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. 

Dedicated to the Airbrush 1

Despite my gap in posts, there has been quite a bit of painting going on.  Kenneth finally pressured me into setting up a photo station and snapping some pics.  The next series of posts will go into the details but the theme running through nearly all my recent projects is a love for the airbrush.  I first mentioned my fascination two years ago when I used the airbrush to base and shade the druid/bear model in the Super Dungeon Explore.  I now use it to apply the base coat to nearly all of the models and perform the majority of the shading and highlights for the larger ones. It is much faster and leaves no brush strokes.  Here is a picture of me in my "setup".  I've basically positioned myself next to my kitchen sink so I can easily rinse parts.  I use a 3-part science fair display board to block overspray (the airbrush hose penetrates the board to reach the compressor behind) and I line the counter with newspaper.  I wear a nitrol glove on my left hand and a respirator.  Despite the fact that I'm primarily using acrylic paints, there are some nasty chemicals in the spray that you don't want to inhale.  Even though you won't smell them, you will inhale them (as evidenced by the Dark Angel Green snot I had the day I realized I needed the respirator).

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

Dark Eldar Corsair Warriors

The above image shows the first 7 of 10 Dark Eldar Warriors in my pirate army. Once again, I believe that GW did a great job redoing the Warrior models for the Dark Eldar in this release, but they just don't have that special look I'm going for. Consequently, I've combined the bodies from the Fantasy Dark Elf Corsair models with the arm parts from the 40k Dark Eldar Warriors to create a Renaissance-Sci-Fi look. I think they fit together quite well.
The colors are very similar to the wyches from previous posts and I'm happy that these, too, did not come out dark. There is no doubt that I've committed to that cartoon style with the high-contrast purple hair. I wouldn't be surprised if many were not fans of the green and purple, but I'm going to stay true to my theme. With all the units beside each other, the scheme is very attention getting and I like it.
I need to finish the last three from this squad and then I'll probably give my first Reaver Jet Bike squad a go.

Dark Eldar Pirate Ship

I finally finished my first Dark Eldar Raider and I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed. First of all, this was a very difficult model to paint due to all of the hard lines that had to be covered and the fact that it had to remain almost entirely disassembled during the entire painting process. Second, it ended up being a dark model even though I tried to mitigate this effect through high contrast. Third, the model is just not as sleek as the Eldar Wave Serpents I'm used to painting.
The blue to purple fade seems to have worked fairly well on the hull. I plan to repeat this theme on all the Raiders and use a blue to green fade on the Ravagers.
The original plan for the sails included a pair of masts with double sails but it turned out to be crowded when I put them in place. The gunner in the front was almost completely obscuring the art on the lower sail, so I decided to break them apart and only use the single mast, centered in the deck. I think I will go back to the two-mast design on the Ravager, to set them apart from the Raiders. However, I won't put art on the lower sails.
I think I'm going to move to troops for while, before returning to the vehicles. Next up, the wyches.

Eldar-rrgh Pirates!

The Dark Eldar models are now available for advanced order and they are very attractive (http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/armySubUnitCats.jsp?catId=cat440160a&rootCatGameStyle=) . I intend to use these models, their new rules, and their hit and run nature as a basis for an Eldar Pirate army I've been contemplating for a while. The look of their new transports (Raider pic from GW web page below) make me both happy and sad. I was going to add sails to the models to match my pirate theme, but they've apparently beaten me to it. I'm happy they did such a splendid job on them, but I'm sad that I will no longer have that unique sail-look.

The actual composition of my army will include some of the DE models and some modified Eldar models. For example, I intend to use the Eldar ranger models for the base troops because I like the look of the long coats and loose clothes. Additionally, I wanted to do something special for the lord character that had a look of Eldar-gone-rogue. The plan was to merge an Eldar Farseer model with an empire noble model, add an elf head, and sculpt him a fancy tricorn hat and buccaneer sword. The images below show how the plan unfolded this weekend.

The messiest part of this project was the preparation of the metal Farseer and metal noble models. In the Farseer's case, I was lucky that the head model was not part of the main model but I still had to remove his skirt, below the belt (which is going to be replaced by the noble's legs). This required some precise grinding with the dremel tool for about an hour. The only thing I needed from the noble were his legs and his surgery was completed entirely with a hobby saw and exacto knife.The sculpting of the cutlass and tricorn were a blast. The cutlass is made mostly from plasticard that I shaped using the dremel's grinding wheel attachment. The tricorn hat was surprisingly easy and actually took me less than ten minutes. The base shape of a tricorn (or bicorn) hat is actually a circle. After sculpting an appropriately sized flat circle, I simply pressed it down over the top of the head and folded it up on three sides.
The next post will include this model fully painted and will demonstrate the color theme I intend to use for the army.