Blindwater Painting tutorial - feat. Rask

I had a request a while back from one of my favourite readers for a painting article. I had to wait until I actually had something new to paint before making it, but here it is.

I must admit that I am far from the best technical painter around, and my Gators certainly do not demonstrate the peak of my technical painting abilities due to some aesthetic decisions I made when starting the faction, namely that I would go for a very dark, muddy and dirty look on every model. As such, detail doesn't really stand out under standard lighting and in no way looks crisp, but it looks good anyway.

One of the most valuable things I learned in secondary school was the importance of colour selection. I learned this in a computer art class, where the teacher took the time to tell me that my colour selection sucked, made me run to the art department to pick up colour theory books, and took 10 minutes to demonstrate that good colour choices can have a huge impact on a work of art. So a big thanks to my computer art teacher from Form 6/Year 12 (1) for giving me the knowledge needed to paint nice cohesive armies.

The army as a whole uses only earthy base colours - dark olive green, bone white and earthy brown. For shading, I primarily use Devlan Mud and Badab Black GW washes. Washes works great for that messy dirty gritty look, despite being a bit of a cop-out technique for a lot of people :)

I also have two 'theme' colours for my Gator army - bright red and turquoise blue. I use these two very sparingly on most models in the army to give some cohesion and spice up the models a bit. Red is easy to throw in since carnivorous Gatormans spill a lot of blood, and the turquoise blue colour is found mixed in the basing colours if nowhere else.

The Process

Essentially, my painting is pretty mechanical and follows a step-by-step process. This is probably why some have referred to it as 'soulless':

1. Undercoat
2. Base Coats
3. Shade/Ink/Wash
4. Highlights
5. Details

That's about it. Here is an explanation with pictures (mistakes and all!):

Step 0 - Model Preparation

This is the stage where you take the model out of the box, check you have all the pieces, hypothesize about how they all fit together and then clean them. I use a really old toothbrush and some warm soapy water and scrub every piece. This is to clean off any metal dust or oils that have gathered on the model as a result of the molding or packaging or transport processes. I find that this step makes a big difference when you get to gluing the model together and it will stick together a lot better.

After scrubbing everything, I'll look over the model under a bright light with a hobby knife and a few different modelling files and remove any flash and mold lines. After that, I assemble it, sometimes leaving a piece or two off to be painted separately and attached later.

Step 1 - Undercoat

I currently undercoat everything by hand - lighter areas like skin or beige cloth would get a white undercoat, metallics and darker colours get a black base coat. This is one reason I don't really like plastic models - I just undercoat with standard paint, which works fine on metal models but ends up streaky on plastic/resin models which require a proper gritty primer undercoat to look best.

For Gators, I undercoat everything in black for the aforementioned dark look. This gives even the brighter colours (like Blood Red and Bone White) I use a darker tone.

Step 2 - Base Coats

I base coat the entire model - basically at this stage it is good enough to be played in a hardcore format and looks decent from across the table. This also allows me to review the overall colour scheme and make any changes before getting to detail work.

For Rask, I decided to paint him like an albino (2), which means he would be predominantly white. In my colour scheme, that means a lot of bone white. I chose to paint his fins bright red to make him stick out, and his bone armor a dark grey to contrast with his lighter skin. His bracelets and loin cloth were painted brown, and the gun and spears painted with dark metallics (silver and bronze).

Step 3 - Shade/Ink/Wash

After the base coats are done, I apply the shading.  In the past I've usually just mixed darker layers of the base coat and watered it down a bit for shading, which looks much cleaner than a wash (worked great on Skorne armor for example), but for Gators I took the easy route of GW washes.

On Rask, I took a bit of extra care with the Devlan Mud wash, making sure that it accumulated in places I wanted darker and was evenly applied otherwise, especially to the scales on his back. I used Badad Black for the brown and grey sections of the model. I also apply a mix of brown and black inks to the metallic pieces - unlike watered-down paint, inks won't fog up the sheen of metallic paints.

Step 4 -Highlights

Highlighting is pretty simple - mix the base coat with a lighter colour (usually some shade of beige or white), and apply to the raised sections and edges. The aim is to make the detail stand out and give some impression of lighting. This requires a fine detail brush, slightly watered-down paint, and a lot of patience.

For Rask, the important details where the scales on this back, his face and the muscular parts of his arms and legs. I used a half drybrush technique to pick these out while maintaining a messy look. The red of the fins were approached in the same way. The bone armor was highlighted in two stages, the second lighter than the first and only on the edges. The metallics were highlighted with a bright silver, giving them a scuffed look. The browns were highlighted with a mix of brown and bone white.

Step 5 - Final Details

This is where you give the model a once-over check, fix up any mistakes, paint eyes (which I don't usually do on models), finish the base, apply seal or gloss, and paint the front arcs.


And that's it. The entire painting process for a well-detailed model takes about 90-150 mins , 2 or 3 extreme metal albums worth of time.

(1) He also taught me that Macs are the best for computer design and art, and PCs are better are everything else.
(2) Fantasy fiction has shown me that albinos all have superpowers relative to their pigmented counterparts.