+ Rifling through the databanks +
+ Making progress on the Titan maniple involved digging through some Retrohammer reference material to find some alternate angles on the Titans. Today's inload looks at challenges and opportunities of this approach. +
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+ Stripes are very in this season +
The work this weekend revolved largely around the white areas – shading them down and adding depth, then adding the freehand stripes. This is most obvious on Steel Hammer, as the warlord has the largest and most prominent areas of these. I'm very pleased with how these areas look, and I think this level of detail is (at last!) starting to bring the project together.
In practical terms, the white areas were brought up to a level I was happy with using diluted Dawnstone (a pale grey) to provide the shading. When shading white, I try to remember not to take the shading tone too dark, and to restrict it to a smaller portion of the area than I would for (say) the red. That helps the area to remain nice and bright, which can then be emphasised with nearly pure white edge highlights. It's doubly important on areas that are white and black to keep the white above an overall mid-tone, or everything will blend in together.
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Painting stripes
Freehand stripes can seem a bit intimidating – it can be hard to visualise how broad the stripes will need to be; you need to consider how many you want to include, and how they'll fit in the space; and working them on curved or irregular areas adds further complication, as it's easy for the line to go for a wander if you're just going straight in with paint.
Using masking tape is one solution which ensures nice clean straight lines, but I was a bit concerned with how it would interact with the paint I'd used, weakened as it was by the use of flow enhancer.
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| + Old Three Skulls flashing a bit of ankle. The red piping works quite nicely here – a fun touch from the original inspiration + |
For these reasons, I decided I'd just work freehand. I used a sharp HB pencil to gently sketch in an outline. This let me ensure the width of the stripes would be consistent, that they ran across broken areas cleanly, and also let me preserve white areas I particularly liked.
These initial pencil marks were made very lightly. Once happy, I dabbed them with Blu-tak (a putty rubber would be a better choice, but adhesive putty is fine) to remove excess graphite, which can otherwise muddy the paint. Not really a problem with black, but good practice. It makes the marks less obvious, so if you do go a bit squiffy, the pencil marks don't stand out.
The stripes themselves are simply Contrast Black Legion. I'll come back to highlight them later, applying the opposite rule to the white above – i.e. only highlight to a midtone.
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+ Inadvertent launchblessing protocol +
It's traditional to smash a bottle of champagne on a new ship as it's launched, and presumably something similar is still maintained by the ritual-obsessed Adeptus Mechanicus.
Less traditional is sloshing a glass of brandy all over your half-painted maniple as the ironing board leaps out from ambush behind the door, but such was the fate of these Iron Skulls.
This cued a few minutes of frantic cursing, mopping up and rinsing them under the tap. Thankfully very little damage seems apparent. Aside from some odd purple sediment on Old Three Skull's missile launcher, where the alcohol or subsequent tap water seems to have reactivated the wash, there doesn't seem to be much permanent effect. Praise be to the god of machines that the combination of washes, contrast paints and acrylics proved largely water-resistant.
(You'll be pleased to hear the brandy glass survived, even if the drink itself was wasted!)
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+ Yellow +
Back in the 90s, super bright saturated colours and jewel-like impact were all the rage, so it's fairly predictable that the bright red Titans would have some equally vibrant accent colours. While I've opted for ash waste desert rather than verdant Goblin Green bases (great for complementing red, but a retro step too far for my tastes), I did want to include some of the more notable elements, like Old Three Skulls' bright yellow-and-black chequered fist:
This was achieved with a yellow ochre (Balor Brown, I think) base – the strong coverage gives a clean base, and it's easy then to layer on the more transparent bright yellow (Yriel yellow, in this instance) to get a good result. Once dry, a glaze of burnt sienna (Mournfang brown) was added to create some shading.
I assembled the power claw without the built-in vulcan mega-bolter for a couple of reasons: it niggles me that it doesn't have an in-game effect, but more importantly, leaving it off gives you larger armour panels to paint, which is going to be critical if the chequerboard effect isn't just going to look confused.
Even as-is, I'm a little apprehensive that the chequerboard effect isn't going to look great on such a visually confusing area. Neverthless, in for a penny, in for a pound. Amongst the best bits of taking inspiration from older models is the enjoyable challenge of translating details like this onto modern figures, often much more complex.
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+ Return to White Dwarf +
When pursuing Retrohammer projects, it's good to keep your reference to hand, and check it every once in a while. I've spotted various bits and bobs on these Titans that I've interpreted incorrectly, altered inadvertently, or simply miscoloured.
The other lesson is that you don't have to match things exactly. Projects like this are meant to be fun, after all, and you should feel entirely free to balance making things 'authentic' with making it look cool to you. I'll count it as a win if the overall concept is clear and the homage recognisable, so I won't lose sleep over a particular panel being subtly different.
For example, the heads of the original Titans are not entirely clear to me, from the photographs. I can't decide whether they're meant to be grey, white, silver or a variety across the Titans.
Here I've leaned into the lack of clarity and decided that I can mix and match. I like the idea of the Iron Skulls having metallic heads, but then I'm not so keen on silver metallic trim on silver metallic plates – which is what I suspect was the thinking of the studio painters, too. Perhaps the heads are white as that's the heraldic way of portraying silver?
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Claviger's carapace is an example of making assumptions – I was convinced it was black and white, and even sprayed it white with that in mind, as you can see in this inload [
+noosphericinloadlink embedded+]. After checking, I realised it was red; the black and white a figment of my imagination, or an illusion caused by the shoulder pads. Fortunately I had a spare carapace, which I sprayed red.
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| + White Dwarf 184 battle report: Abomination! + |
If you do want to match things, then having lots of reference is handy. Anyone who's attempted to copy a colour scheme from a single picture will quickly realise the shortcomings of only having one angle visible. Fortunately, these Titans were used in battle reports over the years, so I dug into White Dwarf 184 to see if I could clear up a few elements that were unclear to me.
This shot of Claviger gives a clearer view of the shoulder armour, and reveals that they're chevrons rather than just stripes.
Carnivore here can be seen to have a single chevron on his white pauldron, too.
The carapace of
Carnivore is an example of a change I've instated. Rather than a halved carapace with yellow and black striping, I've opted for a band of striping, which combines both white and yellow: a nod to the original model while updating it somewhat to the new scheme, which barely features yellow.
Shots like this are invaluable for generating ideas – I had no idea that the missile launcher had an Opus Machina on the side, for example. It's just not visible in any of the other shots.
Keen-eyed inloaders will spot that I've updated the right arm weapon from the standard gatling blaster to this Battle Bling variant, which I felt was closer to the vulcan mega-bolter of the original.
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To bring this rambling inload to a swift conclusion, things are motoring along. I'm going to aim to have the Titans themselves varnished and ready for oil washes by the end of this weekend – after that it'll be getting a bit dicey that they'll be dry for the event!
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