I enjoyed this piece immensely, despite the fact that it is an eldar! I may have to paint a few other eldar models now...
Anyhow what did I do and why?
First of all I removed those spiky bits between the blade and the shaft of his spear, only because I felt that they did nothing for the model and because the light points that would have been on the various spikes would have distracted an observers attention from the rest of the model.
After having done that and re-assembled the blade to the shaft I went for a white undercoat as I usually do.
I started with a turquoise and grey colour scheme that I ended up not being happy with, so I re sprayed an undercoat and decided to try something a bit more visually technical. I decided that the model would be red. Armour and clothing would be red, the other parts were given colours to better offset and contrast with the dominating red. The technical difficulty was to make the various parts quite distinguishable and obviously made of different materials despite the fact that they were all to be red. To do this I played with the various textures and with the colours used to highlight my red.
For example the cassock was highlighted with a cold flesh tone and Space Wolf Grey; the cloak was highlighted using only the cold flesh tone; and the armour was highlighted using only Space Wolf Grey. The shadings were all performed using VMC Deep Blue, and sometimes I would add a bit of Sotek Green or black. For the shading of the armour I used Andrea Shiny black, for the cloth I used Andrea Flat black.
The gems are all based in Sotek Green, shaded down using Andrea Shiny black (to help get that little glimmer of precious stones), then highlighted using Space Wolf Grey followed by white. A heavily diluted glaze of Sotek Green smoothened the layering process, and finally a diluted coat of gloss varnish was applied to give the gems their shine. I diluted the varnish quite a bit because I only wanted the suggestion of a shine, I have found that a strong gloss on gems on a model painted using NMM does not look right: the gems look too real when compared to the metal effect, and the metal looks fake compared to the gems -> the result would have been a technical failure to create a coherent piece. In this case I am quite happy with the overall feel of the piece. [note to self: I must write a tutorial on painting gems]
The base was built up using metal wires to give a structure to the debris. I then superglued bricks and broken shards of dried milliput to these wires. Finally various flockings were applied to camouflage what could still be seen of the wires. I added a few bits of cogged wheels and plastic profiled elements such as the "I" beam and some tubing. I checked everything before adding some flocking here and there to finish off. Finally the base was undercoated in black and then, when that was dry, I applied a simple zenithal highlight by spraying a short burst of white undercoat directly from above. This is the kind of basing the Studio can teach you to do!
There you have it! A few final pictures to show him off!
Here is a link to the Work In Progress album of this piece:
Keep on enjoying all your hobby projects!
