Wednesday 2 October 2013

Corsair Warlocks

Hi folks, today we present the lowest rung of the psychic might of the Eldar Corsairs, a pair of pirate Warlocks:



These pair served as the test models for the farseers still to come. I needed to find a way to make the grey and red corsair scheme work on the more obviously craftworld models. Initially I had the grey of the robes roughly the same as the armour colour but this just looked dreadful. For some reason it just homogenised into one grey mass that looked for all the world like unpainted plastic. Darkening the robes and putting a very light edge highlight on the armour differentiated the areas and actually turned them into painted models, phew!


Balancing the red across the models was mostly achieved with the gemstones, rather than just use the turquoise from the vehicles I used some red ones too. That allowed the colour to be spread subtly across the model rather than in a stripe at head height. The Void Dragon scheme has red hands and faceplate you see, so with both hands up the red would just have been in a horizontal strip. I initially thought to paint the entire singing spear in wraithbone but this seemed to be a bit too much. Talking of wraithbone...


The step by step above runs left to right, first a couple of coats of Ceramite White establishes the basecoat for the bone areas. Note the difference between the first and second images. It is worth making the effort to put the second coat on. Every layer after this is very weak colour and will not cover properly without this solid basecoat. Next we use two layers of Secret Weapon Miniatures' Parchment wash. I picked this up along with both his blacks as I was on my constant quest to find Badab Black again. Sad to say, Secret Weapon aren't it. They stain too much. But, this very property makes it perfect for the wraithbone and I dare say for Deathwing too. Once they've dried off Seraphim Sepia defines the shadoes. Normally I just run the wash into the recesses of the weaponry but this time I had a mishap and so the whole thing got coated. It's fine, just needs more layers of highlight is all. The final image shows the models after a couple of highlights of white mixed with the SWM Parchment are applied. This crisps up the colour and makes for a nice artificial bone look.


While on the subject of weaponry, the warlock's are a good example of an older model - 20 years or so - which has stood the test of time beautifully save for one element. The blades. Old school sculpting and casting led to a requirement for blades of weapons to be more like clubs with a 1-2mm thick edge. This warlock still looks awesome thanks to the genius of one Jes Goodwin but the blade does age it terribly. Easy enough to fix though. This is one of the occasions where a metal file is not the tool for the job. Use a flexible emery board (bit of sandpaper on card) with a medium grain and sand it down moving from the centre to the edge. Essentially you sharpen the blade as if it were real. Keep checking the edges to make sure you are getting a consistant thickness - especially these complex curving edges of the eldar swords. Keep checking the central spine of the blade too as otherwise you can end up making it look bendy. The transformation from left to right took about ten minutes. Well worth it to update this classic model.


Once painted you can see how nice and crisp the esges of the sword look now. Before I go I should mention gemstones, I'm trying a new method for these and it seems to be working. Paint the basecoat and then glaze it with black ink. This creates the dark areas really nicely and then you just work up the highlights as normal. Seems to be doing the job! Anyway, with the experimentation over it is onwards and upwards with these lads. Until next time.

TTFN.

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