WIP: Stormraven- Now With Paint!

I had a really productive week of hobbying.  Stormraven is coming along great, and I even got some modeling work done on an Aegis.  Check out the progress after the jump.

Last week I finished off with closing up the model and starting on the primer coat. Since then I've been going all out on it, pretty much finishing off all the airbrush work until I get to the weathering.

After the primer, I followed my same formula as my terminators, but took a little more care to make sure there was some good variation in tone with all these big flat areas. First up was the Vallejo Black Metal. Rather than covering the whole model like I did with the terminators, I opted to just paint the bottom and any creases or shadowy areas. I'm not sure if this will really help preserve all that much detail but it can't hurt.

Next, I coated just about everything in Vallejo Gunmetal, making sure to leave some of the black exposed.

Finally, I hit the high spots with Vallejo Steel (all of these are air colors, BTW). This time, I used a little piece of plasticard to mask off little areas and give me some sharp panel lines and a little more interesting contrast. Tough to get much credit in these poorly lit shots, but you can see it better on the tail below and on the wings in the header image. I'm liking the way it came out. I saw a great video the other day that pretty much shows the same process I did here on my 3 base colors, but with Space Wolves colors on a Stormfang. I was planning on posting it as a useful tool for everyone, but can't for the life of me find the link. I'll have to keep looking. 

Now that the hull is ready to go, it's time for some color breaks. It took a little time to get the masks on and symmetrical. I hit everything with white primer, and then a little grey preshading, followed by pure white. Without the next masking phase, it was a little awkward trying to leave the grey showing on what will eventually be red, but cover the grey with white in the white spots. Hopefully that will make sense in the pictures. 

With the white done, it's time to move to reds. This is one of the trickier parts of the Grey Knights scheme. That crenellation pattern is tough to get clean and even, and it's really obvious when you don't. I took my time and measured everything out precisely, making sure to really pay attention to my blade angle when I went to make the cuts.  For hand cuts, and my first time trying this, it came out pretty good.  I got lucky when I placed it on the model that there was some extra on one side of the tape where the lines disappear in to the side engines - and that extra is exactly what is needed to put the same pattern on my bolter sponsons. Bonus!

The red went down in two coats- GW Mephiston as a base, and Evil Sunz Scarlet to highlight the top and edges.

The last thing I did was to paint the engine intakes and exhausts. GK vehicles can get really monochromatic- all silver with just a few pops of red.  I wanted to try to break that up a little, so the engines got shot in Hashut Copper, and then a second highlight with a little Vallejo gold mixed in. No pic here, but you can see it at the top.

And that's it for now. I let it dry for a few hours before I peeled off the tape to see how it went. Lookin Slick! With the big 4 day weekend coming up, I'm hoping to put some good hours in to this, and maybe even get a game in with Trip while he's still in the land of the living. Coming up on Friday, a special new surprise from HOW. Be sure to check it out.

~Deet