Black Paladin of Acheron

Painting time: 21.5hrs.

This was a commission miniature. The black paladin took 19 hours to paint, plus 2 and a half hours for the base. The core of the base is resin, from Micro Art Studios, although I filed the bottom and filed/cut sections from round the sides to make it fit on the standard Rackham base. I used my own flock round the edge, and added the little lichen 'plants' - they looked strange and twisted, sort of evil looking and an unhealthy colour, which I thought would suit a warrior of Acheron. And it gave me an excuse to add something to make the base more interesting!

The armour was the main task for this model, and I planned to make it quite rusty from the start, for something different. This meant that I didn't need to worry as much about making the transitions between the first few grey highlights as smooth as usual, as I knew the rust would later cover up many of the rough areas and smooth out the layers.

I began with a dark grey basecoat, equal parts codex grey and black, with a little purple and dark blue mixed in to give it a slightly colder hue. Then I added fortress grey to the mix for the first stage of highlights, then more fortress grey for the next stage, and added white for the fourth stage. Each stage of highlights was much lighter than the preceding layer, and the fourth stage was very light, lighter than pure fortress grey but still darker than white. Despite the large jumps in lightness between layers, the highlights were blended by thinning the paint considerably, using water and also some matte medium, and painting in very thin, translucent layers to slowly build up the colour.

Before I painted the final 'sparkle' of pure white, it was time for the rust! I decided to try out the rust method described in the rust painting tutorial in Cry Havoc 2; although I used the 'light rust' method, I painted many more layers to make it much more rusty than the example in the tutorial - I love rust! As for the glowing blue face on the shield, I used the same technique as I used for the OSL on the neuromancer - I have briefly outlined the method in the neuromancer's description, if you are interested.

Guild Artisan,
Sebastian.