Golden Demon Winner, Rico Chia, guides us through the steps he took to get this beautifully Bloat Drone from the Dark Imperium boxed set. Enjoy!
Prepping the drone
1. It is a complex model, so we break it down into several sub-parts to paint it up.
2. Separate the main body from the weapons and engines.
Priming the drone
1. Use chaos black spray can for the body and weapons.
2. Use leadblecher spray can for the engines
Preshading the drone
1. Prepare a diluted mix of vallejo airbrush thinner and 5 drops of vallejo white primer. Make sure it has the consistency of milk.
2. Set your airbrush compressor's psi to 20, and gently coat the model with an over spray of the mix.
3. Give it 2 to 3 coats at 45 degrees angle and you will get a nice pre-shade.
Drone Armor
1. Use the following colours as shown on the image above. Basically there is no standard recipe, you can use any green you like to achieve the same result. In this case, I chose to work.with vallejo model air colors. Choosing duck egg air as my lightest color and camo dark green as my darkest.
2. Mix the 5 deops of duck egg air with vallejo thinner. I airbrush the mixture on the drone's armor.
3. Followed by the other 3 colors to create the shade. The pre-shading comes into play, as it guides you where to focus your highlight and shadow.
4. Next we wash with a diluted gw camo greenshade with lahmain medium to tie all the colours together.
5. You can either stop here or highlight the armor with duck egg air and white.
Drone Flesh
1. Mix Vallejo Basic Skintone and gw emperor's children for the basecoat. 2. Hand paint on the basecoat. 3. Mix 2 drops gw druchii violet, 4 drops crimson wash and lahmian medium. 4. Wash the mix into the flesh basecoat 5. Make sure the wash has dried completely with a hairdryer. 6. Apply gw druchii violet wash into its recessive areas 7. Apply gw crimson wash in thin coats.
8. Next we do the blending work 9. Mix diluted vallejo basic skintone air & gw emperor's children with water. 10. Apply to the midtone areas in thin layers (This takes practice! Don't give up) 11. Add a little white to the above mix and paint on the highlight. 12. Apply a glaze with mixture from step #3. 13. For boils, use gw scream skull to basecoat and wash with crimson red. Glaze with gw moot green air.
Weapons
1. Airbrush the same color of the armor for the weapons armor. 2. Paint on gw leadblecher rifle parts. 3. Wash with gw nuln oil 4. Apply gw iron silver as mid tone and highlight with gw silverhost silver Engines 1. Wash gw earthshade and nuln oil 2. Highlight using gw iron silver and stormhost silver by streaking 3. Paint balthasar gold for the bronze parts 4. Wash with gw earthshade and gw druchii violet 5. Apply gw gehnna's gold as midtone and stormhost silver as brightest highlight.
Final result:
About the painter:
Rico Chia has been a miniature painter for many years. Adding colours to bring models alive. He won a couple of Golden Demons categories in Australia and has since moved to Hong Kong and is now looking to create models for others to bring to life.
He is part of a company that shares a world of unique characters, Mirico, a boutique collectibles brand from Singapore. Working closely with a family of artists, Mirico strive to bring their customers the best unique collectibles. They've just launched their first miniature bust and you can find out more about the company here: Mirico