Thursday, November 12, 2009

Retribution Prototype Paint Scheme

Recently a friend of mine said he was starting a Retribution force and was trying to work out a paint scheme. We were kicking around ideas and I volunteered to paint up a prototype for him. What follows is an overview of the process of painting this prototype. First though, I want to clarify the goals:
* The scheme should be darker, ideally incorporating the Cryx Bane Base.
* The scheme should be fast to paint.
* Purple was the alternate color to offset the CXB.
With that said, here's what I did.

Step one is to prime in white and then base coat the parts that will be metal with black. The white primer base makes it faster to lay down base coats. The black however is to help the metals pop better.

The next step is to base coat everything. For this scheme I used P3 Wurm green for all the armored parts, P3 Cygnar Blue Highlight for the cloth parts, and GW Boltgun Metal for, well, the metal parts. For the P3 paints I thinned them just a bit (about 2:1 paint:water) but the metal I took straight from the pot.

Next I do the first round of washes. The green gets a thick wash of CXB (about 1:1). The blue gets a thick wash of P3 Beaten Purple (again, about 1:1), although I found that it took a couple coats of this wash to get the desired effect. The metals get a healthy dose of GW Badab Black wash. I've become very fond of this wash lately for doing "clean" metals. There's a lot of buzz about Devlun Mud, but I really like the Badab Black to create a cleaner metal look.

I've included a picture of the back here to better show the effect of the purple wash over the blue. I like the effect that this method creates because the purple ends up with a cooler tone rather than a warmer reddish tone.

Unfortunately for the next step I didn't break the pictures down much, so I'll roll this up. First, I made a thin wash of VGC Black (about 1:8 paint:water) and washed both the armor and cloth parts with it. I did a small bit of sponging to make sure things didn't get too dark or pool too much. Next, I drybrushed the metal parts with GW Mithril Silver to work the metals back up quickly. At the same time I quickly painted all the "bumps" that pop out on the armor with the same silver. And finally I also made a thick wash of P3 Arcane Blue and P3 Turquoise Ink (about 2:1:3 paint:ink:water) to add the turquoise glow to the metals. Mixing in the ink wasn't necessary, but an added bit of punch to the color. For the bumps on the sword I painted them with straight P3 Arcane Blue.

Ugh, more blurred pics. Sorry! Anyway, for the final steps I highlighted the bumps on the sword with P3 Frostbite, and I also did just a bit of highlighting with P3 Wurm Green on the upper armor plates to bring the color back up just a bit.

And that's it! Grand total it took about 2 hours or so. The scheme worked out fairly well. I think a lighter green tone might be better, but this made a good prototype model at least.
The scheme is also very quick to paint, and could easily be put to an assembly line system to roll out a painted army fairly quickly I suspect. It's certainly not a show piece, but it gets paint on a model quickly and when facing the prospect of painting a whole army on a limited time budget, wash techniques can really help do that.

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