Legio Astorum Knight

Greetings to you all! First, sorry for the long absence but circumstances have not been favourable as I have mentioned before. The up side however is that the one model I have gotten (totally a word) finished is huge.

This guy is one of Dreamforge miniature's 15mm scale Leviathan Crusaders. Now considering this thing is meant to be in scale to blokes only a centimetre and a half tall it is enormous! Allow me to bring in all 28mm of Miss Funnymoney to demonstrate:

Dayum that's large. In our case he is standing in for a 28mm scale Imperial Knight. The poor old knights have been rather forgotten in the modern Imperium. They are smaller, one man titans attached to the Legio Titanicus maniples as scouts and trailblazers working with the Warhound scout titans. I've always thought they were nifty and so was delighted when one of my clients wanted a pair of them painting! There are also a brace of Warhounds to go with these two, god alone knows how I'll photograph those, this bad boy barely fit in my light box!

All the Legio forces that I am painting are from the same Titan Legion, the Legio Astorum or Warp Runners to use their vernacular title. As a result a nice deep blue was the order of the day. I first started by drybrushing the whole darned thing steel. Frankly there was so much metal on display it would have made sense to almost undercoat in metallics! Next a couple of coats of Kantor Blue were applied over all of the knight's armour plates. Kantor Blue is a bit of a disapointment - base paint wise - as it's coverage is really not all it could be. Ho hum. Alaitoc Blue and Hoeth Blue drybrushes followed to give the overall shade and highlight tones on the model. Now the detailing could begin.

First up was heraldry, the Legio Astorum use a black hole/star motief. Now I do possess an airbrush that is ideal for this sort of fading out work but quite frankly I am still very much a beginner with it and wouldn't dare go near client models with something that I am comparatively unskilled with! As a result I figured out a means of getting that fading glow by drybrushing white in ever increasing circles and ever decreasing pressure. Adding the starburst lines - making damn sure to make it a 12 point star so as not to wind up unwittingly converting the poor thing to chaos - in white and a black disc finished it off. The white is cleaner in reality, the strong blue tones showed through under the harsh light. Really must get some diffusers made. A bunch of transfers were cribbed from various sheets and added across the model to give some character.

Next came adding brass and oil to the pistons, my usual oil mix of brown ink and gloss varnish coming through like a good un. The yellow and white heraldry was marked out with masking tape and painted and the flames were just freehand.

I thought some kill markings on the main gun would help the tough look, figure these are notable machine kills rather than the run-of-the-mill infantry support. Finally I broke out the weathering powders and sponge and chipped, dinged and dirtied up the knight. I'm finally getting the measure of powders, might have to do a tutorial in the near future.

Anyhow, that's it for this post. Around me the chaos of packing up Chez Mulder continues. PVP will be one of the last things that I box up so there should be some more updates before October's move. Until then folks.

TTFN