Friday, July 29, 2011

Ugh... Back to School

First off, I can't believe that it has been over a month since I've posted. Secondly, I can't believe how fast the summer has flown by. I start school next week! It's so hard to believe. Since my last post, I've made a trip to Baltimore for a wedding, a trip to Michigan to see family, and a trip to Illinois to see my girlfriend, Erin's mom. Previous to the trip up to Baltimore and just before I created this blog, we had made a trip to California to see Erin's dad. While we were out there I got to stop at a cool Games Workshop store. I purchased a tactical squad, to be painted at some point, hopefully during this school year. The coolest part was that judging for Armies on Parade had just happened a couple days prior to our arrival and the winning armies were still on display in the store. There was a pretty awesome Black Legion army on display and two really good looking Imperial Fists armies. I wish I had taken some pictures but my phone was really low on battery. Anyway, spending time at the store really made me wish we had one in the North Georgia area. You see, we used to have one at the Mall of Georgia but it closed down along with my local gaming store here in Athens. So, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I recently read on the Heresy Online boards that Atlanta will be getting a Games Workshop store sometime in August. I am absolutely giddy for the announcement of the grand opening to come. I hope I can make it over for the festivities.

Anyway, about my models... I hate to say it but, I am finding Raven Guard just too hard to paint. I originally thought that painting black models would be easy but it's crazy hard to get it to look right. So, I have put my Raven Guard Army on the back burner. Hopefully I will return to them some day as I have a rhino and scout squad in process. The question has become, what do I paint next? At first, I thought maybe I would paint some Red Scorpions, I really like their colors. Here is an example of a test marine I painted using the Red Scorpion color scheme.


As you can see, his eyes haven't been painted in, I haven't braved the chapter symbol, and he isn't based. I need to come up with a concept for the base... Any ideas? I guess it was when I was in California that I got the idea to try Red Scorpions. I found working with the shades of yellow and Gray to be much easier than working with the black of the Raven Guard, though some of the lessons I learned trying to highlight my RG army definitely came in handy with this guy. I like the clean feel the model has.

Another test I did was Blood Ravens. When I was in Illinois visiting Erin's mom I read a post that Dawn of War III is in development and I started looking at pics of Blood Raven space marines online. I was anxious to try my hand at some red shading so I decided that when I got home I would try some test models. Both models have some rough paint jobs because they had previously been painted with a heavy coat of gunmetal from a couple of years ago when I was trying some Iron Snakes marines. I tried to experiment around a bit. Blood Ravens have darker armor than Blood Angels so I had to mess with darkening shades of red. Here was the result...

I really had fun experimenting with the shading on the models. I took a lot of chances with watered down paint to try and get more of a shaded look as opposed to the hard edging I used to paint the Red Scorpion. While the Red Scorpion has a very clean crisp look to it, these guys look a bit more weathered and dirty.


I had so much fun messing around with these guys that I am going to try and put together a Blood Raven army. I'm hoping in the next couple of days to start work on a black reach tactical squad I purchased on e-bay and conversion work on a Gabriel Angelos model. Should be fun and lessen the sorrow of another summer come and gone...