Thursday 11 October 2012

'nids part 60 / Terrain is everything - Tyranid Aegis Defence Line Pt7

One thing I learned through the tediousness of painting these things is do something that tricks your mind into what you are doing. So for instance I would plan to paint plates but then after I'd done two I'd then switch to doing the red planet basing - say adding the Badab Black wash. that way having been bored with the first task I broke it up with the second only to find that when I planned to complete the second task parts of it were already done and therefore it went quicker and became less boring.


Each panel was taking 15 minutes to do the highlights with 12 in all that was 3 hours. But sitting down knowing I could handle 45-60mins at most was both hard and daunting. Its great to have those figures in your head but it can put you right off. The advantage was that I could find 15 mins from somewhere and just do a single panel but setting aside an evening was just awful to contemplate - hence the diversion tactics.


One way to speed things up was by using a cocktail stick for all the dot. Cutting it in half meant I had a point and a large flat circle which actually made some dots way bigger than I normally do but these are larger pieces of Chitin than I normally do.


What amazes me is the reservations I had about achieving the same finish because they were too denim seems to have been premature, once again I refer you to the most important rule of painting. I thinkeven without the next set of highlights most of the Turquoise covers any discrepancies and the mixed tones add depth and variety. Simply he lighter colour makes the darker colour 'appear' darker, it's pretty much an optical illusion.


The kicker for all this is that in doing the red planet basing I also have to do the bone white fragments which meant one of the other diversions from the monotonous Chitin was the backs of the panels. So once again these things start to come together all at once.


I also tried some Mechrite Red on the alien tentacle vines to see if that would make them stand out a bit more.


The backs are pretty much done, no secondary bonewhite highlights I think, just a few highlights on the alien tentacle vines to pick it out from the base a bit more.


Once again the quad gun in context with the defence line.


Next up more highlights, another 15-20 mins per panel - oh joy!


3 comments:

  1. The whole thing is great looking. If I was to play you in a game you would win by default because I would be spending to much time admiring your work and not enough time thinking out my moves.

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  2. That's what I'd like to see. Where do I place my order? :)

    By the way, you got a link from Fritz, in case you didn't know:
    http://www.fritz40k.com/2012/10/xeno-aegis-defense-line-options.html

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  3. Yeah, I caught that. I had quite a large spike of visitors through that and http://lootandgames.blogspot.co.uk on the same day. It's amazing how one repost can do that. i always try to link to stuff I like, perhaps I should do it more...

    Everyone should check out http://warhammer39999.wordpress.com/ and http://plasticcrack.blogspot.co.uk/ ;) They're cool.

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