Repaint vs. Touchup

I couple of months before we moved to Albuquerque, Ken surprised me with a new Ravenwing Darkshroud model that I prompted painted and added to the display case.  I began thinking of how I could best incorporate it into my games and quickly realized that I didn't have a lot of Ravenwing models in my collection to benefit from its support abilities.  Therefore, I have decided to completely overreact and build an entire Ravenwing Force.  While I wait for the mass amounts of landspeeders and bikes to arrive, I pulled some of the old models out of their transport boxes (because they are not worthy of going in the display case) and set to enhancing them.
One of my favorite Ravenwing models is the second-edition, tornado-version landspeeder.  I happen to have two of them.  Unfortunately, these were painted during my first year in the hobby (20 years ago) and have my most unskilled level of detail.  Instead of stripping and repainting, I decided to try a much quicker touchup.  I feel that the most boring part of miniature painting is the application of the base coat.  My old, rudimentary paint jobs were essentially just a base coat because they lacked the extra shading and details that I now include.  Question: can I get a modern paintjob and save a lot of time by just picked up where my 20 year-younger self left off.  Below is an image of the two old models. Before starting the project this morning, both models were nearly identical.  The one on the right received 3 hours of attention,looks great, and probably saved me the 12-15 hours it would have taken to strip, reassemble, prime, and completely repaint. 

 

Kaptin Badrukk

Kaptin Badrukk was a lot of fun to paint! He has so much detail, the only hard parts were: staying consistent (staying in a common color palette) and the tabbard. I wanted to paint a treasure map, and I'm not great at freehand. I settled for a simple map, but I think it works.

Kaptin Badrukk

Da Powder Grotz

These are Ork "Ammo Runts", I put the 3 of them on a single base to accompany Kaptin Badrukk.

Dedicated to Airbrush 5: Buildings

Ken gave me the Fortress of Redemption five years ago as a Christmas present and it has sat in the box until two weeks ago.  Without the airbrush, painting a model of this size was just too daunting.  I could have just spray painted it with a green, washed it, and then finished with a copious amount of drybrushing; but that is no longer my style.  BTW: this still consumed a full can of Chaos Black primer. 
Like many of the large models seen in my previous posts, I painted this model in parts.  The floor was painted with Vallejo's air metallic rust color and the lascannon was painted with air metallic boltgun.  The green parts of the model were painting using the zenithal highlight technique and then the edges were hardlined.  The steel wings of the dark angle on the tower were the first parts airbrushed with air metallic steel while using a paint on [latex] mask.  After painting the main tower portion green, I applied the liquid latex around the edges of the wings and then taped off the larger sections.  Results were not as clean I had hoped but I think that is due to lack of practice.  Some of the latex peeled of nicely, but some of it did not and efforts to remove it just smeared the steel paint that was on its surface onto parts I did not want steel.  In the end, I had to do much more touch up work than I had expected.   
On a non-airbrush-related-note, I have found and come to appreciate alcohol-based metallic (brush on) paint; specifically Vallejo's liquid metal gold.  See this YouTube video for a great demo.  I have found that both GW's and Vallejo's arcylic gold require several (4+) coats while these liquid gold paints are very opaque in 2.  The fortress model had lots of areas that I wanted to be gold and using GW's gold would have driven me nuts.

 

Dedicated to Airbrush 4: Space Marines

Space marine vehicles benefit from the same easy fades as the Eldar ones mentioned below, but the simple shapes of their infantry models makes zenithal highlighting almost automatic.  This means that you can created well shaded/highlighted Space Marines in very little time.  There are a plethora of articles out there on zenithal highlighting, so I won't go into details.  In essence, you spray lighter shades of the base color onto the model from increasingly overhead angles to simulate the glare from an overhead light sources.  After that you paint the details (like guns, etc) you apply the decals and you're done.  I still like to outline the details with black hardlines as well as hit the edges with bright hardlines.  The below picture shows a tactical squad and to the right, an honor guard squad.  The honor guard squad was painted in parts so I could separate the robe portions that needed to be painted tan from the arms and backpacks that would be green.  Additional shade and highlights were added with a brush.

Dedicated to Airbrush 3: Imperial Knight

Large models used to take a long time to paint, especially if you were using a color that didn't coat in one go.  Not with the airbrush.  I painted the Imperial Knight (seen below) in 5 days.  This model was also painted in parts.  The main infrastructure piece (stuff painted raw metal) was assembled but the individual armor panels were separate and unattached.  I learned a couple of lessons on this project.  First; the metallic air brush paints from Vallejo are magic and coat extremely well.  The boltgun coated the frame in two easy coats and took less than 10 minutes to complete.  Second, I learned how to paint checkerboards with tape masking (as opposed to a template).  Its actually a two part process where you have to lay a grid that paints every other box.  Unfortunately I didn't take any work-in-process photos.  See if you can figure out why it can't be done in one go :-)
In case you were wondering; the banner between his legs is actually a decal.  

   

Dedicated to Airbrush 2: Eldar

Not Airbrushed

Large Eldar models seem the perfect candidates for concentrated airbrush attention.  I love to use high contrast fades and creating these with a brush is hard to do evenly and without stroke marks on the large surfaces.  I wish I had the airbrush while I was working on my Dark Eldar, because I tried to do a smooth brush fade with less than optimal results.  See the pic of the panels on my Razorwing's wing (to right).  Not only are the transitions rough, but this took a lot of time.  The below images of my Eldar were painted with the airbrush and show much more satisfying results.

My only regret is that I didn't put enough contrast in the fades (ie. they are dark blue to light blue rather than midnight blue up to sky blue) especially on the Crimson Hunter (below).  After the first few projects, I began to notice that the intensity of the color, straight out of the airbrush and still mostly wet, is more opaque than when it drys.  Therefore, the high contrast I thought I had painted became much more subtle upon drying.

Airbrushing more than one of the colors on a model is an art in itself.  The simplest method is to paint the individual pieces before assembling it and the more creative method involves masking.  Masking can be done with templates, tape, or paint-on latex.  I did some simple tape masking on the crimson hunter and painted the Wraithlord and Wraithknight in parts. 

Terminator Librarian

This model was an attempt to use printable canvas for a banner. It didn't work the way I wanted it too. Later, I found out why. You need to tell the printer to print at the highest ink level (like high quality photo). I was afraid of bleeding colors, but the later attempts turned out MUCH better. I'll post pictures of the better banner later.

Blood Angels Terminator Librarian

Blood Angels Razorback

So, I finally painted the Razorback I received for my birthday, just in time for 7th edition. For a brief time they lost their "fast" trait according to the official FAQ, but it came back.

I had a slight primer malfunction while painting this. Couldn't do much to fix it. I also learned that it would have been MUCH easier to paint the treads separately and glue at the end... I painted the turret separately and helped a lot.

I considered taking the lascannon and twin-linked plasma gun option, but decided not to. I think I regret that now, since fast vehicles can move and fire 2 weapons... Maybe I'll paint another one, it's not like they go out of style. Especially since vehicles are slightly safer in 7th edition (blow up on a 7, and always WS1 in hand-to-hand).

Blood Angels Razorback

Ork Freebooter Pirates!

Games Workshop only released a single model for this unit (plus a special character, not painted yet). So I had to get creative to make a complete squad. I kit-bashed most of the squad from Ork Nobz sprues (converting kombi weapons into Snazz-guns with more-dakka). I also replaced the heads with some custom Ork Pirate heads I found online. The heads were resin, and needed some conversion to get them to fit the bodies, but in the end I think they worked out!

Ork Painboy

Who wants Feel-No-Pain and 5+ invulnerable saves? Orks do! I painted the Painboy (and Grot Orderly) to accompany my Free-booters.

Blood Angels Librarian

I have had this miniature in my collection for a long time, and I finally got around to painting it. I used the jump packs from the Sanguinary Guard to make it more clear that this guy owes his allegiance to the Blood Angels (plus it looks great with the blue armor).

Ork Warboss with Power Klaw (from AoBR)

I finally got around to painting the Warboss from the Assault on Black Reach set. I think this is the best figure from the set! The Deff Kopta's are good, too. Amazingly, they even managed to pick decent wargear for the guy.

I like the pose a lot, and I tried to do some pretty sharp highlights. Jen asked me to repaint the tassel. The first attempt was a little too similar to the Power Klaw.

I kept the yellow theme, since his main job is to provide leadership to the Bad Moon Mega Nobz.

Ork Battlewagon

I finally finished the Battlewagon (with the Deff Rolla and Killkannon). It's overkill, I know, but I can't imagine not having both. I still have the optional gunners to paint, but they won't make a big difference to the overall effect.

I tried something different. I hard-lined the red panels with metallic silver, to make it look like the paint was wearing away from the edges. I think this could be improved in 2 ways: wider edge highlights, and darker/layered metallics.

Ork Trukk

This kit is one of the coolest kits I've assembled/painted from Games Workshop. The amount of options and accessories was great! The only downside what that it took hours just to get the thing assembled and if I had to make another one, I would definitely put it together in a different order.

It was fun to paint, but I'm just about finished with yellow. It's just so much more work to deal with (and then it just gets covered up with weathering and fake scratches).

Ork Grots

I couldn't resist painting these guys, even though they are tactically ... dubious. But 40 points for an 11-man troops choice to sit on an objective, but also an easy kill-point.

Fun to paint though!

I did 2 different techniques (half got one treatment, half the other)
1 - Highlighting the "peaks" of the flesh
2 - Highlighting the outline of muscles

Games Day Captain

This was a limited edition Space Marine Captain from Games Day a few years ago.

I painted several Blood Angels a couple months ago, but I didn't want to spam the blog with a dozen posts. I lost track of time, and now I've finished painting Blood Angels (for now) and moved on to Orks.

Anyway, this poor guy has been demoted to Sergeant, for now.

A bit messy with the washes, but I was more concerned with the face this time.

Venom skiff

The GW version of the Venom transport (bottom pic) required a little pirate-love before being added to my army (top pic). I let the wych models that were provided as crew walk the plank and replaced them with the Kalabite Trueborn mods that I created from the Eldar Scouts. Each model has a small neodymium magnet mounted between its feet that matches up to another magnet on the vehicle. Similarly, I have two movement bases that each have magnets glued on top. This allows me to pull these two models off the vehicle and onto the bases when its time for them to disembark. This serves as a good WYSIWYG reminder and reduces the number of models I'd have to paint. I've also mounted a sail from the Raider transport in place of the original cannon mount. I needed a sail to match the army's theme and thought this new profile made the model looked more balanced (and kind of shark-like :-)

Kalabite Trueborn mod

Games Workshop has not produced models for the Elite Dark Eldar warriors (Kabalite Trueborn) yet, but I had a set of models already in mind. The top picture is a squad of modified Eldar scouts that I'll be using for the above mentioned unit. The bottom picture is the unmodified version of the squad from GW's webpage. I picked these models primarily for their ponytails, pointy ears and flowing robes, which I think fit well in the theme of my army. The modifications I made were not significant and pretty easy using the new resin (instead of metal) models. First of all, I substituted Dark Eldar muzzles to ends of all of the guns. Two of these received the splinter cannon parts and the remaining three got the regular splinter rifle. The model that originally came with an eldar helmet was lopped off and replaced with a pony-tailed she-elf head. The model with the cloaked helmet received some re sculpting to better resemble a dark eldar version. I used split, carved, and stained craft sticks on the bases to resemble planks that might be found on a pirate ship

Dark Eldar Reaver Jet Bikes

The above image shows two of the six Reaver Jet Bikes I completed recently. I learned my lesson on jet bike squad size from the Eldar and six is near optimum. With fewer, they get destroyed/broken in one round of mediocre shooting and with any more they become too much of a point sink. I will eventually have two squads in the army--each of them with slightly different paint schemes. This squad has the blue on top and purple on the sides. The next squad will reverse those colors. The color of the riders will remain the same.
These new Dark Eldar Jet Bike models are gorgeous. The detail of the sculpt and the manner in which they are assembled is amazing. Unlike the Raider (tank) that had to be painted in seven different parts, I could completely assemble the bike and the rider before painting them. This makes it easier to coordinate shadow and shine direction across the entirety of the model and prevents wasted time spent painting parts that eventually get covered during assembly.
Although the non-metallic metal paint technique I used on the blades and engine nozzle were the most complicated parts of the model, I'd have to say that hard-lining all of the edges is what made them so time-consuming to paint. There are joints, ridges, and sharp pointy bits all over the bike and rider that required lots of attention.
The whole Dark Eldar line shares the ultra-edginess and its not uncommon to see nice-looking models painted with attention given to only the edges. The model is spray painted a dark color like dark blue or black and then all the edges are painted with a very bright or white color; nothing else. If the lines are straight and even in thickness, they will look great on table. I just love to add fades so the hard-line-only option was not going to work for me, but even the GW staff painters have been recently and frequently using this style.