Dark Angels Assault Intercessors WIP - Part 1

 

Greetings!  

It's time to paint 40K Dark Angels.  I have committed to completing the marines from the Indomitus box set by the end of 2020. And I'm off to a good start.  I took on the largest squad to get the grunt work out of the way early.  My recipe is in the tabs above, but this time I thought I'd experiment with a zenith highlight of Vallejo Surface Primer Gray sprayed straight down on top of the models, over an initial Surface Primer Black primer coat.

From the top, this is looking pretty bright.  I tried to keep things light with good coverage only on the high points, and things getting fuzzy at the edges to promote a nice fade in the the green base coat later.

From the front, you can better see the contrast with the black primer more visible and the gray primer showing like snow on the high points. This was pretty easy to do and didn't add all that much time to priming, other than the extra time to clean and paint swap in the airbrush. In the future, I may toy with a second white coat even lighter over the gray focused to only the brightest/highest points.

Next I laid down the GW Caliban Green over the primer.  I use 1:3 mix of Vallejo Flow Improver to paint here to add some translucence to the green.  In the past, I feel the base color just covers over the zenith highlights without really showing any contrast or highlight.  Here, there is definitely a lighter tone where the gray primer is.

  

The green-over-black is definitely darker than the green-over-gray.  So I'll consider this experiment a win. Click through to the larger images to see the difference more clearly.  In the image below I've added pointers to those areas that came out lighter, as expected, due to the gray primer.

Anyway, it was an interesting experiment.  When I moved to shading the armor with GW Nuln Oil, I thinned that too with Lahmian medium so it wouldn't be as heavy handed.  I painted this over all of the armor, except the shoulder pads.  With the shoulder pads, I just painted the Nuln Oil over the trim and along the inside edges of the trim. I didn't want to darken the surface of the pads, so I could keep the most shine there, in terms of the lighter green tone.  

 In the group shot above, I think this shows pretty clearly.  I was able to get good definition in the armor, while maintaining some additional brightness on the shoulders, and even the helmets, back packs, and other portions that were lighter due to the zenith highlights in the primer coat. 

With the base armor painted, I moved on to paint in the chest eagles and the red weapon casings.  These will be shaded and highlighted in later stages. I'm pretty happy with the progress, given only one brush painting session so far.  I did spend two separate airbrushing sessions managing the primer and base coat. But I fit those in to my regular weekend days with very little impact on my family schedule.

Next time I'll have most of the details painted in and shaded I expect.  Things at this point will move fairly quickly with the bulk of the coverage out of the way. Hopefully my experiment in Zenith highlighting with primer coats will prove useful to someone.  It's nothing new, but I haven't really put much time into it.  I tried once with either my Deathwatch or 30K Dark Angels with black armor, and I really didn't see that it did anything when the black base coat was laid down. I'm glad I tried again with this project.

Until next time; stay safe out there!

Cheers and Happy Gaming!