LI Emperors Children Done! For now.

Hey all,

Here's a little Emperors Children force I painted for Legions Imperialis. I'd like to take them up to 2k points at some point, but a self-sufficient detachment will work for now!

The recipe is fairly simple:

• Paint the purple with Proacryl Faded Plum and Citadel Leviathan Purple contrast over it. I airbrushed both, although I'd just brush them on on the infantry or something with a lot of texture. Airbrush to draw out volumes, not just zenithal-like.
• White stripes. They're wetblends of Proacryl Bold Titanium White down to the Proacryl Neutral Grey or so. Don't worry if they're not too smooth, they'll look smoother after the following steps.
• Paint the silvers in Proacryl Silver, golds and coppers both in Proacryl Copper; the golds get a highlight in Scale75 Citrine Alchemy. Wash them both in Citadel Contrast Basilicanum Grey. Any contrast or wash would do, I opted for a neutral one to subdue the color in the low values.
• Time to blackline everything. I used Musou Black, thinned with water. It works ok and it's really dark.
• After that, stipple edge highlights over the purple parts in a mix of Faded Plum and Proacryl Bright Ivory. The highest edges/values build up to almost pure Bright Ivory, the marine heads and tops of winglets and whatnot. The darker areas get almost no edge highlight, or mix in a bit of Leviathan Purple to bring it down.
• If the metals need a boost, drybrushing silver or applying Citrine Alchemy can awaken the metals. Just don't apply too much.
• Pick out some detail. I used Proacryl Bold Pyrrole Red for the red, Proacryl Bright Pale Green for the lenses, Bright Green for plasma, but anything goes. I should try other colors too.
• Vehicles get a light drybrush of Scale75 Mars Orange to build up dust on the side skirts and such. 
• Varnish AK ultramatte
• The tracks are painted in random splotches of Mars Orange and Scale75 Brown Leather, followed by a light and spotty silver drybrush.
• Rebuild the shadows by glazing Musou Black by airbrush. Think anti-zenithal, but follow the volumes.

For the bases, it's the same recipe I used for my Iron Warriors, but I refined it a bit over time:

• Paint the base in random splotches of Mars Orange and Brown Leather. It takes two passes for the color to take hold.
• Drybrush Mars Orange, adding amounts of Proacryl Golden Brown towards the edges
• Pick out the rocks in a mix of whatever grey is nearby and Scale75 Artic Blue. Paint the barrels and other random debris, I used Artic Blue faded into Proacryl Blue Black for parts of buildings.
• Wash the base in Guilliman Flesh
• Add more Artic Blue to the rocks that need a bit of help
• Maybe drybrush some more Mars Orange and/or Golden brown in parts that need to be higher. Glaze a bit of Wyldwood where things need to be lower.
• Varnish in AK ultramatte
• Paint the rim in Musou Black
• Edge highlight the base in Proacryl Golden Brown.

Here are more pics. Thanks for looking!

Repainging all my Legions Imperialis bases

Hey,

I've started collecting Legions Imperialis a few months ago and painted up a small force. And it looked good, I was proud of it. But, the basing schema wasn't working well. The grey blends with the metallic models too much. I tried to make the models a warm metallic and the base a cold grey, but honestly, at this scale that's too subtle.

So, I started looking into repainting them. Mars basing is well known to work with IW; the bright colors create an effective backdrop, and the tones are similar to rust so nothing stands out too much.

I tested the scheme on 4 bases. One base would tell me a lot, but this is a game of large scales, so I feel painting up a single base would make me focus more on the detail of that single base than the general mood.

I liked it a lot! Enough to repaint some 40 bases of infantry I had already painted.

You might be wondering, how to repaint all those bases without ruining the painted models? Isn't that a chore? Well, yes and no. I already glue the little guys on the base before priming anything - I really need the plastic cement to take, because I don't want the models to pop off during handling. Especially considering my bases are all magnetized, and the base is too thin to grab, so the models are really what I handle all the time.

So, it's fine. I just painted around them. What's hard to reach doesn't need much attention, as long as it's some shade of brown or orange it's good enough. I used a small drybrush where that was needed, and it's only needed in open areas and edges.

Here's the recipe:

• Before priming, glue on some pebbles, or pipes or barrels or random bits for interest. Especially if the base is looking a bit sparse in places.
• Prime in black.
• A random wetblend of Scale75 Brown Leather and Mars Orange. Two layers should be enough. It should look random so don't bother smoothing things out, and apply paint thick, it's just a base.
• Lightly drybrush a mix of Mars Orange and Proacryl Warm Flesh, or some other beige you have around. Just lightly, mostly to pick out the rocks, and to bring up the edge of the base up a bit. I wanted the base to form a halo around the models.
• Paint all the rocks in gray, with edge highlights dots in light gray towards white.
• Wash the whole base in Guilliman Flesh. Mid-Heavy towards the middle, lighter towards the edge; if it's too heavy towards the edge you can use a clean, wet brush to dilute it a bit while it's still drying.
• Reestablish a bit of gray towards white on the rocks and such, where you feel it's needed. The rocks should still belong to the same environment, be reddish, but still be seen as different from the ground.
• Paint the rim in Musou Black.
• Edge highlight the rim, all steps and all panel lines on the base in Tau Light Ochre.

I also started applying some of the same paints to my tank tracks but I didn't finish that work yet.

Here are some pics of the collection with the new bases and a bunch of new stuff I have painted since. Thanks for looking.

Ironjawz Army Done!

The Bloodstone clan hails from the remote Blue Mountains in the realm of Chamon. Unknown to many, the mountains were formed before the Age of Myth, when a realmbeast was defeated by a spell that turned it to stone. These Ironjawz discovered that pieces of rock from one giant boulder - what used to be the realmbeast's heart - becomes saturated with blood when in battle.

They thought it was neat.

Yep, I got into AoS.

I started this army around June, after a lot of thinking over which army to start with. The Ironjawz seemed fun to play, straightforward, and they played exactly the way one'd expect them to play. I chose to get a bunch of Brutes instead of 'Ardboys as they were more or less equivalent in 2nd ed and Brutes looked so much better to me. And piggies are cool too... And then the 3rd ed book came out, and well, this is a facecrushing army now. I then bought the Weirdnob Shaman and a third Warchanter only to weaken it a bit, as honestly, I'm worried that this is too strong for friendly games. And it's so difficult to play Ironjawz wrong...

Enough about that. I'm playing AoS, it's a good game, and this is a fun army. But the best thing about it is, it's an elite army, so it should be quick to paint. Right?

But, well, I started in June and I've been working on them more or less non-stop. The technique I ended up with required a lot of stippling and glazing, and that's pretty time consuming. It took me about 2 hours to paint just the blue armor on each model, and the rest was easier, but not as easy. Add about 45 minutes for skin, a couple of hours for doodads and pants and leather, it adds up.

Anyway, here's the recipe. I painted all shadows and highlights as if the light was coming from above and behind the model.

Skin:

• A warm zenithal,
• Thinned Gore-Grunta Fur Contrast Paint
• Glazes of Deathclaw Brown for the midtone, Tau Light Ochre as highlight, Ungor Flesh as spot/edge highlight
• Glaze heavily thinned Gore-Grunta to add warmth and/or heavily thinned Wyldwood to add shadow where the layers went too far.
• Keep glazing all of the paints above until most of the roughness is gone.

Armor:

• A couple of thin layers of Scale75 Abyssal Blue as base.
• Sharp wetblend into Scale75 Artic Blue. Keep in mind where the light is coming from when choosing how high/sharp these blends should be. If the surface is large and flat (usually weapons), I just randomly drew shapes to break up the surface and shaded them as if they were real. Don't make the blend too smooth.
• Stipple Artic Blue highlights. Stippling is important here as it communicates a rough texture. I used a very old brush. If a shape is not facing the light, I added some Abyssal Blue to the paint to darken the highlight
• If something still looks smooth, either in the blend or in the highlight, break it by stippling. It shouldn't be smooth, it's stone and not metal.
• Glaze heavily thinned Wyldwood to add shadow where the surface is exactly opposite the light source, and if the concave shape you're painting on would partly be in shadow, do a part-glaze of Wyldwood.

Straps, bone, most everything beige:

• Ushabti Bone blended into Wyldwood.
• Bone gets a glaze of yellow, rope gets a glaze of red or grey, randomly.
• Revisit with Ushabti Bone and Wyldwood to reestablish highlights/shadows if needed.

Blood:

• A flat layer of Mephiston Red
• Wyldwood and Wild Rider Red to pull it into shadows and highlights
• Blood for the Blood God
• Mix some of the above paints with Blood for the Blood god to pull it in different directions where the shadows and highlights were lost.

Maw-Krusha:

• Airbrush: Scale75 Brown Leather into Tau Light Ochre into White. White around the bone to desaturate the area, the rest is more or less just zenithal Light Ochre into Brown. The wing membranes got a lot of white.
• Airbrush: Glaze heavily thinned (with contrast medium for no reason) Scale75 Ardennes Green, mixed with a touch of FW Indian Yellow ink where I wanted the skin to be more saturated. I didn't use this mix on the wings.
• Airbrush: The wings got a glaze of Gore-Grunta Fur, with FW Indian Yellow where I wanted it brighter/more saturated.
• Varnish it all.
• Airbrush AK Interactive Streaking Grime, then remove it selectively with a Q-tip that has a trace of white spirit in it.
• Regret airbrushing AK Interactive Streaking Grime and removing it with a Q-tip and white spirit. It had a nice effect but it wasn't dark enough for what I was going for, and a lot of variance in the deepest shadows was lost.
• Fixed shadows with Wyldwood by brush. At least this was easy, Contrast paint both glazes well and goes into the recesses depending on how much you apply.
• Varnish it all again. Then, follow by brush and even out things that needed to be evened out, pick out things that needed picking out, etc.

Bases:

• I wish I took notes... Ushabti Bone was used a lot, Wildwood and Gore-Grunta Fur to tint it, but also whatever grey and/or wash color I grabbed at the moment. It's a base, it should be random.

I don't know what more is there to say. What's next? I have a Warmaster Titan and a bunch of Knights ready to paint, lots of Titanicus terrain both to paint and build, some AoS Stormcast and some AoS terrain to paint up. And I still have some Space Marines and Necrons on the backlog, though honestly, I'm not very eager to go through those.