Bike Squadron is Finished!!

Alright, so here is my finished bike squad and right away I have to say that I'm not entirely happy with the way that they turned out. However, the learning process continues. With this in mind, I thought I'd start this post with a bit of self reflection. First of all, I don't like my highlights. The lines are too thick and they are not straight enough. I think I need to really start thinning down my paint. But how thin should it be? What is the right amount of "thin"? I really feel like this has to improve if I want my models to start looking better. I felt ok about my highlighting abilities when I finished the tactical squad but, the bike squad exposed a lot of flaws in my technique. I guess it goes back to the planning stage of army construction. I looked through the my handy-dandy How to Paint Space Marines book, and extreme highlighting seemed like the way to go. Since then, I've taken a look at a really cool posting of an Iron Hands army over at the official Games Workshop site. The idea was to use bolt gun metal and mithril silver for the highlighting to make it look like paint has chipped or been worn. I also recently read a post over at the Jawaballs blog talking about how hard it is to get black armor to look "right". Who knew? I thought it would be easy. Additionally, you'll notice that I have been trying to freehand all the chapter sigils on my marines and bikes.

At a distance they look ok but, as you can see on the standard and the Sgt.'s bike, when you get close you really notice how messy they look. I think I overshot a bit trying to freehand them with so little painting experience. With this in mind, I'll press on with my collection of Raven Guard marines, but I don't think I'll go too much beyond what I initially purchased for this army.

Maybe further down the road I'll come back to Raven Guard but I really think, I'd like to try some other color schemes. A little while ago, I did a test Carcharodon model and I really liked working with the grays...