A friend of mine has been building a really cool themed space marine list for some time now. This year he decided to go all out and bring this army to the next level. I volunteered to try my hand at making an iron man for his list.
The New fast red paint job details: (Enter the new Cidital base coat paint color: Mephiston Red)
Now the proccess is quite simple:
1) Prime black (dupicolor sandable black primer) is my preferred poison
2) Paint Mephiston Red
3) Black wash
4) Bring up with classic cidital blood red
5) Blood Red and Burnt Orange 50:50 mix for final highlights and reflections.
6) if needed add a tiny bit of white or bone white to get one more level, not too much (don't want it to go pink on you)
Red has classicly been a harder than normal color to get right cause to do it well required either a lot of patients and thin coats of paint or priming white. Blood red is a glazing paint, that means that is is semi-transparent the color below it shows through. If you really want it to cover well it took lots of coats. Often this meant that your red looked gloppy or lumpy, (cause you didn't thin your paint enough, cause you were trying to cover with red) The real trick to this new method is a red that covers in 1+ coats. ( what do I mean by 1+?) One coat should cover black primer, plus a little touch up where the paint was thin or black still peaking out a little.
1) In this case we want to prime black cause we don't want to have to do all the clean up work involved with priming white.
2) Put on a nice clean, thin, coat of Mephiston red over the areas that we want red. Add minor toughups where it needs it after dry.
3) Next step is letting the black wash do its magic. Put the wash on thin, let it dry all the way, if it needs to be darker in the deep shadows, hit it again with a thin wash. Letting those deep shadows create a high level of contrast is part of what make this work so well.
4) The part of blood red paint that worked against us before is now going to be its most usful quality. Paint it on in thin coats over the wash, just in the areas that are not in shadow. Since it glazes so well, this will bring it slowly towards the end red we are looking for. Even a completely dry blend addition of blood red over the wash will make it seem like a wet blend transition.
5) Finally I did some very subtle highlighting using the Blood Red mixed 50:50 with Burnt Orange. This was only used on the rims of the shoulder-pads and other key places to really make those edges sharp.
6) I did not do step 6 on this model, as I ran out of time, but if I did I would have used is very sparingly on only a few key places.
Hope this was useful
(Special thanks to Josh for the initial Mephiston Red Tip)
The sculpting of iron man
Bits inventory:
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Fantasy Chaos Head (horns and skulls removed)
Grey Knight Terminator Torso (cleaned up)
Normal Terminator legs (stance adjusted)
(Right Arm) Storm bolter arm, with fist from GK terminator pole weapon
(Left Arm) terminator storm shield arm (w/o shield) Open hand from Terminator GK sprew
Assembled in a classic pose
Added green stuff to fill in gaps from re-posing
Sculpted the chest and head
Added abs and final touchups
Sanded down mold lines that you can still see in this pic
<pic at top>
Added an armorcast bit for the energy pulse "small muzzle flash"
Painted in mostly a classic color scheme
Wanted to do more of a gold than tan, but ran out of experimentation time and just had to finish for tournament.
