Weapons of a warmaster
In the conclusion of the Warmaster, Horus Ascended you may be wondering where is the tutorial for both his Claw & Mace. Clearly, those are 2 key aspects of his model and it’s sure to be very important! Well to cover those aspects I’ve left them to be dealt with on this blog post as when painting, it was very clear that it would be a LOT of the same repetitive techniques in application from Part 2: Armour of Darkness Tutorial. Well not a lot of the same, but quite literally the same workflow! Instead What I would do is provide more final pictures for reference and go over where we should be focusing the key aspects of each weapon.
The claw or better known as The Talon of Horus (his favourite weapon) has two distinct surfaces both of which are the same as his Black armour followed by the Gold Trim. The position of lights is going to be the first order of business and that which will drive the entire look of the claw in relevance to the rest of the model. During the process, it’s important to stick the claw onto the model with some blu tac or even a small brass pin, both of which I did use in the build assembly of the model. I then took a picture of a few angles with my phone to keep on my desk as a reference so that when I paint these elements separately, I can judge the light placement accordingly! The last thing you want to do is spend hours blending and highlighting, only to find out it is all in the wrong positions.
To make sure we all follow the lighting scheme and give the claw as a whole its maximum impact both in shine and in harmony with the rest of the lighting. We want to pick only a few key points where the light should gather. These gravitated towards the top half of the claw naturally. This is at the corner base of the wrist where the armour plate of the back of the hand overlaps the inner palm plate. The first knuckle of the pointer finger, and the curved apex of the thumb. Having all of the light gather at these points makes our highlights small and produces a maximum shine, essential for creating a shiny appearance. Watching how much we apply the size of our Pastel Yellow is critical and gives space for our shadows to separate it from the OSL to come later that is directly opposite from our light above. Remember that golden rule of OSL, where two opposite sources of light meet, we divide it with a shadow! As well this doesn't just apply to the gold nmm, following the black armour highlight we can see our highlights are gathering toward 2 of the 3 light points (the thumb doesn’t apply for black armour). Even the tips of the fingers of the gold arent at the max highlight value of pure Pastel Yellow, those are just a step down which may not look like much, as well as the edge highlights. But they make all the difference in our balance of light.
“Remember that golden rule of OSL, where two opposite sources of light meet, we divide it with a shadow!”
The Mace, or World Breaker. Gifted from The Emperor himself to Horus as a badge of Warmaster follows the same theory as the claw, just with more emphasis on the geometric hard shapes of the weapon. Being a cylindrical weapon will have us divide the light into 2 halves. The upper 180-degree half will be of our key light (neutral) that is shared with the rest of the model and we can illustrate the gold as normal. The bottom half which is facing downward to the base will be lit with our OSL. Besides the parent shape being a cylinder which our light is mapped to, the other shapes that are attached to our parent are a lot of 4 sided pyramids, 6 rectangles spaced evenly making the head of the mace fanned out in a radial pattern, and at the head of the mace a 6 sided pyramid spike.
The trick to painting these geometric hard angle shapes with flat surfaces of each plane is to make sure that each surface has a clear distinct value associated according to its orientation. Just like looking at a Cube, we have 3 faces of a cube visible to us (unless we are looking directed dead centre towards a single face and that would make it appear only a flat square), and each face would have a different value associated to it depending on where the light is. 1 would be the brightest, followed by the other 2 faces being darker giving the illustration of it being a 3-dimensional object. With all the Spikes, it’s easy to separate each flat surface plane and assign it a value as well as a colour. Looking at the 2 large sets closest to his hand, we can see that the most upward-facing is of the highest value and is in our regular gold palette. The downward-facing inner surface is our dark brown ochre since this is facing away from the upward light, but also inward. Then the down away plane that’s facing towards the ground then gets the magenta value. The 6 rectangles make the head of the mace follow the same rules. The outward flat plan which we see another set of 2 pyramid spikes gets the brightest value. Then turning inward at 90 degrees it gets much darker illustrating less surface area for light to reflect. We do however see a bright inward edge highlight running down the crevasse between the 2 most upward rectangles as this part is open upward and with light running down the length of the cylinder. It can sound confusing, but by studying the reference photographs and looking at each plane and the values I’ve illustrated. The light puzzle is revealed and hopefully starts to make more sense with each pass.
Keep pushing yourself, study hard and paint even harder! Thank you for joining me on this journey of creating Horus Ascended and I look forward to more Primarchs and soon some Golden Daemon Painting entires!
Much love,
Bb