The flow of process
You may have noticed that I've taken the brush back onto my Ordu of Jagahtai, the White Scars in the past couple of weeks. And man, my passion for the heresy is back full-throttle with the progress I've had with these bikes thus far. It's never so much about painting a single model as army painting that honestly scares me and makes me nervous or anxious about painting them. I can't tell you how many entries I have in my "Black Book" about colour schemes, and tweaking different methods and recipes. No other legion or project has given me such feelings of joy and fear, leading to constant project paralysis. But that's the nature of this project and something I have to respect and work through which I'm doing right now.
Currently, I've made some changes to the painting process that is making this much more time-efficient. The drawing and cutting of small strips of tamiya masking tape is really helping to make the red markings on the jetbikes. By overlaying the template and lightly tracing it with an HP pencil, I can easily go in with a brush and paint the patterns of the sawtooth and circles. Removing a lot of the sketching and concentration of getting even spacing. Cutting each pattern to be done in over half the time. I've also added light scratches within the red to create some textured noise as well as ivory chips to make some edges worn. Covering a few small errors made and throughout the rest to create some interest as well. This leads into the white and a change in the scheme in that I'll be adding a little bit of weathering into the white with chipping, but nothing heavy with deep grime or any sort of oil wash. I still very much want to keep the scheme clean and a creative concept change of the off-white/green. Initially this was more done in the idea of atmosphere and rebounding of the green base. Instead I've changed this perspective in that the armour is of a very light Jade, something I've referenced from my Majong blocks. This new perspective was very helpful and key to putting my mind more at ease when I think about painting warmachines and tanks, units which are typically not mounted on any base. Simplifying the white in this manner and not fussing about enamel washes on the white which honestly is a pain in the ass to get right is the best move I've made. Leading back and giving the strong volume work and details with the red elements is where most of the attention really goes into, and for an army thats going to be good enough.
I'll be dropping the NMM army wide, as I experimented with the Rotor Cannon MK3 marines I did a little white back, and just filling the guns etc with metallics. A surprisingly good paint I picked up to greatly speed up the blacking out process in preparation for metallics is Citadels Contrast Black Legion. I never thought prior that getting a black contrast paint would be any much different from just VMC black and thinned down a bit, but boy was I wrong. This paint is making its way into all my army painting methods when it calls for large sections to be blacked out prior to metallics etc. It just covers really really well and flows into all the recesses too, something that the jetbikes have a surprising amount of annoying gaps around the engine housing.
So there we are with the decals finished, the surface is back to a matt finish and ready to paint the engines and weapons. In the next unit, I think I should be a lot more comfortable with taking out the camera to record the process with a future video tutorial on the painting of my White Scars. I know I've done several tutorials, with the jetbike being one of my first, as well as a bit more recent one on a single legionaire. But I think an updated one will be due, and also to fit in a vehicle as well to really round out the full army painting experience. It was at this moment I just needed time to play with the scheme and be free to test things out, all without the added preparation and presures of filming. I hope my words and these updated pictures are filling in what I've been feeling and going through getting this legion project to finally see some gaming; something I've been missing.
-Bb