WIP: Grey Knights Land Raider: Look Who's Back!

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It's been nearly 6 months since my last confes... er, post.

Hey, it's Deet. No, I'm not dead. No, I haven't been painting much, but guess what? I am now! The last time I posted about this project was last July. Yeah, that's a while. I had done an hour or two of work on it here or there, but hadn't really been inspired. I'd also put some work in on my Lizards, but was kind of tired of looking at them. But the wife was out of town for a weekend and I didn't have any more excuses. Back to the hobby table!

Man, this model is a mess. This is a really ancient Land Raider kit I grabbed on eBay years ago. I'm too lazy to look up how old, but the model on the front of the box is painted up as a Black Templar. All the Crusader mod parts inside are metal. Metal! I've got a love/hate thing with metal figures, but for mechanical parts on a vehicle, it's definitely HATE. Every single one of these parts is warped, short shot, or otherwise impaired. The plastic parts are not a whole lot better. We've gotten used to these new GW plastic kits and how gorgeously (comparatively) they fit together, but it wasn't that long ago that they really sucked. This kit in particular was obviously well past the normal life span of its tools, and without anything to compare it to, it may never have been right to begin with. The parts don't fit together well at all, with big gaps all over the place. I've spent many an hour filling holes and trying to reposition mismatched panel lines. It's far from perfect but I've already spent way too much time on it. I can cover it up with some creative weathering or just ignore it. Onward.

Got it all primed up and then started with preshading. The pic didn't really show much since it was black metal on black primer, but you can guess. Metallic in the shadows. Afterward I went over it with chainmail and tried to leave the shadows.

Next, I went back with steel and started hitting edges to catch some highlights.

Finally, I started the masking process for the classic GK red/white stripe. The easiest way to keep this clean is to use a piece of tape as your guide. I just matched up the edge of the blue tape along the edge of the tank to keep it parallel. Then I used a really thin pinstriping tape (black- Chartpak brand) to lay along the opposite edge. This thin tape makes it a lot easier to go over all those ups and downs from the sculpted doors, rivets, etc. 

Then I remove the blue tape and slide it over to use as a mask. Sorry- looking at opposite sides of the tank here. I'm out of practice so my pic narrative game is off. I decided I didn't want the red to go all the way to the edge, so I threw down a thin piece of tape to mask off the back edge. 

Hopefully get all the airbrush portion done in the next week and then it can sit on my table for another 6 months before I finish it off.

~Deet