January 30, 2010

Quick and dirty: 6 easy steps to paint gaunts

Greetings,

I thought I'd share how I paint my gaunts/gants, as I made some pics during I painted my last 3 termagants. As I mentioned before, I wanted to get the huge amounts of gaunts painted as quick as possible but thereby not compromising the quality of the paintjob too much.
So here's how I do it:

 

1.) Assembly of the model, cleaning of mold lines, obviously. After that I glue on some stones or rubble onto the base and cover it completely with PVA glue. Afterwards I prime with ArmyPainter's "skeleton bone" primer. But you can use a white primer and paint the whole model with bleached bone. But by using bone primer I spare one step. 

As a sidenote on primers from ArmyPainter: you have to shake them really well (I mean several minutes!), heat it up a bit by holding it into hot water. And after priming hold the can upside down and spray until no colour comes out to clean the nozzle. I didn't do that with my first cans and the nozzles always got clogged with dried colour before the can was half-empty. 

2.) I paint the carapace with knarloc green and the base with khemri brown (foundation colour)


3.) The stones are painted with adeptus battlegrey and some random parts of the brown base are painted with rotting flesh, that shouldn't be done too evenly. While that dries I paint some details like the tongue and the joints with tanned flesh. When the base has dried some drybrushing with dheneb stone brings out the details of the stonerubble.

 

4.)   Afterwards I wash the whole model (not the base) with a lightly thinned mix of devlan mud and water (about 3 parts devlan mud and 1 part water)


5.) Usually I leave that to dry over night, but I think an hour should be enough as well. Then I paint the edges of the carapace with terracotta with uneven brush strokes.


6.) The last step is to glue some static grass onto the base and give the carapace an even coat with 'ardcoat for a glossy finish. Some thinned white on the teeth and the magazine of the weapon give some additional highlights.


That's it. Quick and not too dirty. 



2 Kommentare:

Raptor1313 said...

I had not thought of doing that for the carapace, and I mean the terra-cotta afterwards. It's quick, it's semi-dirty, and it looks a little more organic since it's not so regular.

My question to you, though, is how you plan on differentiating squads? My thought is differently-colored weapon symbiotes for the little boggarts.

Managarm said...

Hi Raptor1313,
actually I am not planning to differentiate between squads. I think tyranids are more of the "one-undistinguishable-mass"-kind of army and so I like it better, when all gaunts are more or less the same.
I mean, they (gaunts) are spawned out of a brood nest or something like that and then are driven to attack the next enemy by the hive mind (or they need to feed without synapse) so I don't think they join together as distinct squads. At least I interpret it this way.

But different coloured weapons are definitely a way to distinguish between squads. When I was looking for a colour scheme and while trying a lot of things, the "precursor" to my actual combination of colours had little, uneven dots and splashes of terracotta on the carapace. So that might be another way for some differences.