Liber Heresius: Painting the knight

Wednesday 15 July 2015

Painting the knight

Been a lazy summer so far with not much 40K so here comes a post about my knight!

Scroll down for pics of the result :)

I've been working on it for 5 days now and put at least a good 20 hours in to it. The project started out somewhat problematic as I was out of priming and with strike in France GW was not re-stocking any time soon. The solution, though somewhat experimental turned out good. I had about half a box of GW purity seal at hand as I don't like the result it provide. The stuff matte down the colour and remove all shine from metallic/gold/bronze paints so I have not used much of it.

So here we go, purity seal as primer!

Notice how the plastic drastic change character when it is matted down.

For the basing I use coarse putty with sand in it called Sandplast. Along with it I "bake" in pieces from the Citadel basing kit to get a smooth seam from the putty to the resin pieces. The gravel is also from the kit.

To get a smooth base to work on I air brushed the entire model with abaddon black. With the purity seal in place the matte surface picks up the paint pretty quick.

For the metal parts I loosly used the Citadel Painting System as illustrated in White Dwarf issue 5 2014.

All the metal parts were based with leadbleacher, then layered with Ironbreaker. This was followed up by washing with Reikland Flesh to get a more worn look. I then tried to get the highlights right by dry brushing Ironbreaker but the result ended up too bright. The solution: A thin layer of abaddon black air brushed on the metal parts.

First layer of metallic paint

After the darkening layer.

With the metal in place I moved on to the carapace. Wazdakka red was first air brushed 2 layers and then brushed one additional time to get a smooth red colour.

The white parts were tricky and I got to say I have not quite mastered working with pure white surfaces yet. I know most don't paint up to pure white instead leaving it on off-white or egg shell but with the paint at hand this was not an option. What feels like 40 layers later (ok, just 9) the colour was in place. The black on the other hand was in place with 2 layers.

The next step was getting the carapace edges in order. As they are more ornamental than the super structure I wanted them to have a brighter shine to them. To achieve this, the edges were based with leadblecher, layered with ironbreaker and finnished up with a thin layer of badab black wash.

With the carapace in place and all the mess touched up, the detail painting resumed. After the detailing, the base was painted and at last the transfers were added.

The knight in all its glory. The Mars aligned house of Taranis will fit great with the Mars themed battle group. My warhound titan of house Legio Ignatum is based on Mars as well and so will my Skitarii when I get to paint them.