The Chosen! (well, one of them anyway)

 Finally managed to get the first one done!

This guy took me a ridiculous time to complete. The main reason being that he was my test bed for getting the colour palette down as well as the actual techniques I would use to achieve the results I wanted. I tell you something, I have actually learned more when painting this model than I have in a long time. Here's a couple of pics and some explanation of what I did....

 The main thing being something really fundamental; water down your paints. Don't get me wrong I've always known this and have also always watered down any paint I use but to nowhere near the extent I did with this guy. Takes his armour for example. To get the red I used a basecoat of Khorne red. After that I used Mechrite red so watered down that the pigment actual began to split. I added around 3 full coats and then a couple of texture coats. What I mean is that the first 3 coats looked rubbish as the paint was too watery but then layering coats in the middle of the flat expanses of the model created an amazing, subtle, textured quality. So simple, looks so good!

The second thing I learned was using targeted shading. I used a lot of washes on this guy but not how I usually use them. Again, I'll use the armour as an example. I used Agrax Earthshade around the edges of the armour plates where they meet the gold. This added great shadow but didn't change the actual hue of the red. It did however leave a slight line where the wash ended so I used Seraphim Sepia shade to blend it in with the rest of the armour. Again, simple but created loads off really subtle shifts of colour in what could have been boring, flat areas of the model.

 I also started getting much better with the OSL technique. Especially underneath the power fist. This was all tied into using really watered down paint making it much easier to blend the colour into the model without fully covering the 'actual' colours of the armour, robe etc.

So what do you think? I'm actually pretty happy with him even though he took an absolute age to do! However, if I can get all of the models in the unit up to this standard then I'll be a very happy man!

Let me know what you think!

Phil