I've been getting a lot of positive feedback about my paintjob on the space hulk genestealers lately, so I figured I'd do up a step by step on how I painted them. Whether you're a novice looking to see how you can take your painting to the next level or a veteran looking to compare notes, I hope you enjoy this.
The attached picture is somewhat large (~1 Mb) so it will take a minute or two to load.
1. Basecoats: The carapace was basecoated with mordian blue, and the skin with about 60:40 hormagaunt purple and rotting flesh. Where possible, I like to use foundation paints for basecoating since they give excellent coverage. Depending on the project/colour, I usually just do a single coat.
2. Washes: The carapace was washed liberally with badab black, and the skin got a medium wash with leviathan purple. I was very generous on the back between the ridges to get the crevasses right down to black. With texture this exagerated, I find I can get away with a very heavy wash without getting ugly puddles anywhere. I usually hold the wash up to my desk lamp (which kicks out enough heat to melt plastic, it turns out) to speed the drying. One note; I would usually do the black wash before basecoating the skin so that I don't have to be careful around the purple bits, but to cut down on the number of pictures I went a little out of order.
3. Return to basecoat: Here I just reapplied the basecoat colours over the areas I washed, leaving the recessed areas untouched. Just looking at the wash gives a good guideline on where to paint - anywhere the blue is just a tint darker than it was initially gets another coat. This step looks pretty ugly on camera - to be honest I think step 2 looks better, but it's meant to give a good basis for the following highlights, since it blends the wash colour into the highlight colours. I find that if I go straight from a wash to a highlight, the difference between the tint in the wash and the paint I'm adding to highlight creates too abrupt a transition.
4. First highlight: The raised areas get their first highlight, mordian blue with a bit (4:1?) of fortress gray for the carapace and hormagaunt purple with some more rotting flesh than before on the skin. I've found a lot of people are reluctant to mix paints and get very abrupt highlights as a result - if you're looking to improve, try mixing a 50:50 of two paints to put between two of your normal layers. On the arms here, I did a speckled pattern rather than normal highlighting. I experimented with fully highlighting the arms and doing the spots after in an even lighter tint, but it looked terrible. The limbs on this guy are actually painted very flat (other than the spots), which seems to help them stand out better and keeps the colour more uniform throughout the model.
5. Second highlight: The spots got a dot of mordian blue mixed with more fortress gray than before, and the carapace was highlighted with the same colour. The skin got a coat of hormagaunt with lots of rotting flesh. This step is mostly a repeat of 4 with lighter colours on a smaller surface, really.
6. Highlight/Glaze/Basecoat Detail: The carapace got another highlight just along the edges with a lighter tint of mordian blue (again with more fortress gray). In step 5 the skin was a sort of sickly gray colour, so I applied a thin glaze of leviathan purple mixed about 1:2 with water (so mostly water). This brings back the purple tint to the skin while keeping it the nice grey-purple of hormagaunt purple rather than the saturated tint of the wash. I also basecoated the tongue with a couple of coats of red gore and sloppily filled the eye sockets with golden yellow. The teeth and claws were basecoated with graveyard earth.
7. Wash/ Highlight Detail: The tongue got a heavy wash of devlan mud (mostly toward the base of the tongue to get a nice blend into the dark mouth cavity). The claws got a highlight of 50:50 graveyard earth:bleached bone (almost completely covering the graveyard earth, which was mostly there so that this mix would go on with better coverage). The eyes were carefully lined around the edges with chaos black, with the pupil drawn as a line down the middle. This has become my preferred way to do eyes - if I'm a little sloppy on the outside with the black it's alright as I just touch up the cheeks of the model. I find it a lot easier to get the pupils even if I'm painting them rather than trying to put in the eye colour around them. The trick of drawing a vertical line (then hiding the fact with a black edge) for the pupil I've also found to work wonders - trying to "dot in" pupils has often ended poorly for me.
8. Freehand/ Highlight/ Edge: The tongue got a highlight of red gore mixed with a little blazing orange. To do it quickly I usually wet blend this step - slap on a highlight of pure red gore quickly, then get a bit of the mix on my brush (watered down a little more than usual) and work it into the still-wet red on the tongue, starting at the tip. It's a bit of a tricky technique, but if you want to try it out, it works most easily on a thin surface separate from the rest of the model - weapon haft, claws, etc. I learned to do it on a sword blade, which also worked reasonably well. Other things that went on in this step were a highlight of bleached bone on the claws, followed by a final highlight of mixed skull white and bleached bones. Next, just the very edges of the carapace and the protrusions on the carapace were hit with a "hard highlight" (significant difference in colour as compared to the previous one), using almost pure fortress gray (just a small dab of mordian blue mixed in) to get the model to "pop". The last detail is the freehand on the top of the head - pure rotting flesh and a detail brush to paint on some veins (oh forgot to mention before, but there's also a couple of details on the forehead done in later stages with the same palette as the carapace).
The last 3 frames just give a couple other angles on the completed figure. Later, once I figure out what colour the display board for these guys is going to be, I'll come back and paint the base.
Questions/comments welcome as usual :)
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