Step-By-Step: Blood Ravens Devastator

Forgive me, Blogger, for it has been a couple of weeks since my last update. This is mostly because of Mass Effect 3, if I'm being totally honest, but I've also been building and painting orks with my eldest son, which has been pretty good fun.

On a more serious - serious? i did just use that word? argh! - front, I've been taking stage-by-stage photos of a Devastator Marine as I worked through him. Partly this is for my own reference, and partly in the hope that people passing by this blog will find it interesting. I don't pretend to have any great answers on how to paint a Blood Raven "look", or indeed anything else, but this is how I do it, with my thoughts on colour placement and markings. Any comments or critiques are always welcome, and the pictures are under the cut.

First off, build and black basecoat. Black Basecoat is your friend, unless you are painting something very light indeed. Black Basecoat from a spray can is your bestest friend, although I tend to basecoat my fingers when using him. 

Mechendrite Red Foundation. As you can probably tell there is an element of getting it all over the model so all the cracks are covered. 

Scab Red. It may be slightly unnecessary to layer this with the Mech Red, but you get a really solid, deep red finish with is what underlays what is going to be progressively thinner and lighter covers. This is also the "shadow" colour for much of the model. 

Blood Red. My Blood Red is thinned down and spread in two-to-three layers (basically as many as you need to get the colour right) across the model. This naturally builds up the colour near the ridges and peaks of the figure and leaves the recesses and centres of larger surfaces are darker, slightly faded colour. 

Wash! I use Thraka Green straight into the joints and borders to avoid contaminating the red surface i've build up. Its just to deepen the shadows without altering the colour of the model, which a black wash would do. Afterwards I've just dry-brused the figure blood-red (again) to lift out the edges a bit more. 

Finally, some not-red. This is basically blocking out the rest of the model - Brown for the non-boltgun metalwork and shoulders, black on the gun case and shouder rims, and adeptus battlegrey for the tubes, grips and under-armour layers. 

So now we're basially flitting around the model picking up details. The ammo belt is Dwarf Bronze, washed with Sepia. The shoulders and skulls are Bleached Bone. The tubes and grips have been washed a couple of times with Badab Black to make them "almost" black yet differentiate them the "hard" black gun casing. The chest eagle is black with a Battlegrey highlight, and the eyes are Goblin Green with a Thraka Green wash, and then another small Gobin Green central highlight. 

And a Highlighting pass. Chainmail onto the ammo-belt, Skull White onto the shoulders and Blazing Orange onto the red armour sections. I try to highlight "top down", which basically means holding the minature so you're looking straight down onto it and painting your highlight colour onto what you can see. Its pretty basic, as zenithal high-lighting goes, but can still be quite effective. 

And this is the posing-with-all-the-markings-on shot.  I do like the idea that Blood Ravens cover their armour in little litanies and prayers, so they all get busy shoulders. 

And finally, this is all the paints that got used in the painting of this model. Which feels like a hell of a lot, now i look at it! 

Thanks for reading!