Last post I mentioned I was working on a bigger model than usual and was expecting wanting to take breaks from it and paint smaller things as I went. In the end I surprised myself and kept at it with relatively few distractions along the way!
So here we have it, probably one of the largest models I’ve painted, a Knight titan! He’s nominally from the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but I’ve done him up to support a new project: Iron Warriors for the Age of Darkness/Horus Heresy game (Warhammer 30,000?). I’ll go more in depth about Iron Warriors next time I post something about them, but they are useful context for this model so here’s the short version.
I hadn’t been very interested in the 1st edition of the Horus Heresy rules as they came out when I had a bit of a hobby slump (and moved overseas for a bit, which required more portable hobbies!), but the latest starter set for the 2nd edition that came out a few months ago has me really interested.
Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marines were my main army during the 4th to 6th edition Warhammer 40,000 period, and I have a relatively large amount of them done up (Which I think I’ll document for the blog when I start painting actual Iron Warriors for this project!). When I decided to paint up some marines for Age of Darkness, I was split between a few legions, but Iron Warriors won out. One thing I wanted to do however was make them distinct from their Warhammer 40,000 counterparts I’d painted up in the past and make them relatively clean looking (my old army is quite rusty!).
Now on to this model! I’ve had this knight kit in a box for a fair few years now (since it came out I think) waiting for an army to attach it to. I wanted it to make sense alongside the army so that meant a couple of things: it needed to fit in with the army colour-wise (or at least not clash horribly!) and make sense in the background. I did some reading on the knight houses that fought alongside the Iron Warriors during the period, and came across House Caesarean who were alongside the Iron Warriors on Tallarn (More on that later!). The house fit the bill rather nicely colour-wise too, being black and yellow! A quick google later and I’d found a reference image of what a knight from the house is supposed to look like and I was off to the races.
The colour scheme is rather straightforward, split black and yellow right down the middle. The reference had the weapons coloured the opposite of whatever side they were on but I decided to make both yellow to make them stand out. The painting process tested my masking abilities, both to delineate the colours in a nice straight line (I used tamiya thin (5mm across) masking tape), and to mask the armour plates to spray the rest of the model silver (there I tried out masking putty). It all worked rather well, and I’m pretty happy with the order I did things in.
The yellow started with an all over coat of Vallejo Air Beasty Brown, followed by a spray of white ink in areas I wanted lighter, with a final all over spray of GW Nazdreg Yellow Contrast. That was a bit of an experiment, but I really like the results and I’ll definitely use the recipe in other places. The black was simply an all over coat of Vallejo Black, with a highlight of Vallejo Dark Sea Blue placed in a similar manner to the white for the yellow. The metallic areas were all painted with Vallejo Metal Colour Magnesium, a really nice dark metal colour. I picked out a few details in black, red, white, and bronze to break up the mass of metal. The model then got an all over coat of diluted oil paint (a mix of dark brown and dark grey) that was then cleaned off of the raised areas using a makeup sponge. That did a bit of work on the coloured areas, but really makes a big difference on the metallic areas, adds a bit colour and a lot of nice transitions from light to shadow. I did a few highlights on the metallics using Scale 75 Black Metal and some chipping on the “painted” areas using Vallejo Air Silver.
I added some transfers here and there, but GW only do House Caesarean transfers for the Adeptus Titanicus game, and therefore are way out of scale for this. That meant hand painting the insignia, which was a bit scary, but worked out ok in the end I think.
The banner hanging between the legs is done using a mix of transfers and freehand painting elements.
This leads us to the basing of the model, which some of those more familiar with Warhammer 40,000 may have recognised as being the whole left side of a Baneblade kit. Rest easy, I didn’t sacrifice a whole kit just to make a base, I’ve had this Baneblade side section on sprue for many many years, the result of some giveaway/raffle my local GW store ran back then, presumably the good parts of a returned kit that had issues. Needless to say I had a lot of fun making it looked wrecked, although getting those long straight track sections to look believably hinged took a bit of messing around. I also spent a significant amount of time getting the side skirts looking like they were hanging loose rather than awkwardly straight, which required a fair amount of cutting and re-sculpting of hinges. I wouldn’t want to do that too often, but it was a lot of fun as a one off! If you look properly into the exposed cavity of the tracks it looks very much like a chopped up plastic kit rather than a believable set of wrecked tracks, but I’m hoping the effect is sold well enough from other angles!
Painting wise there is nothing really special about the base, I used the old military modelling hairspray technique to get the chipped metal look, then mashed on some rust coloured paint on all the exposed metal sections. Topped off with a large amount of pigment powders to get a suitably dusty desert look.
I made this base to look like what I assume the battle on Tallarn looks like, hence the desert setting and the wrecked tank (for those not in the know, Tallarn is effectively a planet-wide giant tank battle during the period). While I was building/painting this model I listened to the Tallarn audiobook as inspiration and one of the details that stood out to me was the descriptions of the effects of the air on vehicles (The Iron Warriors did some rather nasty things to Tallarn’s atmosphere, effectively rendering the surface of the planet inhabitable). In the book the paint on every tank that fights on the surface is effectively stripped/discoloured by the toxic air. This makes the relatively pristine paint job on the knight and my want to paint the accompanying Iron Warriors as relatively cleanly not really fit the setting too well. I’ll have a think about what I want to do there, luckily wrecked tanks and desert settings abound and it should be relatively easy to re-host the army lore-wise!
Anyway, quite a bit longer post than usual! I had a lot of fun painting this model as you might be able to tell from my enthusiasm, and am jumping right into another project when I already have countless others on the go, clearly everything is going along as might be expected!
Lair of the Lagomorph 