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.

All Your Bases...

So I've been having more fun with powders, this time on the basing work I've done on my Terminators. I will probably stick up some long shots of the completed figures at some point, but my toy of the moment is definitely the weathering powders, and they are great on basing material. All my Blood Ravens have so far have been based on a sort of rocky, deserty gravel material, and the larger bases for the Terminators just meant a little more details. This time it's rocks and the odd hit of grass tufts, to give the effect of a marginal scrubland, and powders have been used to blend the rocks and the lower legs of the marines in to the surface.

Anyway, here they are:

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

One of the things I've been meaning to have a play with for a while is Weathering Powders. They come highly recommended by all sorts of people, and look like a fun and different way to achieve a "look" on a model. My chosen victim was the Leman Russ I got for xmas, which got a good lot of work done on it last weekend and then again on Wednesday night when i was in on my own.

It's important to note that this is really, really messy. I spread a lot of newspaper to do this own, but even so it went all over my hands, clothes and so on, so be warned! But lets let the pictures do the talking!

We started here - painting done and a bunch of normal scratch/dent weathering applied, as well as some wash to darken down the recesses in the tracks and around the hull plates.

Rust! Actually i think this is slightly over-applied on the tracks but it's a lovely effect overall. I think i was expecting to be able to spread it around more easily from the initial application site, but I quickly learned that i got effects from dabbing the brush around rather than using it like a "normal" paint application. 

And then a mix of soot and dark earth scattered around the place. I should probably do a sides-shot (though you can see the Chimera hull in the background) so show it's heavier around the base. I was expecting it to be heavier still, actually, hence the less-subtle-than-it-could-be scratches on the plow that i expected to be more heavily obfuscated.

that said, i've falled slightly in love with weathering powders - they're a ton of fun to apply, have a really nice effect and I'm off to try them on a couple of figures next...

Blood Raven Terminators: COMPLETED

It may look like I've knocked these guys out pretty quick, but I wish it were the case. I've been working on them alongside the Dread, Libby and Razorback since Christmas, with amount of red and cream effects I've painting across various sets allowing for a certain efficiency. But without further ado, here are my Blood Ravens 1st Company, 2nd Squad, Terminator Marines.

More after the cut. 

Blood Ravens, the story so far

So, I thought I'd do a  round up of all the Blood Raven stuff i've got painted up to date. It's been quite an interesting process (for me, anyway) both in terms of learning how to get the look i want, and in terms of developing painting techniques.

One of the big things that has plagued me has been "look" and iconography. I've seen some forum threads about the web get pretty headed when you talk about the correct markings and schemes for any Codex Chapter, but on the whole I've settled on using it as a guideline and ignoring it when it doesn't look right on a model - especially the matter of "company colours" which can lead to some very odd combinations. So really I've tried to settle on consistency over (alledged) accuracy. Mind you owning all the Dawn of War games has been a big help too!

Pics after the cut.

Blood Ravens Venerable Dreadnought COMPLETED

So, I continue to work through my Mariney Christmas splurge with polishing off the Venerable Dreadnought for  my growing Blood Raven army. This is actually the first "proper" dreadnought I've built, as my other one came from Black Reach, and as a kit it comes with a rather fab range of options and customisation, and I think I took longer on dithering on how to build him, than on actually building him. The base (like on the Librarian) is still just left blank until I can get some decent basing materials that are suitable for the larger base. Anyway, more pictures after the cut.

WiP: Blood Ravens Venerable Dreadnought

This isn't a Blood Ravens Specific Blog. Really, it's not. It's just...I've got really into painting them (and Marine figures in general) and I'm - quite - sick of painting things Red yet. So after finishing the Razorback and the Librarian, I turned to my next little project, a Venerable Dreadnought and a Terminator Squad. Madness.

I've spent a fair bit of time on the Dread, and have been taking the usual reference pics as I go, and this is the assembled status so far. The "Dawn of War" look for dreads is redder than I'm using, with the cream colour reserved for the engine bay, but I like the idea that Dreads try to mimic the Marine scheme a bit more closely (in deference to their "walking marine corpse" driver so I've gone for a variant that lets me have a large cream shoulder. I think it counterpoints the large Black-painted faceplates reasonably well. Pictures below the cut.