Reinforcements Have Arrived

I FINALLY finished these two. I originally figured I could knock them out real quickly seeing as the whole point of my Marcher Worlds colour scheme was to be quicker to paint. But between one thing and another I just couldn't seem to sit down to paint. I also had more trouble with the glows than usual. I'm not really sure why; maybe I'm just getting old, because everything feels smaller now when I try to paint fine details.

After painting my Dusk Wolf I realised that too many glows could make a model feel unfocussed. So far I've used exactly the same technique for all the teal glows, but for these two I wanted to try painted different glowing areas to have different intensities. The idea was to stop one "brightness level" down for the "less important" glows, so that the "more important" glows look brighter and grab more attention.

For the Warder, the brightest glows were to be the outstretched hand, the helmet, and the Arc-receiver dish. The hand looks a bit too "homogeneous"; the glow doesn't quite have that "brightest at the center and fading towards the edges" gradient that I would have liked. I really should have left the tips of the fingers dark, but it's just hard to control that well while drybrushing.

My Razorbat came with an extra Arc-receiver dish, so I attached it to the Combat Engineer; it was pretty straight-forwards as the part pretty much fit perfectly without really needing any work. I consider the Arc-receiver a characteristic element of the Marcher Worlds and intend to make sure it's present on every model. On the Engineer in particular I think attaching it to the left shoulder helps balance out all the equipment off his right side, so I think it works well for the model. The brightest areas on the model were intended to be the Arc-receiver, the "spotlight" array, his helmet lenses, and the reactor-looking thing on his chest. It's not obvious in the photos, but his hot beverage is glowing; I guess he's so hardcore that he literally drinks Arc for breakfast?

Warder & Engineer
I used the same colours and techniques as the rest of my Marcher Worlds:

1. Prime with Vallejo 73.660 Surface Primer Gloss Black
2. Apply a zenithal highlight of Vallejo 70.862 Model Color Black Grey, Vallejo 70.992 Model Color Neutral Grey, and Vallejo 70.990 Model Color Light Grey
3. Edge-highlight with the same Light Grey
4. Wash with Citadel Shade Nuln Oil
5. Apply glows by layering and drybrushing Citadel Layer Sotek Green, Citadel Layer Temple Guard Blue, Citadel Layer Baharroth Blue, and Formula P3 Morrow White
6. Define the glowing surfaces by outlining them in thinned Sotek Green

I've been slowly changing my methodology for the glows over time to try to be more efficient. I think what I did this time (hard to remember when it happened over a period of months) was to first basecoat the glowing surfaces in Sotek Green, then layer a smaller area and edge-highlight with Temple Guard Blue, then drybrush the glowing surface and surrounding surfaces with Sotek Green, then layer/edge-highlight with Baharroth Blue, then drybrush with Temple Guard Blue, then apply a little the Morrow White on the centers of the glows, then drybrush with the Baharroth Blue. This way each new, brighter layer (except the white) was drybrushed over first with the previous darker colour, then with it's own colour, to help create soft transitions. Which is what I have always been trying to do, but previously I was doing it less efficiently and pretty much applying each drybrush twice; this new sequence does the same thing but with only one drybrush per colour.

Like I said the original plan was to build up to two different brightness levels, however due to the long stretches of time between painting sessions, the glows sat half-finished for a long time and when I came back to finish them I couldn't remember my exact plans. What I ended up doing was painting the "brighter" and "less bright" glows the same way, with the single difference of the less-bright areas not getting the final white dot before the final Baharroth Blue drybrush. What I should have done is to only drybrush the less bright glows up to Temple Guard Blue, so that the cast light would be darker as well. Hopefully I'll try that next time.

I do find that the brightest centers, where the white paint was layered on, tend to not blend in as well as the other layers. I think this is because I only hit them with a single drybrush of the lightest blue; I don't want to drybrush white on top of the final blue as I don't want pure white in the final glow. However, I'm thinking that if I actually drybrush white before drybrushing the final blue, that might blend the white areas better without increasing the "maximum brightness" or leaving pure white lying around.

I've also noticed that a lot of my careful attempts to build up successively smaller layers inside the smaller glowing areas end up pointless as I ended up pretty much needing to just cover them all in the lightest blue (with maybe a dot of white in the centers) and then outlining them in the darkest blue, invalidating all those careful earlier layers. So I think I can save a lot of time and effort without much effect on the final outcome by not bothering with the careful layering and just slopping the brightest blue in at the end. That's another thing I need to remember to try next time. I do have a bunch of infantry and jacks, and of course the Razorbat, left to paint. I'm only worried that I'll have forgotten my plans by the time I finally get around to painting them...