+ inload: Painting a Stormlords Reaver Titan +

+ The steady march of progress +

+ In which we look at the travails and ooportunities of painting the Scythian. +

It's a Reaver – or the beginnings of one, at least. Painting something this big (it's a 40k-scale Titan) has been fun so far. Building and painting in parts is proving a sensible idea, and the first big subassembly that I'm tackling is the legs. 

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To begin, I primed the whole superstructure with the ever-reliable Hyrax Brown from Colourforge (matched to Rhinox Hide from Citadel), then worked over that with Siege Armour, which matches Runelord Brass. The underlayer of Hyrax Brown was to ensure a consistent colour base and work deep into the recesses, while the Siege Armour was applied with a slight zenithal emphasis – that is, I did prime lightly over the whole thing, but more lightly from underneath.

I've never used Runelord Brass, but the resulting colour is a warm metallic – more rose gold than brass to my eye. It's a lovely colour that looks slightly disconcertingly like chocolate!

Why not silver? Well, that was to keep me honest when painting the legs. The mechanical 'skeleton' of the Reaver involves lots of pistons and detail, and it would be very easy to just gloss over the differences and paint it all silver with a quick wash. I thought that would be undeserving of the model, and so worked over it with a selection of metallics: silvers, brasses and bronzes, to pick out detail. 

The basecoat provided guidance on where I had added something and where I hadn't – and pushed me to make decisions on how I was treating various parts. In the end, the rose gold finish is only really evident on the trim of the armour.

Speaking of which, here's a shot of the back, where you can see the trim on the lower legs, particularly  noticeable on the Imperial Eagle:

The other armour will be getting sprayed blue, both for consistency and for a smooth initial basecoat, but as the toes are so integral to the leg superstructure that I've had to get stuck in with a brush. This proved quite a meditative process, as while there's a huge area to cover, the details are thick and clear, making brushwork simple. It's more time-consuming than an AT-scale one, but much more pleasant!

I used a Prussian blue acrylic to lay down a strong base. This colour is very powerful and deep, and will provide a good base for the eventual lighter blue colour of Legio Tempestus:

I'll need to start making some decisions on which plates to spray blue, and which to spray a different colour – as you can see from the plate above, the near-black Prussian blue will work as a base, but I'll need to up the tone considerably.

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All the while I'm painting this, I'm acutely aware that I need to balance a desire for this part to look good... with the fact that a great deal of it will be completely covered up!

This pict-capture from the front shows the armour plates loosely in place. The backs of these have been primed Hyrax brown, and the fronts let unprimed for now, while I work out which will be mainly blue, and which can be primed another colour.

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