Thursday, September 9, 2010

Guard confusion



     Guh! I've been working on my paint scheme for my next army. I'm going with this urban camo type look. I've painted the above three minis as tests for some ideas. They are arranged, from left to right, earliest to latest. The first model, I didn't use any washes on. I was trying pure paint layering. The cloth looks okay, nice and worn-in, which I like. The armor is a tad too light and seems to not contrast with the cloth enough. The middle one was a quick paint. I didn't layer as many colors and I went darker on the cloth color. I also used a wash on the armor, clot and weapon. While that certainly made the overall paint scheme darker, I now have dark cloth AND dark armor. So contrast... fail. I was determined to stick with my overall idea for my army. I did some more research, came up with a good tutorial on GW's site about painting camo on IG troops. I thought I'd give it a go. The results were very good. I liked the look, and I think I pulled it off well enough. I was still waffling though, and I didn't know what to do. I decided that I'd take my three test subjects with me up to my closest GW store, and see if I could get an opinion or some advice, as I needed to pick up some paints anyways.

     I was helped by a red shirt that just so happens to be a fantastic painter. I've seen his 40K Orks, and they look great. He mulled over my figs for a while and came to the same above conclusions that I had. That didn't help. BUT he started looking at the camo one, and declared that he knew how to make it work. He proceeded to paint on my mini (didn't ask me... which was kinda shocking, but he knew what he was doing so I let it slide) and the results were pretty good. Basically he brightened the armor, highlighting it in a bit more extreme method (rather than just hard-edge higlighting) and it looked kinda slick. He just did the back of the chest armor. I decided I'd go home and do the rest of the model and see what I thought. Here are the results (before and after style):




     It looks better. I've finally found some contrast that makes this scheme work. Now I just need to paint 24 more. If you have any opinions or questions, let me know. I've started plugging away at some more models, so I'll update you on that as I go. Until next time...

2 comments:

Big Steve said...

Thats a great looking scheme, though there is one thing that I think looks out of place - the lasgun.

I think it would benefit from being black instead of green as it currently draws the eye to it instead of the focal points of the fig, in this case the face and camo scheme.

Now i've thought about it, a darker green might even work if you don't want to use black, try mixing a little black into catachan green to darken and mute the green.

Unknown said...

Thanks Steve. I'm going to give the black weapon a try. I'll let you know what it looks like.