5th Company Command

Sooooo... what a crazy few months! With my beautiful fiance moving into my apartment, along with her very sick mother, kitten and puppy, life's been a bit hectic of late. Thankfully things are settling into a rhythm quite quickly, and whilst I'm not spending four hour blocks at the painting desk like I used to, I found my first hour-long snippet of time to sit down and get some work done.

With my soon to be mother-in-law as ill as she is, and living in our loungeroom (it's a 1 bedroom apartment), I can't exactly crank out the airbrush for a while, which kind of puts the kibosh on finishing my Land Raider painting experiments. It's a very small sacrifice to make for her (she's a beautiful lady, and it's an honour to have her stay), and in the true spirit of making lemonade from lemons, I've shifted my plans slightly.

With the new GW paints released, and the appalling coverage of Vallejo's DA Green paint, this is actually a good opportunity to change up my colour scheme slightly to try to match the old DAG I've used thus far.

Reading a crap-tonne of forums and articles, I'm going to try replacing DAG with Caliban Green with a Waywatcher Green glaze BEFORE I start highlighting. I know glazes are supposed to integrate highlight shades back down into the base colour for a smooth tonal transition, but I'm happy with my old highlighting colours and technique and don't really want to mess with it. What I do want to do, however, is add back the lovely warmth the old Dark Angels Green possessed, but sadly the Caliban Green lacks. The forums seem to indicate this is the best way to do it.

So, where to now then? In my hour of fun I sat down and starting building the Command Squad for my 5th Company deployment. I've actually got almost all of the 5th Company in boxes now, minus most of the transport units, so I really need to get the ball rolling with cranking out painted units.

It's a pretty typical Command Unit, complete with Apothecary, Standarad Bearer, Company Master and Company Champion. The only item of note is some minor conversion work for the Standard Bearer. I clipped the cross-pole off my Brother Bethor who was fully painted for the last couple of years but without a banner, and I've used the moulded banner from the Command Squad box instead. It fits nicely on Bethor's existing pole, but given he'll be carrying the Dark Angels Chapter Standard, I though it could use some tarting up.

To that end, I've pinned a DA angel from the Chapter Upgrade sprue to the top, added a sconce and DA pendant on rope to the top of the banner itself, and I've attached some large clusters of purity seals from the FW Purity Seal pack to the front and back of banner, along with a long scroll on the back.

Now updated with pics of the un-painted squad ready for priming (though I've since added a DA icon to the Champion's backpack just to make him stand out a bit more).

The Army Grows

Whilst I haven't managed to find time to progress my experiment over the last few days, I haven't been idle either. Maybe it's just my mild OCD, but one thing I love about 40k is planning and putting together an army. Sure, my painting time investment often falls well short of my intents, but it's still fun and it's something I can do from work, or half an hour at home between other stuff preventing me from painting.

So this week I took a look at my army list (published on this site), compared it to what's in my "ready to be painted cabinet" and the bazillion bits boxes lying around the house, and managed to scrimp together a whole bunch of units with almost no further investment required.

So, in the painting queue I have:
2 DA Ven Dreads
Warhound Titan
Thunderhawk
2 x 10 man Tac Squads with Rhinos
1 x 10 man Tac Squad waiting for FW bits for their Rhino
1 x 10 man Assault Squad
1 x 5 man combat unit to bolster my Dev squad to 10
Company Master, Command Squad and Razorback
Azrael
Land Raider w/DA doors and extra armour
Land Raider Ares
Land Raider Promethius
Land Raider Terminus Ultra
Ravening Attack Squadron w/ Land Speeder (full 10man squad)
Half of a Techmarine squad (need 2 more servitors)
Deathwing Terminator Squad

That's a pretty big backlog of painting! I better hop to it and figure out vehicle painting soon! :)

An experiment: Pre-shading Dark Angels

So, after looking around the net at various airbrushing techniques, I stumbled across the idea of pre-shading. The concept is to paint your shadows (panel lines, recesses, etc.) onto a vehicle in a darker shade of the undercoat before mist-coating in your chosen colour. Assuming you apply a number of thin layers of base-coat, your pre-shading should just be visible as a darker shade of your base-coat, essentially shading your vehicle very rapidly and effectively.

Great concept, but how the heck do I do it with Dark Angels Green? I need something that's going to match the way I paint my troops, else the vehicles just won't look contiguous with the rest of the army. My normal colour process for the armour on Dark Angel troops is as follows:
1) Black undercoat
2) 1:1 mix of Black and Dark Angels Green
3) pure Dark Angels Green, leaving the previous colour in the recesses
4) highlight with Snot Green (blend, edge highlights, etc. - depends on the detail-level I want)

So, given I start with a black undercoat, it's kinda difficult to paint a darker colour to pre-shade on a vehicle...What happens if I use a medium grey undercoat? That solves the pre-shade problem, but will it result in a brighter Dark Angels Green than my normal troops? Is there an alternative that will work instead?

Time for an experiment :)

I've used an old Rhino as a test vehicle, primarily because it has non-Chapter doors glued on and I've decided all of my vehicles will have DA doors from FW. I intend to compare the following:
1) A pre-shade using medium grey as the undercoat colour
2) Use my troops process on the vehicle to compare results

Without further ado, here's where I got to in a few hours of messing around last night. All paint is Vallejo Game Color and thinned with Windex. Numbers in brackets are droplet count for mixing.

1) Base-coat Cold Grey:Windex (60:20) at 20psi

2) Pre-shade Black:Windex (60:20) at 5psi

I noted here that pressure was too high at 10psi so I lowered it to 5, but still found it too high (it was blowing wet paint around). Not sure if this is a pressure issue or the paint was too thin, will need to research.

3) Light coat of Dark Green:Windex (60:15) at 15psi

I noted here the paint was waaaaay too thin!

4) Light coat of Dark Green:Windex (60:5) at 15psi

I noted here it was a little better, maybe even a bit too thick, but I didn't wait long enough between coats (I'm impatient!)

This is where I left it so it had a chance to dry completely. It probably needs two more really light coats, probably thinned somewhere between the two previous tests. Will post updates as I progress.

-----------------------------

In the other corner, the progress is a lot harder to see, and not as far down the path. I managed to get one coat of the darker green colour over a black undercoat. The colour I mixed was absolutely perfect to match the first stage I use on my troops, so I'm pretty happy, but it needs a second coat of this mix before I proceed to DA Green.

You can't really see the colour from the photo, but here it is anyway :P

All in all, a good night of experimentation, certainly learned a little about my airbrush. You can see from the last photo I was also messing around with thin lines - I am far from perfecting this, but I at least have a starting point of knowledge to build on now (5psi, about half an inch or so from the object renders a line about double the thickness of a felt tip pen, which is good for a start).

9 Months of Nothing!

Soooooooo....

It's been a long, long time since my last post, and even then it was getting pretty slow. Why? Lots of reasons - priorities in RL taking over, new girlfriend, two kittens that seemed to demand my attention whenever I tried to paint, and to be honest, the painting of my first LR in tiny components was taking its toll too - I know it sounds lame, but painting the same colours on 8 intricate Lascannon's was getting really boring. Thus, I took a 9 month break!

But here I am, back again! Not sure how much time I'm going to get to hobby, I now have a fiance who's about to move in and add a third kitten! But we'll see what happens.

I wasn't completely idle though - I bought a new fiance-friendly painting workstation, and I'm slowly getting that all set up and organized. I've built three Apoc army lists to focus my work (you can see them in the tabs on this site), I've built 23 of 3 Force Organization Charts to clearly show the companies everything belongs to, and I've ordered some bits and pieces from Forgeworld to set me up for my next project.

So, the workplan:

- Finish the LR Terminus Ultra...I've never airbrushed before (beyond some testing on internal components of the same tank), I've never painted a tank before (well, I've never finished one), and I'm still not confident on using weathering powders effectively, especially after my mess when I varnished over the mud inside the LR and turned it into ash. But you know what? The best way to gain confidence in all those areas is to bite the bullet and do it!

- Start building 5th Company! I'm going to start with the Chapter Master and Command Squad with their Razorback, and move straight onto 1st Tactical with their Rhino. I've ordered everything I need, and by the time I finish the LR it'll all be in my hot little hands and ready to go.

- Paint something different. I have a squad of Termies, 2 FW DA Ven Dreads, a Thunderhawk, a Warhound, 6 10-man squads of various types, LR's, LRC's, so much to choose from! But I will probably paint the Termies first, along with their LR Crusader, and go from there.

Keep your eyes peeled, there'll be more updates shortly.

To avoid the pic-less post, here's a happy-snap of my new painting workstation - it's a computer desk with doors so I can hide everything away from the kittens (and the fiance!) when I'm not using it. The keyboard tray currently houses my Alienware M17x so it is actually used as a computer workstation too. Neat eh? Now I just need to figure out where I can get some custom-built painting shelves :)