Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Space Hulk - 2nd Edition - Ultramarines Terminators

Fully equipped with knowledge, wisdom and understanding of my previous project, I set out to paint another squad of five terminators. I wanted to paint a squad of Ultramarines, just like how they're depicted in the Space Hulk 2nd ed. mission book.

A member of the Oldhammer Forum was kind enough to help me out with the sticker banner from the 90's. Thank you Muntantdale, I'll think of you everytime I look at them.

I also bought the transfers from ebay which in the end didn't work out. The shoulder and knie pads were simple to round for the transfers to stick to. They ended up all folded and horrible. No wonder the Eavy Metal painters painted them on.

I wanted to use the airbrush as much as possible and try-out some masking techniques. I'll try to summarise some of the airbrush work below.

This is what the miniatures looked like after cleaning, assembly and base coating them white. You can see I left the arms unassembled for easy painting.


I applied a blue base color with the airbrush. Unlike painting by hand, the airbrush applies a very thin layer of paint. Make sure all parts have equal coverage by inspecting them afterwards.

Strange color blue
For the highlights I used the "above" direction, so light is coming from above at an angle of about 45 degrees from all directions. I keep the angle, but turn the miniature around while spraying paint with quick "flyby" sprays. Sometimes I adjust the angle, some parts just don't get enough paint otherwise or I only spray over those parts that need a little extra. I also set the spraygun to a certain maximum limit. This helps me not to spray too much paint at once.

I try not to spray directly onto the miniature, but instead start spraying from the outside and move over the miniature. This prevents accidental splatters from getting onto the miniature and gives me slightly better control of the amount of paint.

1st highlight
I added two more highlights and worked my way up from blue to white and applied an dark blue oil wash afterwards, which I sealed with Testors Dull coat.

After 3rd highlight and oil wash
Did the same with the arms
I used the masking tape technique to paint the heads. With the new terminator models it would have been easier the leave them unassembled. Arbal over at Coloured Dust has written a nice article about Masking Techniques. I really want to try-out the Maskol technique one day. Too bad he wrote the article after I had finished the models.

All wrapped up and ready to be painted
The results after carefully removing the tape
I corrected some of the lines, applied several grey washes on the white faces and a red wash on the red face and base painted the other necessary parts black.

Ready for manual painting
I taped the arms, sprayed the arms white and afterwards red, did a gradient on the power sword and base painted other necessary parts black.

Taped up tight
Red really needs a white base color
The results
The last airbrush task, the checkered stripes on the power fists. This one was a bit of an experiment. I wasn't quite sure if it would work. I printed the checkered stripes on paper, placed it over a piece of tape, cut out the stripes and placed them on the power firsts. It was a bit of puzzle to get them lined out correctly. Luckily, my first attempt was spot on. The stripes are 30 pixels in width and printed with a resolution of 72 DPI. Again, I sprayed first with white and afterwards with yellow, before removing the tape. The pictures below show the raw results after removing the tape. Taping took about 1 hour, the paint 10 minutes.

Taped up and base coated white
The initial results after removing the tape
Afterwards I realise I've sprayed a bit too much paint, some of the stripes have a bit of a border. The results could have been better with less paint applied.

I corrected the lines and highlighted the yellow and black on the power fists. Painted the silver parts with Boltgun Metal and washed two times with Diluted Umber Wash (1:2) mixed with Fleshtone Shade Wash (1:1). Skulls painted with Bleached Bone and washed three times with Diluted Sepia Shade Wash (1:3).

Highlights need to be applied on the skulls and red parts
After painting the details manually, I ended up with this. Maybe there's still one last airbrush task left once I've figured out how to make good templates for the emblems.


5 comments:

  1. Beautiful job on these. Thanks for sharing your techniques. I'll especially have to try some of my umber wash on metal for orcs and such. I'm still to scared to try an airbrush.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Sean, glad to be of help. Washes are man's best friend as far as I'm concerned.

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  2. Very nice stage by stage post. The maskol is really great I think especillay when you make rust effects on a surface that you mask and then paint it normally so that when you remove the mask it reveals the rust beneath. One thing though, maskol is nearly invisible when dry and can prove hard to remove in recesses.
    Anyway, these termies like their BA counterpart look very good

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, I tried some Liquid Mask from Vallejo (70.523) which is the Vallejo equivalent of maskol. It has a blue color and is easily removed.

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  3. They look really great.

    I remember wanting that boxed set when it was released but who had that kind of money back then as a kid? :-)

    ReplyDelete

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