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I wanted to paint my skull cannon, but I wanted to try a new metallic technique. I didn’t want to try that on the skull cannon, so I worked on this golem that I’d had no intention of adding to my Malifaux crew until a few weeks ago. >.>

Skin

He started Mithril Silver. I read an article talking about how to make metallic red, and they suggested Ogryn Flesh+Baal Red 1:1 – that made it looks like slightly red silver, and not good at all. So I did another layer of Baal Red. Which was still absolutely no good. Heavy Body Black to darken it. Then…Lamenter’s Yellow. This was still bad, because now I had a bright gold colour on him. I did the Baal Red again, which finally made the skin look roughly where it is in the photos.

I let it sit for a day or two, before deciding to travel down a road I’d been trying to get to, but hadn’t had the courage yet – highlight and shading with glazes of a colour entirely different from the base. Mr. Wappel talks about this regularly, but I’ve never done it. If you look at some of his models, he has purple and green and yellow and so forth all on the same patch of Nurgling skin. It doesn’t look patchy, it looks like mottled skin. I was studying a painting of trees in one of the local Vancity branches and remembered that a technique used to shade forests is to use purple. Using dark green to shade a green forest is visually uninteresting – at the end, you just had a big patch of different levels of green. But if you use yellows and purples, you can highlight and shade and create visual interest.

I tried to Google Image search for what I’m talking about, but instead here’s a recent Wappel Nurgle Daemon and some random canvas painting that showed what I mean.

So I took Guilliman Blue, watered it down a bit and applied a few layers to the undersides of the Rail Golem skin. I did the same kind of layers as I would if I were painting using opaque pigments – paint a little less on each layer. I painted into the creases in between muscles and in the arm pit, and on any surface that was on the bottom of the model. Then I took Lamenter’s Yellow and some water and painted a bit on the top of the surface. This made the top a little more of that golden colour I didn’t want, but since I only used a little bit, it was more of a highlight than actually changing the colour of the model.

Pipes

The pipes were similarly done. I think I used Boltgun Metal so I could start darker. I mixed Guilliman Blue and Bloodletter to create a purple glaze and applied in layers, along with straight Bloodletter to create the worn and used look that his pipes have.

This all inspired me to do a multi-post series on different ways to use these 2 colours, as well as Bloodletter. I haven’t even pulled the green, Waywatcher Green, out of my box. >.> You’ll get the next few articles shortly, but this may be interrupted by a GottaCon report, since I’m leaving for the Island in less than an hour!