+ inload: Castaway +

+ Castaway +

Breccia. Little to recommend it beyond its mineral riches. Low flora, high gravity. You'd wake in a panic, stars in your vision. Breathing felt like an animal was squatting on your chest. Infinite drifts of microscopic dust necessitated airlocks and bulky rebreathers almost everywhere; and still your spit would be terracotta. 

The inhabitants? Homo sapiens rotundus. Kinsmen, or thronglings, to themselves. Squats, to you or me. 

A prickly, short-tempered and belligerent people, they seemed to have picked up and internalised the oppressive atmosphere of the planet. It was pure happenstance that I'd made landfall – I'd had to abandon a starcraft following a disagreement with naval security, and my hastily-secured shuttle required some repairs. 

I met Castaway in the cold dock. He was a visitor too, and slightly more agreeable company than the masked Breccian natives. I say visitor, but survivor's probably closer to the truth. A greenskin crusade had reportedly broken over his homeworld – itself in some backwater sub called Antona Australis – and he'd found himself unable to return. 

We met as I attempted to find some way off the rock. Castaway had much the same idea, and over the local brew, Brunski, myself and he concocted a plan of sorts. Like most of my acolyte's plans, it started with persuasion and ended with lasers. Suffice to say we emerged minus a shuttle, but plus a curiously handy engineer.

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+ Faces of the Gatebreakers +

+ Painting things on sprues is a very weird experience, but novelty's a good way to keep your interest up. It also allows for quick and easy comparison, which is handy both for achieving uniformity (for the helms) and diversity (for the bare heads). Regular inloaders will have heard my witter on about painting skin beforehand, but if you're interested in a little more theory, this inload includes some thoughts on getting variety into skintones [+noosphericinloadlink embedded+]. +

+ The Gatebreakers take this a little further: their wide-ranging recruitment methods mean the Chapter is hugely varied in skintones, so having them all on sprue allowed me to really have fun jumping around. Top left of the image above was built up from an ochre base (Averland Sunset) with Army Painter Mummy Robes (a lovely creamy brown-tinged white). A wash of Seraphim Sepia and some pink hints gave a nice smooth result. For the very dark skintone on the top right head here, I used a base of dark brown (Rhinox Hide) and green (Vallejo Flat Green), and added orange (Fire Dragon Bright) as I highlighted up. The fresh scarring was achieved with Vallejo Flat Red and Vallejo Off-white added to the mix. The same flat red was used to add warmth to the cheeks, nose and lower lip, too. +

+ The head on the lower left combined Averland Sunset and Rhinox Hide, and was then highlighted up with Off-white before being glazed back down with washes of Seraphim Sepia. The head on the lower right was painted over a Rhinox Hide layer, using increasingly light mixes of Vallejo Flat Red, Off-white and Averland Sunset. +

+ Once I got a bit bored of painting faces, I swapped to painting metallics and laying oils over the varnished green and yellow areas. These need a bit of cleaning up tonight, and then I'm onto highlighting and assembling. Nearly there! +