Averland Detachment

Hers the smallest part of the empire army I picked up, I'll drop a few more posts of them from time to time but Averland has always struck me as one of the best flavour states, being at one end of blackfire pass its hardened troops defend the route taken by many orc WAAAGHs for generations. Also its exciting elector count Marius Leitdorf, infamous as the Mad Lord of Averland; the genius, pompous, rage prone swordmaster is packed with character to lead an army.

They're a very nice tabletop standard. I suppose one day I might do a little work on the faces but I'm really enjoying throwing down with a fully painted army! I got in a game earlier today and was soundly beaten by orcs.

I bought these along with a whole lot more for a bargin price from a Ben Couzens, cool-kid-on-the-block on warseer (I'll link to his beastmen stuff there if warseer sorts its problems out and comes back up soon). He sells on ebay as Komick-Kid. Hes got a few bargain lots up, for a great 40k mordian army, a vast 40k orc horde and a couple of converted giants, check them out!:
http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/komick_kid/?_trksid=p4340.l2559

Knights Panther

My 40k mojo has worn a little, I've too many things on the go that seem to becoming a struggle to finish so I thought I'd do something in completely different colours for a change. I picked up a vast (almost)fully painted Empire army (actually it seems big enough to be three armies and was labeled as such on the cases it arrived in) for an absolute bargin price. I'm waiting on a reply from the chap/chapette to see if i can link to them or some such, hopefully he won't mind this going up now! While most of it is a good enough standard I wouldn't dream of touching it in my normal way I couldn't help but meddle a bit:

These had been neatly base coated and had some shading with very nicely painted flesh on the faces that were visible. As a result they were a dream to paint! I washed down the blue with thinned down badab black and then asurmen blue then added scratched weathering to all the blue armour sections. I washed down the silver armour with badab black. I washed down the gold armour with Baal red (to contrast its warmth with the cool blue) and built back up with burnished gold. I added some extra colour to the flaming meteor banner (which had been blocked before, the 'Panther' Penants had been painted before). Finally I rebased them to be more inkeeping with my army and (future) realm of battleboard. I'm not sure if I want to change the colour of the plume to blue and yellow or if this will then get lost in the model. What are your thoughts?

Oh I also meant to say a huge thank you to all those who have been dropping by recently and especially to those who've recently joined the blog. Really appreciate it, followers are up to 56, a number i never dreamed of when I first started out! Cheers all!

Valkryie WIP How To: Simple Weathering

I wanted to do something different from my desert camo for this, I decided on a light grey for the navy and picked up an army painter spray: Uniform Grey. Its final colour is nice and it sprays on uniformly, smoothly and thinly so no detail is lost. I set to line highlighting and it was frankly very boring looking. Not wanting to do striped camo's etc. I went for something that would keep the overall look while giving you something to look at close up. HEAVY weathering.

Here I'll talk about three methods I used to weather this up:

1st: (Gryphonne Sepia)Wash rust/oil stains:

This is about the easiest way you can add a bit more detail to your units so long as they have a light colour. If theyre darker dry devlan mud or a thinned down snakebite leather/mechrite red mix.

The idea here is to take just a little of the wash colour on your brush and then create dripping stains from areas that might rust or be heavily oiled: bolts, bolted panels, underhanging ledges, etc. Just take a little time to think about where this should be used and I'd generally suggest its a less is more technique. If you wanted to get serious you could use one colour for rust and another for oil in different areas. You can't get easier than this!

2nd Aged Chips:

The idea here is to give the look of small chips where the metal has aged and discoloured. This is underhighlighted to give the impression of light bouncing off the paint under the chip. (Sadly I only worked that out after a bit and my wings have upside down highlights. Still hopefully no-one will look close eh :D)

Above is a rear wing. I'm going to take you through the steps I used to build up these three weathering techniques to give a beaten/used/poorly maintained look. Its got a tiny bit of gryphonne sepia under its flaps' joints. I decided not to use much here as I've got lots elsewhere.

First up is the lower highlights: Take your highlight colour (for me astronomican grey) and draw smiley faces all over your armour plates avoiding the edges (they're for the next technique). Don't worry if theyre a little thick when you paint your next colour you'll paint over them a little.

Paint scorched brown lines using the smiley faces as a guide. Try and cover the thicker highlights so you are left with a very thin constant thickeness line highlight.

For the larger chips go in with a 50/50 scorched brown/chaos black mix to add a darker centre to your corroded patch. You can add a little boltgun metal to some of the very large chips to give the impression they're semi aged or perhaps recently re-chipped.

3 Edge chips and scratches:

Here you want to scratch up your edges, perfect for covering up where your line highlights have got a bit thick! These represent recent damage and continuously worn areas that don't have time to corrode before being re-scratched.

Using a thin or spread out beat up brush feather some of the armour edges with charadon granite. (I moved to the tip because the pic of this step didn't come out right!) I'd recommend not coving all of every edge I went for some of all the forward edges of my plane. If you were doing something orky you could perhaps go overboard and use this instead of edge highlighting your stuff.

Using the same technique feather boltgun metal inside the charadon granite leaving a rim of this left. If you wanted to further this technique you could try line highlighting outside this similar to the technique above but given I was trying to be quick I didn't bother! You can also do some of this on your panels where they're likely to be weathered from use around door handles, where feet will have walked or just occasional random scratches but I'd reconmmend not going overboard with these.

I'll leave you with my wing sections to give you an idea of what an area targeted with lots of all of these techniques ends up looking like. The aim is to try to build up lots of different weathering and colours to break up an otherwise dull and uniform scheme and add a touch of stylized realisim rather than everything looking factory fresh. I hope these help/give you some ideas, they're just how I like to do things!

Raptor's Sternguard Sergeant Laufrey with weathering powders

I did do the extra work on his base and some powders to tie the model into the base alot and I'm very happy with it... now I may have to go back and do this to all my blood angels.. NOOOO!

Thats him finished as my entry to the Badab Painting/modding competition (http://thefallenprinces.blogspot.com/p/competition.html). Good luck to anyone else whose entered!

Praetorian Ogryn Thursdays Round Up

Just a quick group shot of these chaps as I've not done one yet and to make it a months worth of thursdays:

I can't see myself likely to extend the squad past this or else they won't fit in the chimera that they so desperately need. I've used them in one game so far and they got fear of the darknessed straight off the board the second I got them out of their box. Lesson Learned!

Raptor's Sternguard Sergeant Laufrey

I noticed a Badab Painting/modding competition (http://thefallenprinces.blogspot.com/p/competition.html) late yesterday and thought rushing an entry in one day was a great plan. I'll try and take some better pics for actual entry tomorrow morning when theres some light. Here he is:

I'm considering popping some weathering powders on him and flocking the base more but hes already quite a busy model. What do you think?

Belated Praetorian Ogryn Thursday: Standard Bearer

Meant to get this up on thursday, no surprises there! My bad! Still without further ado:

Hope you like him!

Blood Angels Forgeworld Heresy Armour Test marine

Heres another guy I painted using an army painter red spray as a base colour. Once again I'm very pleased with the results. Once again he's a bit on the gold side compared to my normal guys but having lined a few up I'm happy enough this will just help them stand out.

I've seen a few pre heresy pics of assault squads from the FW stand at adepticon so it looks like I might have to make a DOA army up sometime in the future. My latest tank (the predator from a few posts back) however looks quite different to my older transports because of the much heavier weathering so I might go back over some of my older tanks and bring them in line as this shouldn't take too long!

Counts as Sentinals Forgeworld Mukaali Riders, thoughts please!

So I picked up three off these of Ebay for diddley as part of an army bundle (yeah i know... stop buying guard and paint up your praetorians and BA Rosser). Still the deal also had 5 rough riders and I've already got my praetorian roughs which are both a completely different scale to these. It would also upset me to run something so huge and cool as 1 wound bolter/lasgun fodder. Thus I thought counts as sentinals could be a laugh and wanted some input. Heres pics with blu-tacked autocannons:

I want to sculpt up a mount for the autocannons (like the heavy stubber mount on a leman russ turrent gun)which would be attached the the existing leather strap on the mukaali's neck. This however would still leave the model quite fleshy so to use it as a vehicle might not go down so well even of the walking variety. Still the Grey knights Deadknight hardly looks very monstrous critter-like so I recon I could push it a bit. The idea then would be the add a bit of armour to the model, perhaps just plates on the front legs. I'm not sure I'd want to obscure the pretty heads. I'd love some thoughts and ideas to give me some confidence before I embark on hacking up these guys :P. Thanks!

Blood Angels Iron Armour Colour Test With Army Painter Dragon Red

Here's a chap in forgeworld's Iron armour. I love it. However it has rather more gold on it than the rest of my army which has close to none really. Hmmz. Anyway I just wanted to get some feedback and thoughts on other ways I could paint it that avoided the metal. I didn't want to do black trim, and all red looked wrong.

I actually tried tested out using a red spray (cos I'm getting lazy with basecoating a couple of hundred marines and guard all in red!) this one was army painter's dragon red as it seemed to match the GW blood red quite closely and as a model spray was unlikely to go wrong in the way a spray paint from a DIY shop might have, i.e. thick paint ruining my models.

I first undercoated in black spray, then when this was dry I went in with the red trying to hit only the armour (not that I didn't get everything else too really, but i tried!). I laid down a couple of layers from above trying to hit it slightly less each time to leave a bit of shading. Then I went through my normal stages (wash all over with leviathan purple, highlight with blood red, then a blood red and solar mach orange mix then line highlight with vermin brown/solar mach) and frankly I think it looks very similar, which was the intention!