Fallen Imperial Eagle Terrain

In pushing through to furnish new terrain for my tabletop, I pulled out the fallen Imperial eagle from the Honored Imperium terrain set. Last year I posted an article about painting the space marine statue.  You can see it again at the end of this post along with the new eagle.

The fallen eagle is fairly simple to paint.  I based the whole thing black, then used my Iwata Eclipse airbrush to paint almost the whole thing.  I started with a Vallejo German grey, then a lighter grey to highlight the stone/plasticrete eagle.  The airbrush is great for this.  By carefully pulsing the trigger and varying the distance to the model, it was a simple matter to lighted the raised portions and add some color variations to some of the large flat surfaces.

 

With the greys done, I used two colors of Vallejo browns for the earthy parts.  This included spraying brown carefully on the bits of earth scattered across the grey eagle itself.  here again, the airbrush really helped blend this in and make it convincing with now hard paint lines. 

Once the base coating and early highlights were added, I washed the whole thing with GW Nuln Oil.  After letting this dry, I selectively washed the earth portions with GW Agrax Earthshade. I carefully ashed just the cracks and lines in the stonework of the eagle to give a dirty implression to the stone work without adding too much brown overall.

With all of that dry, I then dry brushed a Vallejo bone color over the earth parts, applying a heavy coat over the skulls so they pop a bit more from the earth.  A dry brush of a light grey then went over all the sharp parts of the fallen eagle itself.  This was then sealed with Testors Master Series Lusterless Flat Lacquer.  This is the best flat coat out there, buy some and use it! :)

 

Above, we have the eagle on one of my new mats from gamemat.eu. These "mouse pad" material mats are the best thing I've seen for a simple, portable game surface. Below, I added the bronze space marine statue I painted last year to see how they look together on the table.

 

I love the way these pieces have come out. My next plan is to experiment with weathering powders in preparation to using powders on my armor and other models.  These simple pieces seem like a good place to try the new powder techniques. 

I also started another building based on the pieces I had left over from the Sector Imperialis box set combined with the sprues form the Imperial Knight Renegade box set. I'll post about that when I have more to show there.  All painted, this will give me a richly appointed 4x6 game board when combined with the game mats.  I look forward to actually gaming on them soon! 

But really, my 40k experience is more about the hobby and less about the playing these days...

Cheers and Happy Gaming!