WIP: Armiger Warglaives from House Taranis - Part 2

When working on Imperial Knights of any stripe, I leave off the armor panels and take on the skeleton first.  The tall metal skeletons on these models are a great place to work on dry brushing skills, and there's no need to get fussy with details...at least at first.  For the Warglaives, I'm starting with a heavy dry brush of Vallejo Gun Metal.  I don't want to obliterate the black under coat, but I do want to leave an impression of metal, not black paint.

Next, a normal dry brush of Vallejo Oily Steel was applied.  By normal, I was more careful to remove excess paint, and I paid a bit more attention to hitting the high points and not being too messy with it.  Of course, it is still dry brushing so some mess is expected.    Mostly I did my best to avoid any long brush streaks that might take away form the edge highlighting that you get from dry brushing.  Last up, some Vallejo Steel was applied from the top down, just to the bits that should catch light.  I was very careful to only brush form the top down following the natural angle of light as if it was shining down on the model on a sunny day.  I'm not trying to create a specific light source here, just highlighting with the brighter silver those spots that should catch the most light. 

Here is a look at the results.

I will come back with some GW Nuln Oil at a later stage once all the colors are blocked in.  Next up on the skeleton will be to paint on some of the metal details, such as bronze and gold for some parts and a brighter silver for the pistons.  I wasn't too fussy about getting silver on the reds.  I'll go back and clean that up in one pass later.  I'm not so neat that I won't make other mistakes there so I've learned to just take it in stride and make a clean up pass part of my process.

Next up, I hit up the edging on the armor panels with Vallejo Steel.  With the skeleton basically done form a dry brushing perspective, the armor can be attached once the edging is done.  I'll leave the shoulders off for a bit since they interfere with attaching the arms.  After applying the steel, the color on the plates stands out better.  I'll do some clean up and then give everything a Nuln Oil shade.  but for now, here's what the plates looks like.

A bit stark and lifeless now, but the shade and some edge highlights will really polish them up nicely.  Now that all the hard to reach places are base coated and the skeleton is in prime shape, it was time to attach the leg armor. I took the picture with the legs laying down to afford a better view of the various panels. Messy with the mistakes from painting the trim, but still coming along nicely!

That's it for now.  More work on the Body of this knight will appear in part three.

Cheers and Happy Gaming!