Greetings everyone! After the heavy tactical content of my last post, I decided it was time for some lighter fare. I've been trudging through painting a Space Hulk set and recently finished up the Genestealers.If you've seen the Broodlord I did, you might know that these guys have a non-standard color scheme. The reason for this? I'm painting them for a friend so that they can also field in his Tyranid army. He loaned me a couple sample figs to compare against. Note that these were NOT painted by Mark or myself. They were done by a friend of his up in Portland. First up was a simple Genestealer:
Each major color was a simple basecoat, drybrush or heavy edging, and then maybe a wash. The application was... generous and layering non existant. I knew I could just slap something out at the same level pretty quickly... or I could challenge myself to paint better. I opted for the latter.I do have to give the guy some credit: the paint job is fine tabletop quality and there are a lot of great conversions conversions and base work, as evidenced by this Warrior:
The very first thing I did was nix the big green accent marks and large purple gun. I did keep them as accent tie-ins on eyes and tongues, but desaturated so that they wouldn't mar the overall effect. This brought the main colors back to a split compliment balance of true red, brown-white, and blue. Go read Sandwyrm's excellent series on Color Theory for a more detailed explanation. Then I did the guys a little something like this:
There are 22 Genestealers in total. I did a test piece to see if the re-color and concept would work. Then I did the rest in sets of 7.
The red is Mechrite Red darkened with Black, midtones of Red Gore, highlights in Red Gore mixed with Bleached Bone, inked in Black and washed with Red. Most of the base=>mid=>high transitions had 2-3 mix steps in between as I was thinning for translucent layering. This was an experiment that more or less worked, but was time consuming.
The bone carapace was a base of Khemri Brown, midtone of Graveyard Earth mixed with Bleached Bone, highlights of Bleached Bone and then a couple washes and inks of Sepia and Devlan Mud. When I say "ink", that's usually undiluted ink or wash deliberately placed into recesses. "Wash" was usually a thinner version that was applied to the whole area to blend the color layers and darken the tone.
The claws were based Regal Blue, midtone Ultramarine Blue, highlit with Ice Blue and washed with Asurmen Blue. I deliberately used a a non-transitional set of color here to make them look like they were glowing or powered rather than just claw.
These guys were all sealed using diluted Future Floor Wax, to give that nice "new floor or wet Genestealer" sheen!As a break from just painting bugs, I also knocked out two of the objective markers
Ironically, the Genestealers and Screamer-Killer I did ended up being about 1/2 of Mark's army at a recent torunament. Why ironic? Mark won "Best Painted"... and his idea of a complex paintjob is to touch up the drybrushing after dipping the model in wash. Even better is that in all my years of playing, I've never won Best Painted. I've gotten every other top laurel, but it's just never worked out for me to get that one. Heh.
Cheers and see you next time!
*** All images taken by ME! Use them at your peril...***
Interesting that you have never won a best painted. I have seen armies at tournaments that I was sure would win best painted and then saw an army that was very much inferior win....
ReplyDelete...subjective scoring what can you say?
I found it unusual that a tourney didn't require participants to paint their own stuff in order to win best painted.
ReplyDelete@Magilla: It's mainly that by the time I got good enough at painting to compete at smaller events, I was usually grabbing Overall or Best General. And at bigger events, I'll score well but just haven't gotten that item.
ReplyDelete@Warhammer39,999: It was a smaller store game with about a dozen players and the owner is very leery about scaring off any potential players. He didn't want to dabble with the headache of partially painted rules either, so instead he just has a rule that you can't win Best Painted more than once every 3 months or so.
Mark and best painted.....isn't that like an Oxymoron of some sort?
ReplyDeleteThe only times I would have won best painted, I won Best army of best overall- so I dont think I've ever got a best paint win before either. Of course, only playing in one tourney over the past 5 years may have affected that...