Journeyman Painting Log # 22

Spell or sword?  Why not both? 

Finished up the Blackfrost Shard yesterday.  Turns out they had as little left to do as I thought.  The most annoying part was the scabbards, which I had neglected during prior session and thus needed to be worked up from scratch.  Of course "annoying" is relative here as the scabbards only needed 4-5 layers, mostly with colors that I was working with anyway.  This is all a roundabout way of saying the BFS finished up both easy and quick.  This is a boon at any time, but especially with the Nova Open getting closer by the hour.

Sufficiently glowy.

While the most annoying bit may have been the scabbards, the title of most tedious was a close contest between rivets and runes.  Rivets are a known quantity to most any Warmahordes painter, and really this batch was not as bad as most jacks or full units are.  I had an idea for the runes before I started painting yesterday, but I quickly scaled it back.  The runes themselves were much harder to pick out visually (to see where to paint) than I expected.  This led to an extended period of simply defining the runes, which took about as long as I expected the whole process to take.  When I finally finished the first round of paint on the runes, I stopped to look at what I had wrought.  The runes pop off the background and even seemed to have a bit of glow.  This could be reflected light, inherent shinyness of the paint, or simple insanity.  Whatever the cause I liked how things looked as they stood, so instead of pouring more time into adding layers I left well enough alone.  In retrospect, perhaps a wash would have helped pick out the runes so they'd be easier to spot and paint.  Speaking of washes, I applied a Badad Black wash to the leaves (which I've long since realized are actually feathers, but I've been painting them as leaves for long enough that I can't change now) in the hopes that it would add some definition to the leaves, which it did.  I'm slightly amazed that I can improve my methods this far into the scheme.

Hand is still in progress.

I got started on the Angelius, but nothing more than a skin base.  The first Angelius was a bit disappointing, or more accurately the greenstuffing I did to it was less than hoped for.  For the second one I put in more time to smooth things out, which I thought went well, but as I started painting I saw that things were at best the same and quite possibly lumpier and bumpier than the first one.  At least Legion is characterized in part by lots of little barnacles and other blighty eruptions.  The plan now is to finish the Angel by Friday, at which point I will hopefully have made a decision about the direction my Hardcore list is going.  Then I want to paint a pair of Shredders and get started on Hardcore infantry over the weekend.  Ideally I'll have everything finished by Tuesday so I can try out the list at Huzzah before heading to the Open on Thursday, but that's mighty optimistic, though not unreasonable.

For now the humidity broke enough that I could varnish the BFS, which means it's time to stop blogging and start working again.