Thursday, June 26, 2014

From the Desk: Cygnar Basing Step-By-Step

So again, posting as much for my own benefit. This is my process for painting these Tau Ceti bases for my Cygnar army.

After trimming off excess moldings, washing, and then priming in black, I base coated them with Andrea Gun Metal using my airbrush. This process gives them a nice even coat and is very fast. The Andrea Gun Metal has a fairly dark color to it, and the metal look is a little different than I'm used to, but I really like it and it goes through the airbrush like butter.
Next I create a custom wash using black ink and my wash medium (matte medium, flow aid and water) at about a 1:2 ratio. Once that dries I went back with P3 Cold Steel and highlight various parts and do a little blending on specific sections. This process gives the surface a lot more depth of appearance.
Now I just base coat the places I want to glow with an even mix of P3 Frostbite and P3 Meridius Blue.
Next do I some detailed lining of the glow with just P3 Frostbite. This gives me a better sense of where the brighter parts of the glow will be.
Next I create a simple glaze using P3 Turquoise ink, at roughly a 1:2 ink:water ratio and glaze all the glowing sections. I'm not super tidy on this and let the glaze run out a bit to add to the glow effect.
Finally a second round of lining with the Frostbite/MerBlue mix and then a final lining of just Frostbite. Then just tidy up the base lip and it's done!
So again, this is not meant to be a premium paint job. It's a tabletop speed paint version. I did 8 of these all at once and it took me maybe half an hour at most. I want to be able to crank these out quickly and consistently so that basing is not my hold up. One personal note about the Tau Ceti bases and this scheme is that even though there are lots of duplicates, I can change up which parts get the glow effect and it gives enough visual variation to make them look like different bases. I'm looking forward to having a whole army with these.

No comments: