The road to Coventry...part three

Okeydokeydoo, starting over.
This time, I've gone for a much thinned-down mix of Guass Blaster Green and Baharroth Blue as the base colour, stippled on randomly letting the white undercoat show through, and I'm much happier with the result.

A happy accident of the white undercoat not being 100% whiter-than-white has also allowed a little texture from the combination of white paint and grey plastic to show through, giving the whole thing a little more texture than originally planned. It doesn't really show in the photographs but you can see the subtleties in real life. I wish I could say that that's exactly as planned, but I have to be honest and say it wasn't! Still, these little occurrences are part of the painting process. Sometimes they work in your favour, sometimes not.

I've followed the basecoat up with a couple of passes of a thinned Guilliman Blue/Waywatcher Green mix to strengthen the colour, create more random patterns and to give a bit of shading to the armour. Overall it's a much more satisfactory result, and almost exactly how I'd envisioned it before painting.

Next comes the fun/horribly frustrating and time-consuming bit (delete as applicable, depending on how much you like really fiddly stuff.) I want to add a veining running all through the turquoise, so I've used a mix of the old Citadel black ink (the really opaque, nasty-tasting stuff in the transparent bolter-shell pots- Daler-Rowney do a good alternative in their FW range) and a bit of Mephiston Red. This is painted veeeewy cawefuwwy with a Citadel XS Artificier Layer brush*. The lower edges of these lines are then given a fine highlight of White Scar**.

It is a fiddly and time-consuming process but, after some hours all the armour is done. I then gave it a final glaze of REALLY thinned Guilliman Blue/Waywatcher Green to knock the white highlights back a bit and I'm calling the armour colours done. The next stage is to shade and highlight the armour to finish it off.

Finally, before I go on this entry, I've just one more picture to show. If I have time I'm going to enter another model into this year's competition in the Duel category. It's unlikely that I'll get it finished in time, so it may have to hold over into the rescheduled Age of Sigmar Open Day later in the year, but you never know...Anyway, here's a sneak preview... 😉 More soon!

* A note on brushes. I use (almost exclusively) Windsor & Newton Series 7 brushes sizes 2, 1, and 0, and occasionally a size 00 for really fine detail. I know there's all sorts of other brushes out there that everybody says are just as good and cheaper than those but I've never yet found anything that matches the Series 7s and certainly nothing that's convinced me to change. However, a while back I needed a really fine brush and couldn't wait for a new size 00 to arrive so I bought the GW brush and I have to say it's been excellent. I have a sneaking suspicion it may be a W&N S7 miniature 00 brush with a rebrand, as it seems very similar and I know that the old GW Artificier brushes were S7 rebrands...

**I use the Air version of the paint for fine highlights like this. Pre-thinned, how useful is that?