Exodus is in position
Exodus is in Position
In this rendition of Exodus, I wanted to take some of the lighting principles from Horus Ascended and start to apply this to the smaller frame of a Space Marine. By driving focus on a few key elements that would help drive the narrative of the painting to illustrate this lethal assassin. The main elements I wanted to place would be the helmet/head of the character, and rather than the gun itself (which I often find painting guns is quite boring), I would place emphasis on the bullet being loaded. Driving home the "One shot, one kill" motif. I've had some friends even comment that it looks like some depleted uranium round etc. And if that comes into your imagination with the painting, then I'm all for it. Rather it was just using the idea of light, temperature and saturation which would drive the focal points.
The overall colour of his armour is almost identical to that of the Alpha Legion Praetor I painted last year for my friend Josh (@omegonsedge). But rather than push the saturation of the colours in the piece to make a very vibrant model. I would use a different brush techniques to create a much more desaturated look. To add from the last update in the process of painting him, I went ahead and took the light turquoise blue and glazed a bit more saturation just to the upper areas of the armour surrounding the immediate illumination just to give a bit more colour. This also enhances the spotlight effect as colour is at its strongest mainly in the Mid-tone area sandwiched between shadow and the highlights. With the Praetor using more solid blocking of layers and bridge blending between them. Exodus's armour using a lot of thinner layers almost like you're doing continuous glazing with a strong emphasis on brush stroke and moving the puddle of paint towards the light. This approach helps create a much more desaturated layering progression which helps control the values. A future experiment would be to try and re-create this effect with blocking and would require me to mix "actual" values on the palette before applying. Where with Exodus, these glazes utilize the majority of the previous layers to slowly build things and it's up to my judgement on when to stop reaching the levels I want. On a related note, it's just fun to switch my mode of painting as doing the same thing for each project can get kinda boring. Different models even within the same legion can be illustrated differently and especially characters gives you that opportunity to break out of the army mold.
Thank you for checking out this relatively quick model (13hrs total painting time) and your interest in my thoughts on it. Where there isn't a video tutorial on him featured, I would suggest you watch the Praetor video and also compare that to Exodus and look into spotting the differences and similarities in the finish. I'll be working on more Alpha Legion in the near future, and I can expand on this method with possibly Alpharious himself. As well as doing a more tabletop ready format on the XXth legion.
