THANKS FOR MAKING MY DRAFT GO UP KIRBY. D= That's okay!At the request of Kirby, pics of the Dreadknight I just finished painting.
I am no master painter, but I would like to think I'm not to bad either. I'll talk with the pics. It doesn't take a ton of practice to be able to paint to this degree, and if you try any of the things I did I think you may be surprised at the results you get.
First, pics all around!
The white on the armor plating was to help break up the monotony of the model- silver on silver on silver is not exactly an interesting color scheme. White allows me room while still allowing me to still look recognizably like the classic Grey Knight scheme.
The red is there to add just a bit of flair to the model- by picking out some of the more mundane features, it really makes all the small details pop. The red is definatly a theme I'll be carrying throughout my entire force.
Painting white is always a challenge- it requires many coats and often ends up still being see-though or chalky. Even now, I should probably do another coat... I've found that Deneb Stone makes an excellent base for white, and alternating layers of drybrushed and watered-down white works quite well to get the color to stick.
The red is just a flat Red Gore.
To represent hammerhand without drawing too much attention, I simple inked Baal Red on both the pilot and dreadknight's hands.
The metallics were the easiest part- I simply overbrushed Boltgun Metal onto the while model, and then did a light drybrushing of Mithral Silver with downward strike over it. The gold parts are just Dwarf Bronze in multiple coats, with some Shining Gold used to pick out details.
Posing was a little difficult, but on the whole not too bad. The legs slot into the hips, so I just had to use a bit of green stuff to take him from "stand" to "stride" by adjusting the angle of one leg. the feet and shoulders are both ball-joint, so those weren't at all a problem. Only changing the bend of the elbows and knees would be challenging, it will certainly take some green stuff to do so. For now, I'm happy with simple changes. Of course, the pilot has to change his position too, and I was a bit difficult to make the right arm look natural... it's a lot of slow cutting and fitting to get to close to right. The legs were gain easy, I just cut one from the hip and glued it separately. No problem.The pilot himself- painted in the same silver colors as the knight, of course. I didn't want to go too crazy with reds and whites here, as I thought it would distract from the model as a whole too much. The eyes were done the same way I did his sword, which I'll cover in a bit.
The incinerator was easy- especially the burn, which anyone can achieve on a weapon of any size in about 5 minutes. This is over shining gold and bronze, but the base color doesn't matter. Just take terracotta, and drybrush until you've got a nice brown over most of the end. Then do the same with black, but stop shorter. It creates a natural gradient and looks great.
The sword is simply many layered colors: over a basecoat of black, I put a thin coat of Terracotta where I wanted the "burn" to start, and slowly, slowly layered out in brighter colors, going from
Black>Terracotta>Red Gore>Blood Red>Blazing Orange>Sunburst Yellow>Skull White (just the edges)
Each coat was successively lighter, and more removed from the center. There's no hard and fast rule on when to stop drybrushing each layer, I just did each until it looked right.
I'm pretty pleased with the kit overall, it looks a lot better in person then in the crappy frontal shots GW has put out of them. I'll have to get some pics of it out on the tabletop soon.
