Hello! Sorry I am late with this one. Life happened and I had to push this back a little bit. I have the next blog posts painting almost done. Just some tidying and smoothness issues with the piece. I put a sneak peak on discord. Feel free to jump on there!

This time I had a time limit of five hours. I used that time to push contrast up and add some visual interest. Lots of glazing and panel lining in this one. I will also give you some pointers on doing tiny free hand markings and some talk about simple OSL (Object Source Lighting).

Disclaimers first. I am not a world class painter, but I try me very best. English is my second or third language so spelling mistakes and weird words will pop up.

As with the last one, we start with the airbrushing of Burnt umber over the grey primer. How ever now we spray the upper parts of the model with the Burnt Umber and parts closer to the ground or facing it with the kimera kolor Violet. (Or any Dioxazine violet paint)

I do this to establish colour variation and colour temperature variation in the shadows. Now upper facing shadows are warm and downward facing shadows are colder. And we unify this with using the same midtones and most highlight colours. I am terribly sorry that I forgot to take a picture of this phase.

Then I went to painting the midtones with resplendent red and start edge highlighting with angelic red. Painting with diluted paints so the pre shading shows through a little bit. After the midtones are ready and I had been painting about one and a half hours. Then I started to push shadows on the armour panels. Using The violet where it was sprayed and using the burnt umber where it was sprayed. I used about an hour for panel shadows.

I did the lenses, metals and the freehand symbol the same as last time. I however added a little osl effect for the lens. I painted the osl “light” with matt white. Then a few glazes, or technically velatura, Marine Mist first to do a little fade for the light on red panels. Then Phalanx blue glazes. Then I stippled Marine Mist to the most “bright” places. Its important to use pure white in the lens, but not leave any pure white in the light effect.

Then it was time for edge highlights. This step took almost two hours as I needed to fix mistakes so often. I Highlighted everything from the knees up. Highlighting with Angelic Red. Then 50:50 mix of Angelic Red and Inner Light. Then some dot highlights with just Inner Light and a tad of Angelic Red. After highlighting I glazed, or technically velatura, Angelic Red to unify the highlights and the shades.

Then the small freehand markings. Using flow improver and some satin medium, you can make a flowy white paint. Then wick of most of the paint and sharpen your brush before painting fine thin lines. Paint is good consistensy when the lines are sharp on a surface. You can try the paint on your models base, separate base or any other surface. This is a good brushcontrol exersise if you feel the need to do that. I looked inspiration for the symbols in the 7th edition codex. If you do a mistake, just fix it with a Angelic Red glaze.

Then we will do the base. I used cork pieces and heavy acrylic gesso to create the base textures. Apply the gesso first, then put cork pieces on the gesso. After that you can put gesso on top of some places of the cork. Remember to dryfit your model on the base before you leave it to dry! When you like the look of your base you can leave it to dry for over night. After drying I primed everything grey.

After priming I basecoated with Deep Ocean Blue. Then drybrushed Phalanx Blue. Second layer drybrush Marine Mist and lastly drybrush white sparingly. After the paint had dryied I could apply the snow texture. I used two different textures, it will create a more believable story. Using almost see through grey ice like snow texture at the botton and then add white “fresh snow” like texture on top. Remembering to press footprints in the snow because my miniature stand on top of the snow. When the base dried I glued the miniature on base.

And now we are finished! This one took me a little over five hours. I tried to push refinement over impact on this piece. And I think it shows very well the diminishing returns on miniature painting in army scale. List of paints and products used down at the bottom and please come back in two weeks as I have the third miniature almost done! I think it is a very good paintjob and I hope you will be there to judge it!

Paints used:

Kimera kolor satin medium. Windsor and Newton flow improver, Burnt Umber Scalecolor artist, The Violet Kimera Kolor, Resplendent Red*, Angelic Red*, Gun Metal*, Greedy Gold*, Inner light*, Matt White*, Matt Black*, Hydra Turquoise*, Deep Ocean Blue*, Phalanx blue* and Marine Mist*.

*From Army Painter Fanatic line

Basing texture: Any Gloss acrylic gesso and some Cork pieces.

Snow textures: Citadel Valhallan Blizzard and Green stuff world snow texture 2795-Snow. But any two different snow textures will do.