Summer of Painting - Dark Age C.O.R.E. Prep



Well, It's about damn time I finally put some paint on a model.

Since I started the challenge two weeks ago, I hadn't actually worked on anything until Wednesday night.  That has changed, obviously, as on Wednesday I finally went to work on my C.O.R.E. army for Dark Age. Rather than focus on one model at a time, I decided to get as much of the work that could be done to every model all done at once.


The first step, after they were all primed, was to do a basecoat of Exhaust Manifold from Vallejo metal color as a base for the model. This turned out to be something of a problem, as it happened that I hadn't cleaned out my airbrush since the last time I had used it, which was October of 2016. After about an hour or so of soaking and scrubbing, I finally got the damned thing cleaned so I could do the base coat that you see above. It's a very dark metallic, but it will help for shading when I do my Zenithil highlights later in the basecoat, and will also make the brighter metallics that layer on top of it pop some more.



 Next step was to do a few Zenithil highlights with various mixtures of Exhaust Manifold and Pale Burnt Metal. First 75% Exhaust Manifold and 25% Pale Burnt Metal, then 50/50, and and finally 25% Exhaust Manifold and 75% Pale Burnt Metal. I decreased the angle of which the Zenithil was applied with each new mixture, so that it would create an interesting highlight effect.

The final Zenithil highlight was done over a very narrow angle, and was done with 100% pale burnt metal. After that I did a recess wash with Nuln Oil, being sure to clean up as much of the wash that was on flat surfaces as possible, so as to not destroy the shine of the metaillics. 

I really cannot say enough about how much I love Vallejo's Metal Color line for airbrushes. They're not noxious, like their other metallic line for airbrushes (which would probably require a fume hood or to be used outdoors), and they work with the airbrush so easily. Aside from a little bit of Flow Improver, I can almost put them directly from the dropper bottle into the airbrush and go to work.



Finally I decided that this C.O.R.E. army was going to be my first attempt at OSL (Object Source Lighting). The units in the C.O.R.E. all have parts that tend to glow blue (in the studio images anyway), so I took the opportunity while my airbrush was set up to give them a bit of a wide glow with Caledor Sky from Citadel's Air line. While it might not look like much right now, once I have the sources of the glow (the crystals on lightbringer, the lights on the L-CSTs and RAPTR-7s, etc) It should really pop and make it seem like those sources are radiating light onto the rest of the model.

And that's really all I wanted to get done at this point. The other main source I could have done for all of them would have of course been the Bases. However, with all the other details and things I have to do on each model, doing the bases at this point would really just mean that I'd be cleaning them up again at the end.

So now I'm going to do work on each indivdual model (or pairs of models, in the case of the RAPTR-7s and the L-CSTs), and do individual posts for those as I work on them.

There might be a slight Age of Sigmar interruption before that, however, as my Saurus Oldblood has finally arrived, and I need him finished and painted up for a Tournament that I'll be playing in on July 16th.

--Jastrick

Comments