First attempt at blending, lighting and painting faces (AoBR - Terminator sergeant)

I have been trying to finish painting my AoBR space marines since I got the starter. This being my first Warhammer 40k purchase and my first attempt at painting I have been struggling finding motivation to paint, time from other hobbies (I blame MekWars - an online BattleTech Java campaign, and Facebook which is a huge timesink) and also the problem that as a beginner in painting, I kinda hate my painted minituaers due to low quality.

Anyway, thanks to Gareth and to the FTW blogring, I found the motivation to go on. Here is a previous post about my progress on AoBR terminators. This is a picture of further progress.

As you can see, I painted glowing eyes on terminators after reading a few tutorials on jeweling, and also finished the first layer on the on the sculted insignias (using Valejo's Wolf Grey). I also did a layer of Valejo's boltgun metal on the weapons and Terminator's cables/tubes.

I spent a considerable more time trying to paint the face of the sergeant. After reading various tutorials on how to paint faces (especialy this) and loading a few pictures on my PC of that very same model (thanks Gareth again), I tried to paint my first face.

What I did was paint the whole head Parasite Brown (Valejo's), then wash it with Beasty Brown, and highlight forehead, cheekbones, chin, nose and lips with a 1/1 mix of Parasite Brown and Elf Skin tones (all my paints so far are Valejo paints). I did a further very thin highlight of bleached bone. The short hair and freshly shaved beard was done with a mix of stonewall grey and elf skin tone.

Then I tried to do the power weapon. My main inspiration (I actually completely copied the color scheme was from The Painting Corps. I painted the blade black and tried doing the blending technique. I applied a very watered down Bloody Red on the tip of the sword and tried to blend it down to the hilt of the sword blending it with black. I used a lot of water. In fact applied a layer of just water to the blade so the color would flow more easily.






Afterwards I tried to apply some electric sparks. I painted straight lines of red, and then on top of those lines I painted gradually thiner lines, using a lighter version of that red color. Somehow I need to make the lines a lot thinner, however the look thinner in reality, the photo tends to magnify the whole thing (and it also makes mistakes a lot more evident)

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AoBR Ultramarines Terminators

Hello everyone. I am at my summer house at Loutraki here in Greece and manage to convince the wife to let me bring my painting supplies here. So, it's sun bathing in the morning and painting in the evening.

If you have been following my blog, you would know that I am rather new to this hobby, so any comments/criticisms are welcome!

First of all, a picture from Loutraki. Any picture from Loutraki is going to be better than any other picture of my Terminators.


Unfortunately I had already painted and highlighted a Termie. It's the one that's based. That particular one is actually from the White Dwarf issue that came with an AoBR Termie and Ork (That's why there is one extra terminator). So until I got the AoBR set, I had time to paint it. This being my very first 40k mini I painted, it's very crude.



The second termie from the left is actually basecoated black and then painted a darker shade of blue. I think it was regal blue. I had no idea it was so dark and then decided to basecoat the rest of the terminators ultramarine blue. I will have to basecoat the darker Ultramarine again and hope that the second basecoat will not hide any detail.


Just in case anyone is interested, the colors I used are the following
1. Primed the figures black with an Italery spray (I am very cheap and I refuse to use GW paints)
2. Basecoat with Vallejo's Ultramarine Blue (except that dark terminator that was undercoat with Andrea color's blue.
3. Helmet and eagle symbol were painted Wolf Grey (Vallejo) and then highlighted with White from Andrea colors.

I am not really sure what color to paint the terminator's eyes. It's either black, or red (using the jeweling technique which I think I can manage). Another area that buffles me is that gun. Do I paint the barrel with a metalic color and the rest of the gun black with dark grey highlights? I have seen some pictures where the gun is painted with bright red or yellow colors, but somehow this make the boltgun look plastic and kinda unrealistic. I suppose this was an older version of the ultramarine paint scheme.



If I learned anything from my first attempted at painting this squad is that basing greatly improves the overall look of even a mediocre painted mini.


I still have trouble finding the optimal amount of water to add in my paint. Sometimes it's too thick and the rest of the times it's almost transparent. I think it's way better if the paint is transparent. Some times I can do cool stuff, like blending two colors and having a 'fade efffect'. Also any damage done can be repaired easily.