Slapping The Quickshade On

My first week at work didn't feature much painting, alas.  After two weeks off work, in which I've fallen into bad habits of sleeping in and going to bed late, getting back to a 06:15 alarm has proven.... challenging.  However, today my girlfriend was out in town and I set myself aside some time to paint.  Stick 4od on in the background and let's get this Primarch back on the road!





First up, I tidied up the base of the figure, to get all the lines as good as they can.  (I never was good at crayoning inside the lines, either.)  This included tidying up the eyes of the Iron Hands marine.

Looking a bit more presentable than before.  The skulls are quite bright white but the shading will bring them down to bone colour.

Then, the same thing happened to Fulgrim himself.  I reattached the sword & pommel which are now pinned - I fit the smallest bit I could to my pin vice and drilled a hole into the hand and both accessories.  A little leg of staple and a dod of Milliput was added into the hole and hopefully it'll be a bit more secure.

This is the first time I've ever pinned a figure.  Let's hope my jury-rig holds.

You'll see I stuck with flat purple in the end.  Metallic just seemed overkill when he was already fairly attention-grabbing.  I also realised I'd missed skulls on his own base, so I painted them as the display base ones - off-white.

Now, it's time to shade.  When I was younger I found inks totally useless - I always got as far as a crisp base coat and I could get drybrushing to work, but when I put any ink or wash on the whole thing would just turn into a much.  When I restarted I experimented with very thinned paint to make my own washes, and has some success - I'd go about adding water to the palette until the point where, when painting on my palette, the paint didn't stick flat but started quickly contracting inwards.  I found with these improvised washes I had more control over colour.

Since then I've started picking up store-bought washes again and while it still tends to dirty up the figures I use them on, I can get some good looks.  Here's Fulgrim after his bath:

The metal has come out quite nice.... but the skin is way darker than I want.

All purple and pink on the figure was washed with Druchii Violet, which was a real gem in the new GW paint range for me.  Purple shades alright with just black, but shading pink was really tricky without making it go brown - the purple, however, keeps the base colour nicely.  

As you can see, the skulls have indeed gone a more boney colour once the Quickshade goes on.

The rest of the figure is painted in Army Painter Quickshade.  I use the dropper bottles rather than dipping, because I want to avoid getting any on the pink.  The bulk of the figure not already washed gets the Dark Tone, especially the brown and the metal.  Soft Tone is used on some lighter items like the hair, flesh and bones.

Next step is going to be to highlight, and to try and sort out those areas which have gone a bit too dark.  This is principally Fulgrim's face, which isn't quite what I had in mind - it might need a coat of Elf Flesh over the high points it to bring it back up.  Fulgrim's armour has lots of detail so he'll need a fair bit of drybrushing, as will the very knarly rock.