After coming home from our vacation in Italy, refreshed after 2 weeks without any thoughts of hobby and after devoting all free time before that to Path of Exile, I decided to move along on the gray plastic I had lying on the bench to justify new purchases of the awesome Primaris kits.
Since I had 2 Dark Imperium halves assembled and ready to go, I decided to do batch painting. I chose to start with 10 Intercessors and 10 Hellblasters as I was using them in games regulary and I wanted to test some stuff out before I went on to the Inceptors.
Some new ideas been tested, my patience has been tested and… well… batch painting is not for me. The progress after the break.
As everyone is painting their armies in batch and you hear it in every other youtube video, to do all the steps at once on more minis, I firmly believed this is the trick that will boost my effectivity. I lined up the models on painting lines, sorted out weapons and noted down their squads by color coding and went to town on them.
Sort of. Color coding failed somewhere during the painting, in the end I had to GS most of the weapons to the marines as I was unable to tell which is which and finishing them off I have managed only by sheer force of will.
After priming them grey (used Mr. Surfacer 1000 from can this time, that thing was absolute garbage. The pot one is fantastic, will have to decant the can I am affraid) I tried a trick that I thought will save me some time. I have painted the “company” kneepads with Vallejo Bonewhite and masked them off with Humbrol Maskol, feeling very happy about how clever I am.
I continued to basecoat Vallejo Black and then made zenithal transitions into Vallejo Sombre Grey and final highlights into Vallejo Wolf Grey. Both greys are of the “blue-grey” variety, which I preffer to the “white- or brown-greys” on the models. I slightly overdid the effect so I made the decision to do full oil wash with black colour to tone it down.
I am absolutely excited about using oil washes now. That shit is awesome. This was my second attempt at using oil washes (I have done my Deathwing set before with Umber colour wash). It turned out far better than I expected, although in hindsight I shouldn’t have washed my decals. Well, lesson learned. The great thing about oil wash on gloss coat is that you can work the was far longer than acrylic washes, you can get more articulated pin washes and you have lots of time to wipe out “zenital” spots like shoulderguards and whatnot after you apply it to the model. For me it works as hybrid between wash and a filter.
It did not tone down some of them enough, so I made mental note for the future to throttle back on the highlights. Which I believe I managed with my characters that I have completed for the B&C vow challenge. Anyways, I am liking this style a lot, airbrushed transitions, light washes/filters and not so hard edge highlighting.
After washing I removed the Humbrol mask and and painted the green halves of the kneepad. I decided not to do this on the characters I painted later on and I have to say, while the masking is awesome for some situations, for kneepads it’s a waste of time. Unless you do 20 of them. Since you still need to “paint” the mask on, you are really saving time only for smooth Bonewhite application.
The last steps were to get in with the “color” details like lenses and red stripes, leather pouches and work on the weapons (photo missing). For weapons I decided to do small OSL on plasmas using dry-brushing, as I hate my last Landraider on which I overdid it with airbrush.
For basing I followed my previous method that I used on Company Master Kedrial, that means Stirland Mud (this time textured not with brush but with the plastic spatula tool from Citadel sculpting set) and I tried doing it with models already glued to the base. Not like I had any other choice, I was playing with the guys and blue-tac was simply not handling it well.
But I took it as opportunity to test two things – how hard will it be to drybrush the base and whether I can manage to create a base that will blend with the model, not just look like model standing on top of it. Following the assumptions that Astartes would probably leave footprints in soil/mud, I dragged a bit of the Stirland mud to their boots and up their heels etc. The result was good, in my oppinion. Two fast drybrushings later a grass has been added (self made from sawdust) and sprinkled onto PVA glue to create contrast. As I have mentioned above, then the arms were somehow fitted and the rim of the base painted. And voila, 4 new squads are fully painted.
At this point, I am absolutely sure I cannot handle batch painting. What started as fun project ended up feeling like a chore and I had issues bringing myself to painting the rims of the bases black in the end. I think 10 models is my absolutely maximum, and I will preffer even smaller batches if possible.
Anyways, lessons learned, liking my aesthetics so far. As a tournament is coming for me at the end of October, I have plenty to build and paint…
The Consecrators project 