This project ranks amongst one of the most in-depth I have ever done. It all started earlier this year; one of the staff at my local GW decided to try out the "non-metallic metal" painting guide that was printed in White Dwarf for the Blood Angels character The Sanguinor, Exemplar of the Host. It was quite the challenge he set himself, and it raised a lot of interest in-store.
Sadly the resultant model, while pretty good, didn't quite do the job; some of the crueller critics may or may not have mentioned that the gold looked like melted chocolate... but I digress. James, being a good-natured chap, then set me a challenge: To do a better Sanguinor. Having a reputation as a decent painter to uphold, I figured "why not?". Ah, if only I'd known...
I followed the White dwarf guide pretty closely; I can't remember the issue number at the moment, but it's all there if you fancy taking a look! The only change was the sword; the paint mix ratios in the guide look nothing like the pictures, so after a bit of mucking about, I decided to fall back to the crystal technique I used on my Farseer; for details, see below. Needless to say, after hours (and hours) of careful blending, I was starting to worry that I was in fact painting the most in-depth shade of brown to ever grace the Earth! Not only is the technique required crazy-hard, my friends, but it takes a fair knowledge of light theory, which I won't go into here... look it up on-line, if you fancy going quietly mad :)
In the end, though, the finished result was very cool indeed, and it was definitely worth taking the time out to do it. I entered the model into the store painting competition that month (you can find pics of that competition, and more, on Games Workshop: Thurrock's Facebook page!), and came first. And it was around that point that someone suggested that I enter the piece into Golden Daemon this year.
I decided to give it a go. First, though, the Sanguinor needed a new base; just standing on his slottabase, he looked good, but not quite how I envisioned a Golden Daemon entry! After some careful thought, and some help from staff and friends, it was decided that the guy in gold would look good on a semi-scenic base, rising angel-like above a pile of fallen warriors. I invested in a a box of standard Assault Marines, as the legs were in suitably "stretched out" poses, and set about making a new base.
Parts were added to the basic kit from the Chaos Space Marine troop sprue, which my brother had lying around. I decided to have one Blood Angel assault marine with combat shield and power sword, and three Black Legion marines, one normal (or as normal as Chaos gets...), one Khorne Bezerker, and one Plague Marine; the last two had nothing to do with Virus' CSM army at all. Honest. :)
Once the various models were positioned, I set about painting them. The Blood Angel followed parts of the White dwarf guide for painting the Space Hulk terminators, which turned out very nicely. The Black Legion armour was mostly black, with edge highlights of Fenris Grey and then Shadow Grey, before two heavy washes of Badab Black. The hardest part was the metal sections; I realised quickly that the whole thing needed to be non-metallic! The gun metal was easy enough; I just exaggerated the shade used in White Dwarf's silver technique.
The brass, however, was a different animal. I started out, in the end, with a roughly 50/50 mix of Snakebite Leather and Blazing Orange. This was highlighted by adding increasing amounts of Bleached Bone, followed by Skull White for the final highlight. The shad was created by adding increasing amounts of Dark Flesh to the original mix; final shades were 50/50 Dark Flesh and Chaos Black. Some careful freehand was added to the Blood Angel's combat shield, and the base was ready to go!
The Sanguinor was carefully removed from his original base, before being pinned directly through one of the marines on the base. Any damaged paintwork was retouched, and the base was painted Astronomicon Grey. The plinth the model is standing on was found on e-bay for a decent price, and was painted to look like marble; I'll do an article on how to acheive that soon.
Here are some pictures of the finished result... enjoy, and let us know what you think! I'll post the results of the Golden Daemon some time next week.
~MyBlueOblivion
