I’ve been painting this “ice and fire” model for a few days now, but haven’t posted a single WIP picture yet. Sorry!
The general concept is to represent the clash of ice and fire in this Chaos Lord model. Hope you enjoy my interpretation 🙂
I promise you that my next mini wil be really sweet and will have nothing to do with barbarians!
Do you remember the Emperor’s Children chaos space marines that I have been showing in various WIP phases for the last few weeks in various places, like my facebook page, Chest of Colors fanpage, or my Instagram stream?
Now they’re done!
Though I must say I am very happy with the results, the road to this point was quite long and bumpy. Still, I am glad I finally made it! 🙂
As you surely know, I tend to think about my models a bit in a storytelling way. There are no random poses, every model I am building is representing something – a situation, a state of mind, an image I’ve seen… So while building this squad I had some interpretations for every model forming in my mind.
Maybe you remember that I initially planned to paint the unit in metallic variant of its color scheme, which unfortunately didn’t work as well as I expected, so I needed to start over and try some alternatives as far as concepts and color schemes go.
But finally I have something that both I and their new owner are happy with. 😀
There were quite a few conceptual debates and choices, but with two defining guidelines I knew I would use freehand paintings similar to those used on my Decimator Engine, that can be seen in my gallery of Warhammer 40.000 models. Of course these would have to be smaller and more subtle, but this tip was enough of inspiration to make me know in which direction to go.
The other suggestion was to use the sticky slime/gore/goo/blood technique that I used on my Contemptor Dreadnought. The technique is based on what CUKIERas showed in his tutorial about creating sticky blood effect, but I use it also for things other than blood. At this point I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I was nearly sure it wouldn’t be blood. We’re talking sci-fi here after all, so we can use various alien or demonic substances of various colors.
After adding the slime it was all about testing a few color options and interpretations, and finally I chose to go for white, spiderweb-like substance. Now they’re fighting their way through a dangerous alien or demonic world, which is not a hospitable place even without its inhabitants.
I have some individual photos of the models, so I hope to share them with you pretty soon, but in the meantime let me return to working on a group of Daemonettes of Slaanesh… 😉
I hope you liked the results of my works.
Thanks for your attention. 🙂
Recent news about return of Confrontation miniatures under the new label of Legacy Miniatures reminded me about the tutorial I wrote about painting steeds for drune raiders. Even if it’s nothing new, you may still find it useful if you are looking for ideas how to paint chaos demons or steeds – this method of painting skin may inspire you to do something interesting.
As you can see the model I used was a Drune Raider from Confrontation, but the way I wanted to paint his steed was supposed to make it look demonic and unnatural. I feel that this skinned look with well defined muscles can be perfect for painting Chaos creatures.
When I am painting I often forget to take photos in the meantime, so I didn’t make a full step-by-step documentation.
That this skinned look with well defined muscles can be perfect for painting Chaos creatures.
I still hope that what I prepared gives some impression of how I created the effect that may be inspirations for those of you who wonder how to paint chaos models and their skin.
On the very beginning let me explain that the primer was not white. 😀 Don’t tune your display screens. 😉 It’s the grey spray from Maimeri Idea Spray (in my own palette of colors I would call it ‘ash-colored’).
I started painting with thinning VMC 960 “Violet” heavily.
Remembering about shapes of muscles I applied glazes with a brush. This way I became familiar with the shapes of this model and started creating the next moves.
The next color I used was transparent red-brown – VMC 828 “Woodgrain”.
I used it to define the horse’s muscles more boldly… First I outlined the sinews, and then I added direction to them.
To bind the colors and reduce the contrast, I added glazes in both colors where ever I painted sinews. Don’t try to achieve such an effect in one layer – it was creating by applying more than one layer of paint. The more layers the more saturated your colors will be.
The next step was applying shadows, which made me use black color. I used ink at this stage, because it adds no texture and allows me to manipulate in recesses and build up protruding muscles… With thin lines I painted transitions from light to shadow on the sinews without losing saturation of colors.
I glazed it with Transparent Blue because Vallejo Black color is not black enough for my concept of such sinister moods
Black looked a bit vulgar on the miniature, so I made it a bit milder by adding some violet and red-brown glazes on the borders of colors.
When I was thinking about the model, I wanted something to tone down the warmth of red colors and I decided to add some green. The drune’s tunic seemed to be a good place for this. To bind the colors of the rider and the horse together, I had to add some green to the whole palette, and so I decided about the area around the eyes, and – omitting the neck – head toward highlights of the lower parts. A color less saturated than reds an violets was supposed to imitate the effect of partial shading. But I found that adding VMC 920 “German Uniform” green made the horse look matt and made it bland and nondescript… and so I found another color 😀
To bind the green with other colors on the horse I used VMC 938 “Transparent Blue” (as the name suggests it’s a transparent blue paint ;)). It’s most visible on the horse’s face, but you can see it also on the legs, where I used it to cover the green – not only on the edges (as it was done in the upper parts) but also glazed the whole green surfaces with it…
The subject is nearly completely covered now 🙂 To make it more complete I can add that I used VMC 907 “Pale Greyblue” (which is an equivalent of the primer I used) on some parts to highlight the top of sinews, and I covered the deepest shadows with black paint. The dullness of the paint made the black even deeper, and I glazed it with “Transparent Blue” because Vallejo Black color is not black enough for my concept of such sinister moods. 😉
If you reached this part of the tutorial, you have enough patience for painting with glazes 😀 I hope you will share your own ideas and methods of painting evil and sinister creatures in comments below.
I wish you good luck.
— Ańa
It must have been in 2008 that I painted two commissioned Chaos Demon Princes of Nurgle in that pre-heresy color scheme (white armor with green decorations). At the time everybody used winged Demon Princes for Warhammer 40.000, so these had to have wings, too. So I used wings from Heresy Miniatures B’hakoth model, converted them and painted in a disgusting Nugle way. But this only started the series of questions how I painted these rotting leathery wings. To avoid responding to every question separately, I created this tutorial showing how to paint wings for a Nurgle Demon Prince.
Here’s the first wing. It’s more or less finished, and at this point I decided to take pictures of the process of painting the other wing.
Generally I don’t try to analyze or organize thoughts clouding in my head in any logical way… (otherwise I might decide that if I don’t know where to start, I should not start at all ;-))
I prefer to go all ahead instinctively… to keep my thoughts busy (especially to keep my left hemisphere busy, so that it doesn’t disturb the right one :-P) and to start painting… and to hope the rest will be fine somehow.
What I did first was outlining the shape of the “skin” which remained on the wing.
I think it wasn’t a bad choice because in case anything had been wrong, I still could correct it easily, because this light blue color would be easier to cover than red.
The blue color is probably a mix of P3 Coal Black + P3 Menoth White Highlight / Vallejo MC Ivory 918 (you can use any of the two alternatives).
The remaining surface was painted with Vallejo MC Woodgrain (transparent) 70828.
The next photo shows the wing during application of highlights to the skin:
Hmm, I didn’t finish it and I started shading the border between “skin” and “under-skin”.
You can see how unsystematic I was (that proves that the wing was created by Chaos ;-)).
I also added a stich on the “skin”.
I returned to highlighting the “skin” and modified my concept for colors.
Even the previous photos shows that I added darker decolorations of a green shade (it’s a glaze of P3 Coal Black + Vallejo Smoke Game Ink). The same color as the skin on the final color of the demon’s arms.
I also added some light blue by highlighting P3 Coal Black with white (P3 Morrow White).
That’s more or less what my painting of the demon prince’s wings was like.
Total chaos can sometimes make painting even more enjoyable, and sometimes can only make it more difficult.
This time it was ideologically necessary. 😉
And that’s what the wings looked like in the end (I only painted some chipped paint on the green arrows later.):
If you still have any questions or suggestions – feel free to share them in a comment. I’ll try to check them and leave answers.
Enjoy your painting and share your results!
— Ańa
