Thursday 13 July 2017

Space Wolves: Primaris progress

... or how to spend seven hours feeling like you've achieved nothing. NOTHING.

After priming my marines, I wanted to weather them differently to how my other marines have been done. The old method was sponge dabbing the chips on, but this time I wanted to try a different method - chipping medium.

First step is to apply two different browns on the models - starting with all over Dark Fleshtone, then covering a random 50% of each model with Parasite Brown.


Out of shot, I've applied the same process to arms, legs and other missing pieces. But you don't need to see those in the test shot.

After this, a full coverage of Vallejo's Chipping Medium - which works surprisingly well straight through the airbrush from the pot. Then it's Dark Grey Blue to cover everything so no brown is visible.


So after two full sessions I'm now back to sprue grey! Brilliant. Well done me, what a great use of time.

It's a little demoralising at this point to realise nothing appears to have changed, but I'm hopeful the next few stages will help change that impression. This approach takes a little longer in the preparation but I'm hopeful the extra effort is worthwhile, and will look great on the support vehicles later too. Bear with me, future posts should be more interesting - but this feels like an important stage of the process.

Before the chipping begins, I've also started painting some terrain pieces to act as my test area for this technique. It's designed to be debris and ruins, so if everything goes horribly wrong at this point ... it doesn't matter so much! This makes me feel better than trying it straight on the marines and failing hard.


Shout out to the excellent Crooked Dice for their junk piles and containers shown above, they're great scenery pieces and the range they had on display at Salute 2017 was excellent. Perfect test material for new techniques. Ignore the ork shaman in the corner. He's for another post at some point :)

I played with a few test colours to get an idea of how I want the highlight stages to go - and below is the very, very rough sketch of colour transitions.


This moves from pure Dark Grey Blue up to pure Wolf Grey, with a few inbetween steps. Just to stress, the above is only a sketch to let me see each colour over the top of the last. My hope is the final version will be a lot smoother!