Hi everyone! Something less formal for the weekend and for those who've been wondering what I've been up to the last few days. It's been awhile since I've picked up the brush to paint up a full squad of anything (think about 6 months or so) and this edition's gotten me so excited that I'm finally trying to finish the loads of plastic I have sitting around. Before we begin, this WIP also has a mini dry-brushing tutorial so follow along if you're interested in picking up that technique.
So I started off with a black base coat and the aim was to roughly get a darker result than the image of the single guardian which I painted some years ago.
Step 1
was to use Vallejo's Heavy Black Green from their Game Colour range. I've always preferred Vallejo's dark green as it was vastly superior in consistency and coverage to GW's Dark Angels' Green which has since been discontinued.
Step 2
I washed the whole model (technically you only need to wash the green parts) with a black wash. I used Dark Tone from the Army Painter's Warpaints series as I had that lying around but GW's Nuln Oil works just as well.
As I've not been painting for awhile, I wanted to test a combination of blending and layering and got a couple of results that I was fairly happy with, but would not be an efficient use of time if I wanted to get all 20 guardians finished in any decent amount of time.
Colours used were:
1. Vallejo Heavy Black Green
2. GW Warpstone Glow (Layer)
3. GW Moot Green (Layer)
The red gemstone and visor was a layer of GW Liberator Gold (Layer) over black and then the application of GW Spiritstone Red, which is a technical gemstone paint that makes mass gemstone-painting simple and fast. If you would like find out more about using GW's Technical gemstone paints, head over to the Two Thin Coats section where we've linked to Warhammer TV's tutorial for those paints.
ANYWAY, having taken that short detour, I decided to use dry brushing for the rest of the Guardians if I wanted to get those 20 to tabletop standard in a decent amount of time.
Step 3
1. Heavy drybrush with a 50:50 combination of Heavy Black Green and GW Warpstone Glow
2. Lighter drybrush of GW Warpstone Glow
3. Last drybrush of GW Moot Green
Step 4
Weapons were done with a flat application of Vallejo Model Colour Black Grey which will be highlighted with GW Dawnstone (Layer) later with a final highlight of a 50:50 Dawnstone/White mix.
Final look so far for this batch of Craftworld Guardians:
Which brings me to the dry brushing mini-tutorial!!!
So what is dry brushing? Dry Brushing is a painting technique that aims to apply tiny amounts of paint on raised surfaces of models. You do this by keeping the brush as dry as possible (thus the name) while still holding paint. Flat brushes tend to work better as dry brushes but there are small rounded ones for smaller dry brushed details though any old brush or one with firm bristles will do.
1. First, you load the brush with paint and
2. Wipe off most of it on a towel/cloth/table until you hardly see any more paint come off when brushing it over a flat surface or cloth.
3. Next, lightly drag the brush across the detail or the model surface you are dry brushing. In the example above, I'm using a 50:50 mixture of Dawnstone/Black Grey for the first dry brush application. The stone-faced base was pre-painted with pure Black Grey.
Be sure not to apply too much pressure or go too slowly as that allows the brush bristles to settle in the crevices of the surface you are dry brushing. You might not see the difference until you go over the same area a few times with the dried brush. If you start to see streaks or lines of paint travelling in the direction of the brushstroke, that means the brush is still too wet and needs to be dried further.
4. After the first dry brush application, we then use pure Dawnstone in the same manner as #3 but with a lighter application of the brush than used previously. This is to get the lighter colour on the uppermost raised surfaces of the detail you are dry brushing. In the right-most image, you can see the gradation between the 2 dry brushed colours and the base colour more clearly.
And that's it! Dry brushing is a quick (though messy) way to get models with a lot of uneven surfaces like gravel, rough stone, fur, etc, highlighted and ready for use on the table top. It might require a bit of practice and getting used to how much pressure to use but it works well when you need to paint up large batches of models.
In the coming days, I'll be doing up the gems, highlighting the weapons, giving colour to the face plates and eye lenses and finishing up with all the bits of cloth here and there on the Guardians. Stay tuned as I update my progress on this blog over the next week or so. Until then, Happy Painting!!!
the BenCH