So my Dark Angels devastators are coming along...........................slowly. What the airbrush giveth, the hand painting taketh away. Getting all the details onto eight figures takes time, even just the basic blocking out of colour, before you start shading and highlighting.
Still, as I'd hoped, the figures are starting to come together as the detail goes on and the zenithal highlighting via the airbrush looks less weird now and will look progressively less so as the details are refined.
This blocking out of colour is probably one of my least favourite stages of painting a model, because it is fiddly and time consuming. I try to avoid any mess, to save time cleeaning up later on, which means careful painting inside the lines. I've also got to think about what colours I want, where I want them and how it will all look when I'm done. Plus I miss bits, I forget stuff and then wind up having to repaint areas because I've moved onto another figure at the one time. So not all the base colours are done yet.
Plus doing the freehand to get the Dark Angels chapter symbol on the shoulder pads (as the DA sprue shoulderpads only have a sword) takes a while as well.
Also,last night appeared to be "not good macro photography night" as it was late and I was tired taking the pics so everything is slightly darker than it should be. This some what exacerbates the zenithal highlighting on the figures, where some of the dark looks darker than it should. I find myself worrying unnecessarily when looking at the photos that the macro photography has made it so the shadow is hiding the shadow effect I've tried to achieve, when in fact, it's displaying it more or less properly.