Aqua Marine

I painted this one a couple of weeks ago as a fun project, because some friends and I wanted to practice some new weathering techniques, and we decided to have a fun challenge between the three of us: we each painted a marine with similar markings, in a similar 'cyril style'.

I owe a large debt to cyril for the ideas and colours - this is very heavily inspired by one of cyril's new marines that I saw in his thread on creafigs. And it is also a tribute to nano's metal marine from the 40k single at the Spain GD 05, with the bionic arm etc.

When making this one I was imagining something a bit different from a normal GW marine - I was originally going to make a star wars clone trooper like the ones in episode 3, with the cool coloured stripes and stuff, but it would have been a big sculpting job and in the end I was too lazy hehe, I just wanted something simple to paint for our little challenge. So instead I opted for a few small changes - the changed helmet shape, and the bionic arm...and of course the missing backpack! haha, in my defence, he was never really meant to be a GW marine, more just a generic sci-fi warrior in a totally different universe - I know that, strictly speaking, a marine without his power supply in the backpack would be unable to walk if you follow the rules of the GW 40k universe, but I thought it might be ok to break the rules just the once ;) Plus he has those little button/light things on his back which would be covered by the backpack normally - so they needed a rare chance to actually be seen!

Anyway, I wanted to try a new technique for doing those little scratches and chips in the armour. You may have noticed that they are much smaller and more widespread than normal - usually I paint them all on individually, by hand, but I heard romain and cyril mention another way to do it...the secret sponge technique! hehe, basically, you just take a piece of foam from a normal blister pack, dip it in some paint on the palette, and carefully sponge the mini in places. It sounds crude, but it gives a really excellent random arrangement of tiny scratch-shapes - the hardest part is always making them not look contrived, and this helps immensely. After using the foam, I then went back with a brush and neatened up some of the chips a bit, and extended a few, enlarged some, etc. Then I painted the light-underline on the underside of each chip as usual, to give a more 3D effect. And that was it - pretty easy and quick, and it looks much much better than the old way I think, especially in real life - the fact that the chips are much smaller, really tiny if you see them in reality, helps the illusion and makes things look more realistic I think.

So - give it a try! On a test model first though haha.

Guild Artisan,
Sebastian.