I was putting this guy off until after I had finished most of the rest of the models for the Batman game. I wasn't looking forwards to painting him as I figured just painting tons of greys would be boring, but it actually wasn't.
He was rather challenging to paint as I couldn't rely as much on my existing paint collection; I had to mix up a bunch of new shades for him. And while I was able to use drybrushing to blend the layers on his cloak, there wasn't enough room for than on his body.
I decided this would be a good time to try two-brush blending, but experiments on a test model were abject failures, so I decided to just rely on plain layering to highlight the body. I thinned my paint a fair amount using water and "Phoenix acrylic retard medium" (something that I found in a local shop). The resulting paint was thin enough that it took many layers to build up a solid colour; this actually worked to my advantage as it allowed me to get a blending effect just by shrinking the area I was covering as I built up the layers.
The cloak was painted with the old Citadel Shadow Grey, shaded with Badab Black wash, and highlighted with a mix of Shadow Grey and Blue Horror. The suit was various mixes of Vallejo Black Grey and Citadel Dawnstone, with a watered down wash of Badab Black on top - I added some acrylic retarder again, which was thick enough that the was wasn't too runny, and the extended drying time helped me apply it and avoid patchiness. I think the boots and gauntlets were simply Vallejo Black Grey (or maybe a lighter mix) edge-highlighted with Dawnstone.
The belt was Citadel Lyanden Darksun highlighted with Citadel Sunburst Yellow, then washed with the same Badab Black mix as the body suit. The tiny, tiny eyes were just plain white - I debated not painting them at all since it actually looked fine just darkly shaded there, but decided to try and see how they looked painted, and went with it. I considered trying to paint the ovals in his gauntlets to look like lit-up screens, but decided it would take away from the rest of the mini and just left them.
Prep work wasn't as bad as some of the other Knights Models' minis I've worked with, but he still suffered from stupid-thin bits that I needed to fix/support. The ears were originally very flimsy and not very symmetrical, so I had to bulk them up a lot with greenstuff. The Batarang was also slightly miscast - enough to look bad, so I had to reshape one side to better match the other. There was a bit of gap filling as well, no big deal really, though the gap on the left arm was big enough that I wasn't able to sculpt the join very well, and it's a bit of a poor spot on the final painted figure.
To put that in context, I've had to do a lot of re-sculpting and weapon replacements on the other Knights Models' minis I've assembled so far. It occurs to me that I didn't show any WIP photos in the old posts, so I thought I'd put them up here.
Filling the huge holes in their crappy bases to try to make them look good:
Repairs and sculpting missing detail:
Replacing flimsy misshapen weapons:
Filling quite large gaps:
Anyway, back to Batman. This might sound silly, but I think this is the happiest I've ever been with one of my paintjobs. I look at this guy and can't believe I painted him because I don't believe I can't paint that well. I think he looks great, and it makes me want to paint more superheros and other smooth organic models. Now if only I could drum up the courage to assemble the damned things in the first place...
No comments:
Post a Comment