Valkyries for my Praetorian IG

I've had a bit of a turn around and decided to move away from the grey I did on my vendetta. It was done some time ago and I think my current desert colour scheme is better, more interesting to look at than something that's mainly grey and silver and ties in better with my tanks when they're all the same basic colour scheme.

This leaves me with somewhat of a quandry regards my older vendetta (and the other two I've got still siting in pieces in boxes some years after I did the first... sigh.) will I repaint the old one. Will I paint the newer two with the new colours. Should I stick to gunships being an imperial navy colour scheme and if so could I make it more interesting with some fenris blue-grey cammo and perhaps some sky underbelly? Anyway for now my three valkyries that I've had in a cupboard for about three years now are getting some desert cammo with sky belly love.

I've never done any masking before so don't really know what I'm doing, I've just used invisible tape as it was what I had to hand! Seems to have worked out really pretty well oddly/luckily enough..

The cockpits and interiors were prepainted by whoever I bought them off on ebay. They've got some fun colour helmets which I like even if they're not quite up to the standard I'd have done them I don't want to risk breaking all the canopy bits ripping them off so that's how they're going to stay.

I started off by masking off the cockpits and giving all three a coat of army painter leather brown on all the cammo areas.

You can make out my dodgey invisible tape masking, especially where I began to remove it before taking the shot! I airbrushed on some skyblue.

It actually came out quite well!

And again.

and again.

and once more for luck. You can better see the contrast here, I chose to do sidewalls in cammo with the idea the blue would be very visible if the plane was on the ground, I like how it looks even if its wrong!

I shaded in armour plate joins, rivets, random divits, etc. with sepia and used a little to make trails where grease, grime and rust might have been dragged out during flight.

Weathering proper began on one wing to check out it looked alright. I used a brush to do sharp thin strokes using rhinox hide and then metal along panel and wing edges where damage might be caused. I used sponge weathering to add lighter damage to the main parts of panels, perhaps where paint has distorted a peeled in the sun and finally small lines of highlighted semi circles containing a line of rhinox hide to represent where old chips and scratches had occurred trough the paintwork and then left to tarnish over time.

Another angle of this, overall it builds up to quite a nice effect.

The same effects on the underside of the wing... that possibly no one will ever look at again... sob.

Overhead shot, weathering complete.

Cockpit and nose shot with obligatory angry face painted on (pre weathering so the scratches could get it a little!)

Close up of mr grumpy.

The plane is going to fly a building around with it... its a bit large I know but otherwise the massive bases look rather empty with just normal flock and rubble on. A Praetorian casualty or two might have to find their way onto here but I'll paint them up separately and make sure the flight stand fits around them.

The flight stand will sit on the floor tiles.

The other side of the base.

I've started the hazard stripes around the jet engine intakes, wouldn't want anyone accidentally popping their fingers in before take off. Just these and the base to do to finish the first one... then just another two more!