Crusader body done

So it is time for the last post of the year and it will be about the Crusader. I did get the Gaunt's ghosts box for Christmas from the wifey but since I built some custom bases for them I have not had time to paint anything. I also have been working a bit on Opus, taking the Dremel to some parts, but these are not yet put back together so there is nothing to show.

So instead of showing half done parts I will show a half done knight. Well it is done as far as it is built but it is still lacking its weapons. These needs to be built first and I am struggling a bit with finishing them. One main reason I did this project with the Crusader and his sergeants was that I wanted to try out some weathering techniques that I previously only done on small models. I wanted to see if these would hold up on a large scale model.

So what have I done. Well instead of painting the model as usual and applying the weathering and shipping over the base paint I did it the other way around. I started out with painting the armour panels in my standard rusted metal scheme. 

Once done I used a bone white colour and stippled it on to the model using a brush half full of paint. This will give the effect of only partial cover of paint as if it has mostly shipped/worn away revealing the underlaying metal, and since the metal was painted before it as a nice coloration to it that is hard to achieve if it is applied over the base paint. The bone white areas were given a light drybrush to give it some shades. Some of the drybrushing will go over the metal and give it a slightly bone-ish colour which works quite well in the next step.

Once the base colours are done, the metal and the white, I added some free hand patterns to the panels, taking care to only paint on the white. This actually is easier than painting on a solid background since the pattern is broken up it is not as critical to get it perfect. I added some light stippling of bone to the red to give it a more broken up texture than what I managed while painting in the patterns. Once that was done I did some standard sponge shipping to added some minor wear to the paint, don't know if this is really necessary though. Once I was happy with all this I used some watered down orange ink to colour the edges of the paint so that it looks like rust add the edges. Here it turned out that the over colourisation from the white drybrush helped to pick up and shade the orange rust effect.

Overall I think the technique works also on this scale, and I might actually prefer the look compared to the traditional way, at least if I am going for heavily worn look.

Once all the panels were done they were attached to the knight. Shoulder armour are still lose as I need to fit the arms before locking them in. Now I just need to sort the weapons out and get this finished. 

But I might take a detour and paint some Ghosts first.

Update, Opus and Crusader

 These last weeks have been full of work and other commitments so I have not had that much time to work on the hobby stuff. That being said I still have made some progress.

For the crusader I decided that I did not really need to finish the build before painting so I sprayed the legs, torso and most of the armour (which I need to re do since I forgot battle scaring) and started out on the legs. I am doing rusted metal again! I thought I would make it more of black and silver metal but I ended up with a brownish metal any way. It is just the base paint so far I I need to go back and add details both on pistons, cables etc but also on the rust. I am pretty happy with how the stance turned out. I did have an idea of making the toes grip more around the chimera by heating the plastic and bending it into shape. That did not work out as I intended, and to save the model I had to stop and work with what I had. This meant that the feet are not attached properly to be bottom of the legs, but are at an angle that would normally have been taken up by the ankel (and I did not like the idea of cutting up the legs to correct for this). But I do not think it is bad enough to bee seen. The toes also do not connect properly with the tank but this is not seen from a distance. I hope that the lower leg armour will hide a lot of this. I need to get me some Cerastus Knights to see if the legs are better on these.

I have also been working a bit on Opus. It is slow going as there is so much to do that it becomes daunting. I have mostly been working on the upper bow section. This was probably one of the first sections I worked on an I tried to use some car body filler to fill gaps etc. This did not work out so well and it needs to be corrected. The geometry of the hull part is also quite odd so there was a lot of things to fix up and hide. 

This is one of the more heavily armed sections of the hull, featuring two Vulcan Megabolters, six twin linked heavy bolter turrets, six lascannon turrets, four stormbolters, a dual hurrican bolter arrays, two twin linked assault cannons and two Interceptor quad guns. Most of these needed some custom setup to be attached to the hull which is also taking time.

All in all I am very happy with how it is coming along and I am almost at a point with this section that I can let it rest and move on to the next.