So yes, I have taken on another very large commission piece! This time I have the pleasure of painting a Chaos Reaver Titan! First off, this model is MUCH larger than I thought it would be, and it is a heavy piece of resin, haha. I dread what Forge World will put out if they actually follow through on the Warlord Titan... Anyways, check below for more info on how this model will play out as I paint, and also for my thoughts on the new Chaos Hell Drake.
So yes, I am actually enjoying this model so far. The client has a HUGE Black Legion army (close to 40k points of it if I had to guess), so he wanted his Reaver to match it. The problem, as most of you know, is that painting true black on anything will kill the detail. Therefor I am going with the near black look. I started by priming it black, obviously, and then sprayed with a 50-50 mixture of Vallejo's Black and their Grey Black. Pretty solid dark grey there. After that I sprayed a light layer of Vallejo's Dark Blue Grey, which isn't blue at all but still another solid darker grey, and I made sure to avoid the edges of the armor plates. That created a slight fade from black to very dark grey to dark grey, which looks great! After that I made a wash of about 1 part Black Ink and 20 parts water and washed all of the armor. I love using watered down inks because they are heavier and flow into the recesses so nicely. However, they don't stain very well, so I ended up adding more Ink to the mix until it was about 1 part Ink to 10 parts water and washed it all a second time. I am now happy with where the base coat stands.
Now for future painting this week, I need to make a dark grey that is slightly lighter than where the armor sits currently, and then I will spray a sort of zenith highlight on all of the raised surfaces of the armor. The thing to remember when painting is that NOTHING is monotonic in real life, so you need to have variance on all of your colors or it just won't look right at all. Once that part is done, I get to coat the model a couple times with a Matte Varnish before starting on all the metal parts! Yay me! This will actually give me a great opportunity to try out AK Interactives Dark Steel metallic pigment for the pistons, which will hopefully give it a realistic metal look (with hopefully being the key word there). Then after that I get to paint up the demon face on the knee pad, make some stencils to airbrush designs on the wide open and boring empty spots on the armor, etc, etc. I'll discuss all of that as it draws closer.
Anyways, here is another shot of where the Reaver stands at the moment, for those who care:
Now on to the Chaos Hell Chicken. I was very excited about the prospect of having flyers in my Chaos army, so I promptly ordered 2 of these guys. Oh, the disappointment. I'm more of a model guy than I am a game guy, so aesthetics are VERY important to me. I like the overall look of this model, but I feel that GW got unbelievably lazy when making this model. The back was 100% completely open!!!! I had to cut plasticard to cover the 6 exhaust ports and the engine so that you couldn't see into the giant openness of the model. Very lazy. Also, I don't like how troublesome this model is to pose. As is the same case with the Forge Fiend / Mauler Fiend kit, the head doesn't really want to just go where you put it. To pose it anywhere beyond where it is in the pictures, you actually have to trim parts off of the top and bottom of the head... piss poor thinking in my opinion. After everything was said and done, it took me a while to get it put together, and I did cut it so that I could pose it how I wanted (sorta, I guess) but I am still going to paint the model fully before passing further judgement on the model. Here is how the back looks now though:
Anyways, it's time for me to play mad scientist and mix some paints, so until next time, stay classy interwebs!