Workshop Wednesday: Storm Strider Part 3 PAINT

Ever feel like the last 5% of a model always seems to take the longest time? Building the thing and basing the thing seemed so easy, but sometimes it’s because you’re painting and repainting and trying to get something juuust right. Other times it’s just because you can’t get the inertia back up and they just sit there…. mocking you.

This was one of the other times. Problems included white primer (I hate white/grey primer, but the amount of white I have on my Cygnar means I need to prime light) and not actually knowing how I’d be painting my models. Thankfully though, I finally DID get it painted. And you get to see them.

More under the cut.

The main Storm Strider bits were easy enough. I went with a predominantly white colour scheme for my Strider, because the bit about Cygnar that attracts me is the hi-tech and lightning, and white says hi-tech mad scientist more than labcoats? The white would be mirrored in the (usually) clean surfaces of the jacks and larger models (whether the Colossal Stormwall would be as nice just being white is something I’m currently tackling) like the Storm Strider.

I went with the armour plates on the legs as blue (as well as a small bit on the main dais) for a bit of accent, while the rest of the Storm Strider was airbrushed white or metal respectively.

Because some of the bits were I had pretty large, I had to mask the parts in order to airbrush multiple colours (in this case white and iron).

After the airbrushing came the very time consuming bit of individually painting, hightlighting and shading 32 gold doughnuts, followed by painting the insides white, then blue and glowy. I spent a LOT of time on the leg armor plates; the transition on the gold is crazy, like 2 shades and 3 highlights (and blending in between). I figure that was one of the main areas to spend time on.

The main lightning coiled bits were similarly airbrushed white, while the dais was metal.

Painting the metal and coils were similar to painting the storm striders legs, and the metal dias was washed and shaded. I tried to keep the shading a little bit uneven to give some sort of interest to the dias. Plus I don’t think grime pools uniformly.

And of course a similar treatment to the giant stormcaller.

The stormsmiths were my hangup because I didn’t know how to paint them. I ended up painting my other stormsmiths at the same time so I could work out my colourscheme for my infantry.

Well, of course first they were similarly airbrushed predominantly white. Labcoats, after all! The leathers were washed snakebite leather -> bestial brown -> battlefield brown for the shadows. In this case becase I primed white, all I did was go with continuously darker washes of brown. The pants were the blue grey denim in the Cygnar book.

The armor was painted blue, while the metals followed how I painted the Storm Strider. I’m not very happy with how the colour scheme turned out (the leather seems too similar to the gold colour), and I might switch some of it out with a blue-black instead. I think I need more cool colours to contrast with the warm golds and white anyway. Also, that driver stormcaller was an absolute BITCH to assemble, because of his fiddly driving levers. One of them broke and I had to replace it with a paper clip, and getting everything to match up and hold gave me an aneurysm.

Anyway, everything is finaly completed and awaiting the coat of varnish.

What to paint next… Khador, Trolls or Cygnar? Or mercs even?