This year I got "Magnus the red" as Christmas present from my wife (I have a very understanding wife). This is a stunning model and very fun to paint. As I am not doing a Tzeentgh army I felt that I could take my time and experiment a bit with the paint scheme. Since the model is so detailed, even beneath the armor I decided to paint the model in a "naked" state first and add the armor afterwards. This helps with the painting but also gives me the opportunity to take some photos of the model painted and assembled with all the details that will later be hidden.
For the paint scheme I decided to stick mostly with the original as far as the main colors go. I painted the skin a deep red (but not the same as my blood thirstier) and dry brushed it up to yellow. This gave the model a red base but in moderate light it looks more like a red brown which is more believable as skin (even though he is a daemon). For the hands and feet I choose to bring in some more purple to represent the change from Magnus "natural" skin tone to the more Tzeentgh daemon colors. This also ties in with his mutated feet and big claw hand. I also did this for the hand holding the spear, but I am not sure that was the right decision as this hand is not mutated as the rest of the extremities.
For the wings I went with some more vibrant colors than the original, which I think ties in more with the Tzeentgh theme. Getting the blends and transitions were not easy with the dry brush (here an air brush might do a better job). These new injection molded things are very thin and hence flexible, which makes dry brushing hard as the surface constantly yields to the pressure of the brush and it becomes difficult go get an even coverage. To avoid frosting I rinsed the wings with water after each dry brushing session (usually, three to four colors in a field and max 20 min brush time). This mean that the wings had to be painted in multiple stages, i.e the four sides and two fields per side and two to three passes per field with rinsing in between.
The metal parts are given the standard treatment to make them look more weather beaten. For the runes on the blade, and also for the arm, I decided to give them a blue-ish glow and try to make it look like they were beneath the surface rather than on top of it. So after painting the runes I actually went over them again the the dry brush to add some original colors back to the edges of the cutouts.
For the base I decided to do something more advanced than I usually do, as this will be more of a display piece (as most my models really are). There is this dreadnought arm foot rest coming with the model, so I decided to add some more debris to the base, like some concrete slabs, different plastic cutoffs that might look like they came from a dreadnought and some generic marine parts like should pads, helmet and bolt gun. The base will then be finished of with sand like the rest of my bases.
All in all I am very pleased with the progress so far. Now I am looking forward to starting on the armor. I am going to go for a subtle rainbow effect in the white metal to make it shimmer a bit. I have already tried out the scheme on the metal bands on the tip of the horns and on the handle of the spear, but I hope it will also look god on the larger surfaces.
Well that is it for now.
