Sunday 7 October 2018

What can you learn from 1994 Knowledge? (3) Well "old stuff" is still "good stuff" [smiley emoticon]

My retro painting experience continues. It is an exercise in 'sticking to the script' and keeping faith with the method, even if it is counter intuitive to the normal way in which I paint. However that is "why" I am doing it, to unlearn mal-rules or find new (better) ways of painting! Here is when the Space Marines take on their distinctive armour "shading" comes to the fore (see below, "first highlight" is basic Vallejo Game Colour Ultra Marine [the base colour was 50% Imperial Blue and 50% Ultramarine Blue] - Note: the Space Marines to the far back right are three  previously completed examples from Space Crusade, all nice with decals applied - they seem a brighter blue as I used Vallejo Colour Magic Blue as a final highlight, not making the Ultra Marines Blue paler with a touch of white):


I like the end result, but more importantly discover that I can get good results by putting on far less paint, watering down the paint (quite critical as it turns out) and "being brave" and letting the layers be distinctive. My attempts at multi-layering just meant that the paint built too quick up on the model. The surface of the model became uneven because of the "thick paint" not being uniform - watering down was being sadly missed here. The same batch receive the final "white + Ultramarine Blue" second highlight layer. The should pads were also given Yellow Company colours (see below, reading my Space Marine Codex this reads in 1994 as the Second Company - in 2018 this yellow seems to have been replaced with a sexier gold look):


The good news with the "scripted method" is that the amount of painting (and paint) gets successively less. I seems to be painting the figure almost fully "three times: Shade, Base and Highlight. With teh Base, Shade and First and Second Highlights, this perversely only seems to be like painting teh figure twice. It seems to be as third as fast but not that particularly "fast in real time" as I have been 'on and off' these in taking me about a fortnight.

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