by It’s been a couple weeks. I’ve kept my Dark Angels moving through the painting process and now I have a full group of them painted, as well as the company commander. Well, I am missing the appropriate sergeant, but more on him later. As it stands, I have nine Dark Angels done and the company commander. I was able to get the proper paint color for doing the highlighting. I still ended up with a Tron-like effect, but it’s much more muted.
One thing I need to work on is the edge highlighting technique. The lines on these minis are a bit inconsistent in the width. I think I’m also going to scale back the number of edges I highlight from “darn near everything” to a more reasonable level. Looking back over the minis and thinking about it, probably not every line I did needed to have a highlight. Still, it looks pretty good from a table-top eye view – as in the distance your eye normally would be over them minis if you were playing a game.
The general color scheme used by the GW tutorials for the Dark Vengeance set actually came out pretty well. It meant I didn’t have to think much until I got to the highlight stage.
One of the areas on these models I didn’t highlight much was the silver metal areas. I usually do highlight the metal, but this time, I wanted the other areas of the armor, and the boltgun casings to stand out more. Also, I knew there would be a lot of silver metal colors on a lot of the Sector Imperialis bases, so I didn’t want to overdo it. I think it worked pretty well.
I do need to work on the technique I use for the power cores on the plasma weaponry. It came out fine with the two pictured here, but I want to try to push the envelope of what I can do with them. I’ll be a little more experimental in the future.
The Dark Angel mini that took the most time was the company commander. As you can see, he has a lot more details on his armor; a lot more trinkets, robes, and trim. In a lot of ways, that’s similar to how Chaos Space Marine lord and sorcerer minis are modeled. I think he came out well for the most part.
What I’m not too pleased with is how his relic blade came out. I was attempting a little non-metallic metal flair and I don’t think I executed it too well. This was my first time every trying something with a non-metallic metal technique, so maybe it’s just a steep learning curve. I think I need to plan out better exactly where the dark and light parts will be. I may also use different colors: a lighter grey and darker blue. I’ll need to watch some more tutorials on this technique before I attempt it again.
I do like how the white came out on the commander’s wing details and robes. I find white is hard to work with because it’s easy to get that chalky texture look if you aren’t careful. I was able to avoid it this time with more thin layers white. Hopefully, I can replicate what I did here going forward.
Something else I learned here was how long I need to make the metal pins for lodging them properly in cork. Since I’m going to be using the Sector Imperialis bases for all my Dark Angels models, all the troops I paint I’ll be pinning in cork. The first group, the pins only stuck out about half an inch or less. Since cork is porous and layered, my pins would end up hitting resistance a layer or two down and not be long enough to really anchor in the upper layer of the cork. This made the platform really unstable.
For the next group of Dark Angels I’m painting, I made the pins at least and inch long. When I stuck those models on the cork, the pins could go much deeper and are now on a pretty stable platform.
It’s hard to tell from this not-so-hot photo, but I’ve got the first layer of green on these guys. I’ll be doing the two librarians, two sergeants, and the Dark Angels with plasma weaponry. I hope I’ll be able to move faster in the painting of these guys with the stability issues solves. I’m also hoping to take some of the lessons learned from painting the first squad and put them to use.
We’ll see how things turn out.
