As Usual, Duncan is right

I'm so strapped for painting time during the week that I've hauled my setup to work to paint over lunch break. 

Earlier in the week I did a second model with a deep-but-not-as-deep-as-before Agrax wash over Mechanicum Standard Grey, but inverted the color on the shoulder pads. You can see there's a good improvement in top-down readability by bringing out a block of blue, but the overall model is just really dark. Even with a highlight layer of a softer blue tone, I don't think this is going to look good on a tabletop. As much as I like the gritty feel of the full Agrax wash, I think it needs to be over a lighter color if I'm going to go that route.

The reality of my situation as a dad who doesn't get a lot of time to paint and who actually wants to play the game sometime soon means that I can't realistically edge highlight the entire army. At the same time I don't really like the heavy-drybrush look on Marines. What's a gamer to do?

I spent a day or two wondering what the next step should be when Duncan himself came to the rescue with a painting plan I could get behind.

Away we go! Another test model, this time with some Balthasar Gold on the chest emblem, which I've been thinking about using as a way to designate higher-ranking Marines. This 1.5 "wetbrush" layers of Dawnstone (layer version) not particularly carefully applied over MSG, with a careful Agrax wash in the appropriate recessed areas.

This is ... good. The grey isn't so overwhelmingly drab, and the gold definitely goes bronze with a layer of Agrax. I'm not sure that it's a good replacement for the yellow on the chest emblem, but it'd be great to add more color to character models.

Here it is up against the other two recent test models I've done. While the other models look a little sharper on the contrast, I haven't done a drybrush layer and none of the gunmetal colors are inked. I think that the gloss layer also helps the photography a lot and getting a transparent layer over the whole model will work wonders.

This color is a little closer to where I started out, but feels decidedly less Accidentally Space Wolves. The shade difference is tangible in a way that I'm a fan of.

 A better comparison of why the heavy Agrax wash doesn't work very well is more plainly visible when photographed against a darker (albeit reflective) surface. The detail isn't visible - it's just a bunch of dark ink over dark armor.

Optimism returns! Let's finish this model out next week and see what it looks like.

More Color Exploration

We last left off with a freshly Agrax-washed test model. The grey is substantial, but very dark. This looks more like a metal model that has been primed then paint-stripped. 

The goal today (last Wednesday actually) is to see what this looks like after the rest of the details have been painted in. I used Kantor Blue on the pauldron trim and one kneepad, Leadbelcher and Nuln Oil on the joints, cabling, and plasma rifle, as well as some green on the plasma rifle and red on the eyes. I went with the "just do a line on the center of the eyes" tactic and this is the first one that's come out in a way I like in a very long time. There's no additional highlighting here, so the pauldrons have a little more room to further pop.

From the front, this is satisfactory. Doing the kneepad is enough color to make the model look painted, and if I'd finished the purity seal and put a brighter green on the plasma rifle it'd be decent. It's possible I could do the belt in blue, but most models are going to have that covered by a bolter so it's not relevant. Additionally not every marine has the kneecaps to paint, so most models will end up with less color than this.

The biggest problem is that from the top, it's the same problem. This isn't a great shot, but it gives you an idea of how much color is lost just from top-down lighting instead of head-on lighting. The chest pauldron is really the only visible color on the model, and that's covered by the bolter in many cases. The shot on the left is with an unfinished backpack is incomplete, but as I was fiddling in my bitz box to figure out which one fell off, and apparently Past Me did something smart and tried a variant color. If the center of the backpack is blue as it is on the model on the right, the color improves considerably from a top-down perspective.

Needs the metallic color on the sides, so let's plug that in real quick and take a look from the top.

I'm liking this a lot for Tactical marines, but I think there are other models where this breaks down. Terminators in particular don't have a great place to put this kind of accent color, and neither do most vehicles.

I think both problems may be solved by inverting the pauldron colors. I'm going to try Kantor Blue on the surface of the pauldron rather than the trim, and possibly using a bronze or copper color on the pauldron trim instead of grey. Having a larger block of the model be blue gives me more options when it comes to larger models to have a handful of large accent blocks instead of trying to restrict it to trim only.  More test models this weekend!

So about the colors I want

Sometimes the answer is staring you right in the face and you don't even realize it.

Granite Fists 101, because the Internet is the place to store everything

In mid 2015 my life was coming down off the worst rollercoaster ride I'd been on. My wife and I traveled to Europe to shake off the proverbial hangover and I spent the entire trip reading 40K books and listening to podcasts after more than a decade away from the hobby. Over the following months I dug out what I'd brought along - lots of unassembled and unpainted models, and very dry paint. Though I had a few productive Saturdays for the most part I didn't make any hobby progress, but as the months have gone on I've re-acclimated myself just in time for the unveiling of 8th edition. This blog is intended mostly to be a record of my hobby progress for myself, since I can't remember a h*ckin thing if it isn't written down these days.

The main problem I've been struggling with is trying to fix my paint scheme. After my initial disastrous Blood Angels army (let's talk about paints in the winter in South Dakota) I'd done about 2000 points of a DIY Space Marines chapter in the late 90s with Games Workshop paints, and they've turned over pigments twice since then. I was never particularly happy with the original grey color ever since someone said "Hey, nice Space Wolves" so I took this as an opportunity to start a little more fresh.

It's toaster quality because that's as good as digital cameras were in like, 2002.

Behold: the Granite Fists. Check out those sweet second edition Rhinos, kids. These were never the best quality of paint jobs, but there are a lot of hours of love in that picture. It was an army I was very proud of at the time, and though I only got a handful of games in this was one of the few genuinely creative outlets I had at the time. I think this was the only time the army was ever fielded in fully painted format - maybe one other convention.

This image is a decent encapsulation of the intended paint scheme. Codex Grey over a black undercoat with uh.. Regal Blue? as the primary contrast color, lots of Boltgun Metal, Bad Moon Yellow on the chest emblem, with Blood Red, Chaos Black, and Bleached Bone as accent colors and some deep brown as a base. At least it wasn't goblin green.

Not a one of those colors exists in the modern Games Workshop line. The first stop was Vallejo paints, as they have close analogs to all the original colors. A few models of shaking off the rust yielded some decent results that weren't far off from what I'd originally had. I went several months with no notable progress (and no photos), which I blame on my infant son and my wife's work being a madhouse. Early 2017 was rough on personal time.

During the many months between buying the paints and actually getting something painted, I discovered the world had passed my shitty painting strategy by. Games Workshop had reinvented its paint line in an amazing way with all the new types of paints that obviated the need for mixing, and especially the glosses. I'm not a skilled enough painter to reliably reproduce a mix so I never properly highlighted my original miniatures, and got good enough at drybrushing to leave dark recesses. Turns out, I didn't have to do any of that nonsense and could just turn to Agrax Earthshade. Sweet, sweet Agrax Earthshade.

Agrax: neat-ish, messy, none

This shows the same basecoat of grey with 3 variations: a neat Agrax shade, a messy Agrax shade (the first attempt I made), and no shade at all. The difference is phenomenal. I'd spent so many hours trying to avoid any paint going in the recesses of my models, and this stuff made it so I could just slap on thin coats and never worry about it. There's no question that the tedium of painting the models so carefully was a big part of what I never enjoyed about that phase, and this new tech in my arsenal made completing a large army actually feasible in my mind. Some amount of iteration later, and we've got a good test model. 

Those recesses tho

To me this felt like a faithful adaptation of the original Granite Fists scheme, and I was pretty happy. Right up until I found an old Techmarine I had painted in the original set.

Definitely not the same grey.

Butts. So much for color match.

It was at this point that I said hell with it. I'd found a store nearby that actually has people who play Warhammer, and they carried GW paints. It was time to go back to square one. I mentally resigned myself to being okay with repainting my entire army -- if this wasn't a color match, nothing would be. On top of that since I'd never highlighted or washed my original army, odds were good that I would've had to go back over every single model and, optimistically, do just those two things. And also re-base them. In reality even the best models I'd painted then are likely to look like poo compared to what I'd be able to do now with the improved GW paints and a lot more patience.

So, as they say, in to the breach. I picked up some more GW paints to try to capture what I'd always had in my head as the Granite Fists colors, and started with the darkest grey: Mechanicus Standard. I also picked up Averland Sunset because I was unable to use the Vallejo colors to achieve a good yellow on the chest emblem without like ten coats.

OG 90s, Vallejo, and GW 2017 Base colors

The model on the right is the dead simple foundation that goes all in on the GW colors. Mechanicus Standard Grey base, Leadblecher with some Nuln Oil in the creases, a single coat of Averland Sunset on the chest emblem, and Kantor Blue on the pauldrons. Any non-Nuln areas were washed with Agrax Earthshade. While I'm not a fan of Kantor Blue on its own, there's a lot of possiblity to improve that with a layer and/or wash.

Sidebar, I have to shout this out before moving on: holy smokes is Averland Sunset a great color. This was one of the worst parts of the original model since building up yellow layers is traditionally miserable, and it looks amazing with nothing more than one coat and an Agrax gloss.

The next step was to try some highlights. As you might have noticed, I didn't highlight before using Agrax which is a mistake. I went to another model and did Mechanicus Standard again, but this time I used a liberal drybrushing of Stormfang to attempt to give the model more texture. You can see my bad attempt at a post-wash highlight against a highlight before wash, and the difference is stark.

I was optimistic at this point that a heavy Agrax wash would be all I would need for the model to come out well. I'm not 100% sure that the results are what I want.

While there's no question the overall effect is striking, it's so drab that the miniature looks like it had been an older metal once been painted then stripped. What's under the shade is so dark that the shade's color ends up being very strong to the point where it appears to be more brown than black. At the advice of a coworker, I'm going to finish out more of the detail and see how it looks, but I strongly suspect I'll need an interstitial layer of grey between MSG to lighten the model up before Agraxing the crap out of it.

Alternatively, full Agrax shade may just be the wrong approach and I need to do a better job of layering and edge highlighting.

I'll say this: nobody is going to mistake a model of this gradient for a Space Wolf. More experimentation lies ahead.