Back From the Abyss

Well then.  It's been a while.  But, after 2.5 months off I am back, refreshed and motivated.  In my defense, at least one of those months was spent learning how to be a father after my wife gave birth to our first child in December.  Good news- I've learned it all.  Nothing but smooth sailing for the next 18 years now.  Back me up on this, dads.  So now I am back with the itch to paint, but what to paint?  My wandering eye has moved off of fantasy and back onto 40K, so I've picked up my Blood Angels again.  I believe at this point I am contractually obligated to inform you that I started Blood Angels BEFORE the new codex came out.  And I also started them before the rumor of the codex even came out, so I'm a real BA player, whatever that means.

So what got me motivated again?  Well, my buds Chris and Justin informed me that our local GW store is holding a single-model painting contest: purchase any model in the month of January and have it painted by the end of the month.  There are no other rules, which does strike me as somewhat odd in some respects.  Our pal Sean is painting Azhag the Slaughterer, and it seems to me that it would be hard to compare that to Chris's puny, pitiful Prince Althran model if you were having to judge.  Irregardless, this seemed like a good time to pick up my favorite model of all time- Astorath the Grim.  Opinions seem to be kind of mixed on him as a model, either you love him or you hate him.  Well, I love him.  No idea what he is like on the table, but then I don't know what half of my army is like on the table either.  I'm not exactly a dedicated general.  On to painting.

I started by priming the model black and then basecoating all of the red parts with scab red.  I did this in several thin layers.  The basecoat was followed by a layering of a 50/50 mix of scab red and blood red.  Astorath's armor is quite a pain to paint.  Essentially you want to wetbrush or overbrush the ridges (like drybrushing but with more paint on the brush).  The trick I have found is to touch your brush to a paper towel to drain off quite a bit of the paint from the bristles before giving it a go.  If you have too much paint on your brush it will come out too quickly and pool between the ridges.  You can see in this picture a few places where that happened to me.

I hate looking at pictures of my models, all I can ever see is imperfections that I swear did not exist before I took the picture.  When you are doing the ridges just make sure you take it nice and slow.  Approach it like you are doing a line highlight with just the edge of your brush and you can generally sweep across 3-4 ridges at a time that way.  Just avoid the temptation to start moving too quickly, thats how you can end up with too much paint.  Anyway that is all for now, I've got to do a further highlight of blood red, blazing orange, and vomit brown on the red parts and then move on to all the other bits.  I'll have more pictures as I progress, and possibly some of Chris's and Justin's models if they send them to me.  Here are a couple more Astorath pictures as I leave.

Brandon