Friday, February 19, 2010

Blacklining ftw!

Alrighty then, I'm making a good start on that Space Marine army. Thanks to the large-ish contingent of Blood Angel Terminators that came with Space Hulk, the rest of the army will be painted in Blood Angel colours to match, though played as standard Codex marines (at least until Codex: Blood Angels turns up). Apart from the Space Hulk marines, I have at my disposal:

1 Captain
2 full Tactical Squads*
1 full Devastator Squad*
1 full Assault Squad
2 Rhinos
1 Land Raider Crusader

Fans of 40k may notice from the above that if it ain't plastic, I'm not interested. Of the above, the LR Crusader and about 12 bolter-armed marines were hand-me-downs from nephews too young to even assemble a mini**. Hurray for Xmas and misinformed aunts, eh? So, easily a good 1000pts there, with room for tweaking, though I'd like to have a couple of Landspeeders. Up til today, I've been slipping in a little painting time mostly getting through the tedious bit: Coating the little devils with Blood Red. It takes about 5 coats of decently thinned Blood Red to get a nice finish to work with. And up til today, I've been using a hideously tedious method to shade. See previous posts on painting Space Hulk for details. Thing about that method is, owing to my current ineptness, it's a bit hit and miss. Sometimes I can get the wash to behave and slip happily where I want it to with minimal fuss, the rest of the time the surrounding area gets horribly stained and several more coats of very carefully applied Blood Red are needed to correct the error. For example:

This is after MUCH time and effort spent cleaning up, mind you...

So, today I tried blacklining for the first time. Joy, joy! I luv marines! Their shape lends itself so well to blackliney goodness! Citadel fine detail brush is now my very good friend...


Unfortunately, in my enthusiasm, the first marine I'd picked to experiment with (centre) didn't quite have enough coats of Blood Red on him yet. Silly me. The other two aren't quite done yet, but there's no denying how wonderfully sharply the shading makes the armour plates stand out. Only downside is I'm worried I won't quite be able to do this too soon after the morning coffee.

Having assembled the Captain, I couldn't resist going a little further painting him, and he's almost complete now. Thing is, those Space Hulk minis are a bit too nice. It ain't easy to look like a Captain when you're standing next to Sgt Lorenzo...

"Could I trouble you to, um, stand somewhere else, brother Sergeant?"

And that's all there is for now. Nothing completed yet, what with there being a total of about 40+ marines to cover in Blood Red. That comes to about ~200 coats. The next time I start a new army, I'm definitely getting me a spray gun...


* Heavy weapons yet to be decided, but among those minis there are 6 plasma pistols, 1 plasmagun and 2 plasmacannons. It's a horrible game-turning accident waiting to happen, I know... I love it! Gotta make me one of these one day...

** So they'll be with me for, uh, safekeeping until my nephews are old enough to figure out the rules of 40k and appreciate a good paintjob, which I estimate will be in 2018.

1 comment:

Beak said...

I hate to rain on your parade, but your nephews have flypaper memory, and I think 2018 is probably overly optimistic... try August 2010!