Paint! Or Die! Part 2.

I'm about a week behind, which really blows given the time I usually take to paint a model. Speedpainter I'm not.  We started decorating the downstairs of our house this week and as a result I had to disassemble my den.  Luckily, the basecoating I wanted to do involved the use of my airbrush, and I was able to do that today. It took me a couple of hours with the usual familial interruptions and a fat ginger tomcat whapping my chihuahuas across their noses. Such is the life of a Warhammer painter!

The last squad of Terminators I built with Thunder Hammers & Storm Shields were assembled from bits orders.  I used Forgeworld Deathwing pauldrons, and decided to pose them.  It'll make them interesting to paint, but I like a challenge.


This is a new take on painting Deathwing for me.  The two squads I have were done with many thin coats of GW Deneb Stone over Chaos Black primer.  I recently painted some Dark Angels Veterans for a tournament, and decided to try a different tack for the robes.  I started out with a base coat of GW Graveyard Earth, then went over that with a mix of Reaper's Desert Sand and Desert Khaki, washed with GW Gryphonne Sepia then highlighted with Reaper Desert Sand.  The result was quite pleasing, so I'm going for a similar affair for the Deathwing armour this time.

When I painted the Veterans' robes I wasn't in a hurry and needed to be a little precise in where the paint went so I brushed it on.  This time I cracked out the airbrush.  I thinned the GW Graveyard Earth down with a 50-50 mix of water and methyl hydrate.  The methyl hydrate sped up the drying time a little, which was good since I had made the mixture a little thinner than I normally would when airbrushing a basecoat.

Most of the Terminators are being painted with the arms off, just to make things easy.  Airbrushing that many arms individually would have cost me a lot in time and paint.  I wrapped some wide packing tape inside out around a couple of 2x4s and stuck the arms to those.  The Chainfists were converted with chainswords.  A couple of them blew off the 2x4 while I was blowing the paint over them but not too many to cause an issue.  Two coats each side, and Robert's your Father's Brother.

I had a spare bike kicking around so I blasted that with Graveyard Earth and this week - if my house is back together - I plan on experimenting to find out if I can get away with airbrushing the Desert Sand/Khaki mix over the Graveyard Earth, or if I need to take the old tank brush to the Terminators.

There's been grumblings (lol) among the POD... contestants? participants? that I don't have a troop choice, so today I ordered a Terminator torso and base, and I should be able to convert up a Belial with lightning claws.  Hopefully I can get it done in time.  I'll have to drop something from the list to make it playable.

Once I'm satisfied that the Terminators are ready for washing I'll airbrush the Ravenwing.  As you can see here I've assembled them with the Marines removable for painting.  Once the paint is finished they'll be glued in position.  As for the paint scheme I'm going out on a limb again.  When I painted some chaplain armour a while ago I basecoated with a 1:1 mix of GW Chaos Black and GW Adeptus Battlegrey, highlighted with Battlegrey, washed with Badab Black then some more highlighting with Astronomicon Grey. So I'll start with the Black/Grey mix in an airbrush.  Fingers crossed!