Thursday, October 6, 2011

Path of Chaos Part one: How to Paint an Army


As promised.  Here is the first of the reprints of the Path of Chaos Blog.  I've been a bit rundown of late and haven't had much chance to write new stuff.  Hopefully this will tide those of you who haven't read it over till I'm feeling a bit better.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Painting an army

Hey folk, and welcome to the first of my posts on the actual methods I am using to build and paint this army.

Well we're getting toward the end of week one of the Army builder challenge and I've made quite a bit of progress.  As you may already know, the idea behind the challenge is to paint one unit a week, building toward a 1000 point army over the coarse of the month.  Well in week one I've gotten a little carried away and painted my first unit (20 Marauders) and my General (Tzeentchian sorcerer) and, as of typing this, I have just about completed the second unit (10 Warhounds).  So in today's post I'll give y'all a rundown on what I did with the Marauders.

I tend to have two modes of painting.  The first is meticulous and involves a lot of obscure techniques and arcane murmmerings which I shall not get into here.  The other is army painting mode.  This involves getting the models in question painted to a good game ready paint level in the shortest time possible.

The Three Foot Rule:

When painting an army it is important not to get too hung up on the look of each individual model.  At the end of the day people won't be viewing each model up close and personal.  They'll be looking at them from the other side of the table (hopefully as you march to glorious victory over their forces).  This being the case you want to get each unit looking good from around three feet, hence the three foot rule.

Here are my top tips for getting an army done quicky.

First off,  assemble and paint each unit by using a factory line.  For assembly start by glueing all the legs to their bases, move up the body in stages attaching the same pieces to all the models in the unit before moving on to the next stage.  With painting, start by dry brushing all the metal surface on every model then paint all the brown then the next colour and so on.

The next tip is to keep things neat.  This tends to be quite difficult if you're going really fast (and it's the advice I'm worst at taking myself) but try to get each colour on neat and smooth and only in the places where you want it.  The neater you are at the base coating stage, the less work you'll have to do later.

Ink wash is your friend.  You can save a lot of time on some models by making good use of washes.  If used properly you can get away with just base coating your models then giving them a good coating of the appropriate wash.

Keep it simple.  Keep the number of colours for any given unit to a minimum.  Where possible it is best to pick one metal colour, one cloth colour, one flesh colour and one detail colour.  From here you can expand with a high light for each and a few variations for hair and the like.  By keeping to a limited pallete you'll give your unit's a cohesive appearance and cut down on time for application.

Bright colours draw the eye, so spend a little more time getting them looking good.  Make sure they are applied neatly and are well defined. it'll distract from shortcuts you may have taken in the darker areas of the miniatures.

Finally, base the models well.  Make use of flock and static grass.  If the unit is based well it'll look that much better.

Once you've got the army to a playable level you can always revisit it later and add highlights and details you might want.  In this way you'll be playing with a fully painted army sooner rather than later.



So,  that being said, here's what I did with my Marauders. (I won't bother with the details of assembly, see the tips above for how i went about that.)

First up I picked the palette I would be working with.  They were as follows.
    Tallarn Flesh
    Hormagaunt Purple
    Bleached Bone
    Calthan Brown
    Scorched Brown
    Ultramarines Blue
    Chainmail
    Charadon Granite
    Adeptus Battlegrey
These were backed up by the following washes.
    Badab Black
    Devlan Mud

Astute readers may have noticed that there are a few more colours in my list than the tips above suggest.  This is because there are a lot of similar types of items on the Maruaders, the boots straps pants and loin cloths could have all been done in the same shade of brown but I was worried that if I did that it would make all these details blend in together too much.  So instead I decided to make each of these things a different colour.  As long as you stick to the plan of painting all the miniatures in a factory line you'll still get through them quickly, just not as quick as if you had used less colours.

The first thing I did was I went through and dry brushed all the metal components with Chainmail. This means all the weapons helmets and steel gut plates.  I always try to do drybrushing first if I can so as not to run the risk of getting Chainmail all over the other colours later.

Next I painted all the skin on the models with Tallarn flesh.  I then painted all the pants with Scorched Brown.  Once these had dryed I ran a thick wash of devlan mud over the flesh and the pants. I then went back over the flesh with talarn flesh again making sure to leave some nice shady areas to give the skin depth.

The next stage was to go through and paint the detail items.  The wrist band got Ultramarines Blue.  The fur, Adeptus Battlegrey, The boots Charadon Granite and the horns Hormagaunt Purple (weird I know but trust me) The belts and straps I painted with Calthan Brown.  Then i went back to the horns and painted them Bleached bone leaving thin lines of the hormagaunt puple showing.  All these area then got a thick wash of Badab black.  The horns also got some devlan mud.

The last stage on the main body of the miniatures was to paint their hair.  For this I went outside my pallete using blondes, Reds and browns to get a little variation.

Finally I painted the shields.  When painting shields it is a good idea to remember, The shield is a large and very noticable feature of the model, so you want it to really pop.  to do this I went with Ultra marines Blue and Chainmail as My major colours.  The Ultramarines blue got a blue ink wash to really get the colour to bounce.  The chainmail was washed with watered down Badab black.  Then I glued the shields in place.

At this stage I took a look at the models and checked for any patches I'd missed or needed more definition.  Those That had been missed got a touch up and some areas got a little more Black wash.  Then it was time for Basing.

To base the models I started with Citidel basing sand.  This was painted black.  Dry brushed with Graveyard earth and then given a few patches of Static grass.  Personally I like to keep static grass to patches as I feel it looks better this way.

So,  that was it.  Unit one done.  I started it on Monday and was done by Friday having spent roughly 1-2 solid hours a day on them.  The really time consuming thing with this technique is always waiting for the washes to dry.  You can speed things up by using a hair dryer on low, but be warned.  You may end up pushing the wash to different areas of the model.  It is better to use the time to work on something else, like your character models or something.

Below are some pics of the Marauders at various stages of their creation.  I'll go into more detail on the sorcerer and the banner in the next post.

Cheers folks.

Ben











  

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