Tim (Dezartfox over at The Vanus Temple) and myself had a real hoot getting into the best army nominations and gaming together. So we have started planning our next doubles force. On my behalf I'll be entering with Ultramarines.... I know I know... But I've always enjoyed the crisp cleanliness of them and I want to turn my hand and messing these guys up with some weathering etc etc.
The plan is to go for a desert theme again as it will help the blue "pop" against the base, I have a handful of conversions / mini dioramas planned for my side of the force.
The theme is going to be of two forces joined together to combat the xenos threat of nids.
So onto test colours. I really want to achieve a muted blue, that still manages eye catching, so I've gone into the Vallejo model colour range and also some model air as I'll be aiming to get these guys painted with the airbrush as much as possible. Here are the colours I've selected so far to trial:
VMC Dark Blue, VMC Ultramarine Blue, VMC Royal Blue, VMC Andrea Blue, VMC Deep Sky Blue, VMA French Blue and VMALight Sea Blue.
(VMC = Vallejo Model Colour, VMA = Vallejo Model Air)
So my first port of call was to lay down some Primer. I use grey primer these days from the Vallejo Model Air range. Once the primer was dried I layed a solid base colour down using the airbrush and VMA French Blue. This is a really rich shade of blue, however it does have the "classic" cartoony look to it. Again once dried I then airbrushed a highlight using the VMA Light Sea Blue. This was the result.
For me this was just a tad to "baby blue"... however it may work, once weathered. Though I didn't bother finding out. I reapplied the base colour and this time added a highlight using a 50:50 mix of VMA French Blue and VMA Light Sea Blue. Much better! from here I went a hit an edge highlight on using pure VMA LIght Sea Blue... Big mistake, it ended up looking messy:
It's almost there, but the extra highlight was rather sloppily applied for an edge highlight and looked more of a bad line highlight. However, not one to consider myself a quiter I decided to see what it would look like with a little more colour added - This is messy, so please don't judge... I just wanted to test!
The white is the worst messy bit, but I decided I wasn't going to continue adding another 10 layers to get it smooth whenI could see the colours were just looking too cartoon.
back to the drawing board and to trial some of the other shades I have!
