My first model of the year and it isn't even mine...

I painted this model for a friend ("Blondie" in my battle reports) who's recently started a Cygnar army. I've been trying to teach him how to paint (which requires two types of skills I lack: teaching skills and painting skills), and I decided Old Rowdy would be a good "reference model" to paint up for him so he could get an idea of how the techniques I'm trying to show him can look in his colour scheme (at least as it stands right now, he's still experimenting with colour combinations).

The idea we discussed for his colour scheme was basically a darker version of the standard Cygnar colours, with darker blues, and blacks instead of whites. So for reference' sake, I'm listing the paints I used with this guy. These are mainly Citadel paints, and some of them might be out of production (or renamed), so check the paint compatibility chart to see what equivalents are available.

Blue:

1. Base with Mordian Blue
2. Wash with Asurmen Blue
3. Highlight with Enchanted Blue

Black:

1. Base with Black
2. Highlight with Codex Grey

Brass:

1. Base with Doombull Brown
2. Base with Gehenna's Gold
3. Wash with Ogryn Flesh
4. Highlight with Auric Armour Gol

Gold:

1. Base with Doombull Brown
2. I applied a coat of Gehenna's Gold here, but it's probably not needed
3. Base with Auric Armour Gold
4. Wash with Ogryn Flesh
5. Hightlight with Chainmail

Steel:

1. Base with Leadbelcher
2. Wash with Badab Black
3. Highlight with Chainmail

Silver:

1. Base with Chainmail
2. Wash with Badab Black
3. Highlight with Mithril Silver

Glow:

1. Base with Temple Guard Blue
2. Highlight the center of the glowing area with Baharroth Blue

Grass:

1. Base with Blackfire Earth (a texture paint)
2. Wash with watered down Devlan Mud
3. Drybrush with Bleached Bone
4. After varnishing apply spots of PVA (preferably a waterproof kind)
5. Sprinkle on Static Grass
6. Hold model upside down above the grass container and tap the base to get rid of excess grass and help it stand up rather than laying down flat
7. Preferably keep the model upside down while the glue sets.

I painted him over the course of about three weeks, which is pretty good for me. I did feel that he was more detailed than I initially realised, and as a result he actually took a bit longer than I expected to finish.

A bit of freehand on the shoulder.

Rowdy has lots of cute little dials and gauges.

Wait a minute, Rowdy has... NIPPLES? Horrifying machine nipples...

About the only blank space on the whole model is that huge empty shoulder plate thing. I kinda felt that it would look strange if it was left blank since it's in such a prominent position and there's no other large empty spaces on the model, so I pretty much had to do some freehand. I decided to get a bit ambitious and try a combination of patterns that I had been experimenting with way back when I painted Dante. I think the results are pretty good, if a bit "uniform". In case it isn't obvious, it's supposed to be a decorated block of "scripture".

For reference sake I've broken down the steps for painting the pattern. First I painted a simple square in Mithril Silver, then drew two a "frame" inside:

Next I painted over the middle bars using black:

Then I painted very thin lines of black to give the pattern depth and make it look like a single line passing over and under itself:

The "spirals" took a lot of back-and-forth, but basically they were a series of diagonal lines, with the first and the last lines extended into a loop. The ends of the lines were then touched up a bit to to go up on one side and down on the other, making them look more like curves:

Finally I painted a bunch of squiggly lines inside the frame to look like text:

I think he looks pretty cool overall, without using any techniques that are too advanced (not that I can use any particularly advanced painting techniques...), with the possible exception of the somewhat mandatory freehand. By the way, this was my first time using my new camera to take photos, along with a Foldio light box and a two-part rotating turntable thing I painstakingly built for creating more uniform animations (this was before Foldio opened their kickstarter for their mini remote turntable thing). I think these are the best photos I've ever managed (I didn't retouch the brightness or contrast or anything in post, all I did was resize them), so that's good. I'll post more details on the turntable later, but I'm hoping to get better at creating smooth turntable animations in the future.