WIP: Blades of Vengeance Primaris Librarian - Part 2

More progress on the Primaris Librarian I've been poking away at for my Blades of Vengeance project.  From my prior post, the blue armor was...well..too blue.  The clear choice was to use some GW Drakenhof Nightshade, but I chose to experiment with the GW contrast paints instead and picked up a pot of GW Ultramarines Blue along with Contrast Medium for thinning things down.

Before contrast paint

The original shading was done with thinned down GW Nuln Oil...which...worked...but perhaps I messed things up by painting back over some surfaces to clean up staining and add highlights.  But it is super blue. I liked the pop, but it wasn't what I was really looking for.  So I thinned some Ultramarines Blue contrast paint and repainted all of the blue armor with it.

The contrast paint definitely toned things down a bit. I found the paint hard to work with in terms of spot painting just the armor on this model.  It goes on thick, even thinned, and I likely should have thinned it even more.

The staining is most noticeable on the back pack, I think. I might have gloss coated everything first. I know this new paint is meant to go over light colors, so maybe painting it over the existing blue armor wasn't the best call. But it did do the job in terms of toning down the bright blue, making it more palatable for me.

I went back in with the original blue to highlight sharp edges, but tried very hard to avoid repainting any of the smooth surfaces so I wouldn't end up back with the bright blue look I was running from.  The next thing was to look at the sword.  I had been considering a purple power sword effect for the Librarian's force sword instead of the standard blue effect I use.

As I thought about this, I realized that the purple was going to be my warp effect, and therefor the Librarian's eyes and outstretched had were going to need some purple OSL/glowing effect to make this clear and sell the warp psyker look.

So I chose to emulate the GW approach for Custodes power swords, only with purples instead of blues.  I can't say I nailed it, but I got to a point that matched my mind's eye view of what this should look like.  I used a mix of white and light purple with thin shades of GW Druchii Violet to transition the eyes and left gauntlet to a warp charged state.

While working on the purples, I decided the robes needed some layers, so I painted the under robe white fr some contrast against the other darker colors of the model. I also began highlighting the bone areas and the blue to get a sense of the overall look of the final model.

Overall, this model is going in the right direction.  I look forward to completing it before jumping back in the dark green and bone of the rest of the chapter. The Librarian is definitely going to pop out among the rest of his brothers on the table. I'm very happy with the purple. This is the very first time that I've used purple as a psker effect and I think it's going to stick.

Check back later for more on the Blades of Vengeance.  There will be Lieutenants!  And a Captain.

Cheers and Happy Gaming!