It's time for me to be back at the keyboard with a good mood. My Arc40k project is going well, and despite the intervention of that furry friend I have completed my Knight Tyrant. So now is a good time to talk about its paint job and what I am trying to achieve.
In this hobby of ours, painting our Tactical War Dollies can and should be a very personal thing!
I know you don't try too hard to reproduce exactly what other people are doing. Instead, I put a lot of my own expression into it and make it distinctly mine.
However, this doesn't mean we can't learn a lot from the talented people on YouTube and in the open world. For example, I learned a lot from Squidmar and Victoria Lamb. I looked at their techniques and skills, practiced them, but then changed, adjusted, and tweaked them to suit my needs.
When it comes to my Chaos Knights, it all comes down to how I envision these large war machines striding through the worlds of the 41st Millenium.
But what makes them Chaos? What does that mean visually to me, and how do I express that ?
Firstly, I didn't want them to look damaged, rusty, or poorly maintained, or falling apart after millennium in the warp.
The Dark Mechanicus still reveres these God Machines and keeps them functioning. I also wanted the influence of the Warp to be present on my models, either through physical conversion and addition of bits or through the paint job.
So, what did I end up doing? Well, I decided the concepts of rough, slightly out of focus, and slightly sticky would guide my style on these models.
For the rough and slightly out of focus aspects, I made sure that there were very few sharp highlights. Instead, I used broad highlights and topped off with a lot of washes and shades. I love using washes, and I dialed it up to 11 with these models.
I wanted the washes to mute the colors and blend them together, rather than separate them. I also wanted the external silhouette to be distinctive, but the internal silhouette, like the distinction between the internal shapes, head, body, and carapace, to be a little hard to see where one shape started and another ended.
The lack of sharp highlights and blending colors with washes helps a lot with this.
I'm not very familiar with today's terminology, but I like to think of my style for this army as Blanchitsu-Lite!
For the slightly sticky aspect, I have a secret. Maybe it's not super-secret, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought of it. I have a wash mix that I really like, a 50/50 mix of Arthonian Camoshade and Seraphin Sepia!
This is great for oily, greasy, and grimy bits and bobs. I further thinned it down by adding a 50/50 mix with Lahmian Medium. And as a final step, I washed the entire model with that.
This added a nice green-brown layer to everything, making it look a little oily and further blended all the other colors together to help with the out-of-focus effect I was going for.
Take a look at the final result. If we catch up at Ark40k, let me know what you think. I am always happy to chat about painting this stuff.
Cheers! Take care, and I'll catch up again soon.
