Knight Titan Progress – Playing Dress Up

With all of the parts of the Knight Titans painted, it just comes down to easy part: assembling.

Except nothing in my world is easy.

Since I painted all of the different parts slightly differently, it came down to what parts look good together.  Realistically, this step might have been completely skipped by some people altogether, and I’m not sure it was necessary for me either.  Still, I like to over-complicate things a bit.

It just didn’t look right when I put some of the heads next to some of the torsos.

Does that mean I’m O.C.D.?

I’ve never really considered myself to have that affliction–nor would you, if you’d ever seen my desk at the office.  But when it comes to putting these guys together, it seemed like it was necessary.  So, I spent a good 30-45 minutes playing dress-up with theses guys in the garage and in the house.  I called my wife over and asked her how she felt about specific configurations: “Well, I really like this knee pad, and this guy is stepping up so he’ll show off that pad better–but that would mean that it would have to align with this carapace–is that too much checkerboarding for one model?”

I don’t think her heart was in it as much as mine was.

Still, it was a fairly pleasant experience, and I feel a good use of my time.  The only thing left at this point was to glue things into place and then take some final photos.  Ooooh, can you smell the anticipation?

Knight Titan Progress – Arms

With the Knights effectively done at this point, I was dismayed to recall that they were going to have to have their arms/weapons painted before I played in the Apoc game.

For those taking notes, that game happened back in June, and I still haven’t done a proper write-up on it.  That may, as of yet, be forthcoming–but I wouldn’t hold my breath at this point.

I seriously contemplated just painting the gun/arm options for those that I was planning to field in the Apocalypse game, but I didn’t know what I was going to field.  Despite all of the time and effort I’d put into these guys, my heart was really interested in playing with my Genestealer Cult before the codex became obsolete in 8th edition.

Ultimately, the Knights won out because I had put all of my time into painting them, and I never even bothered to start on my cultist characters.

The scheme was easy, as it just followed what the rest of the models did, leaning heavily on the metallic components underneath.  I backed off on caution stripes and other free hand based upon my exhaustion with the project.  Still, I didn’t want it to look like I phoned things in completely, so I added a little bit here and there.  Otherwise, things mostly stayed solid colors.

And this basically concludes my painting posts on my Knight titans.  Granted, the series will have a few more posts, but at least no more on painting/works in progress!

 

Knight Titan Progress – Bits & Gubbinz

I should mention that I’m not exactly sure what a “gubbin” is.  Linguistically, it seems an awful lot like a “gibbon,” but I have my suspicions that these miscellaneous parts are somehow related to monkeys.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that the only reason the word is even in my lexicon is because those guys at the old GW’s mail order option.

Oh man, what was that called?  The black gobbo?  No, that was a magazine…

You know, the one with the “mail trolls?”

Oh well, whatever it’s called, it clearly meant the small bits and pieces.  As much as I’d like to just be done with writing these blog posts, this was the same attitude I had when it came down to painting these little guys.

For all of these, I tried to mix up the colors where I could, using the quartering/halving scheme to inject a little extra color where possible.  For things like the helms, I tried to find examples of painted knights online that I liked and mixed those in where possible.

Since I did a little variation with all of the different pieces, I also wanted to mix in some additional color with the carapaces.  Two of them had already been painted blue (well, in fact, all of them had been painted blue at this point), but I wanted to also mix in a little something else.  So, rather than repainting everything red, I opted to add a little splash of color (well, if you consider “white” to be an actual color).

I was toggling between the ideas of a single white stripe down the center, or two white stripes (one down either side), and ultimately opted to go with the two stripe model.  I don’t recall exactly why that style won out over the other, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I think it’s because the extra creases and rivets that line the side of the model help to give depth to the white.  Now, I can’t rightfully say whether that was the defining reason as to why I went with the double-stripe theme over the single stripe, but in retrospect, I think I made the right decision.

At this point, I am (or was) done with painting every bit of the Knights… well, until I remembered that I hadn’t even begun to paint the arms…

Knight Titans – Shins & Shoulders

I will finish this series on my knight titans one day.  I’m fairly loathe to write these posts anymore, but I’ve already gone through the effort to take all of the WIP photos and even created skeletons for all of the posts, so I might as well push through and finish them all.

So here goes nothing…

When we last left off, I was working on the whites of the model.  I’ve also posted on the blues and golds as well, so at this point, it really became a matter of just repeating those techniques over the rest of the model.

The only other color I didn’t go over in depth is the red.  Just like the blues, I opted to go darker with the reds than I use on my typical Ultramarines.  Again, just like the blues, I achieved this effect by mixing in some black into the red scheme.  So yeah, nothing terribly fancy there.

For the Pegasus (or is that just a horse?) I wound up painting it in the classic blue-shaded style that I’ve painted much of my army in.  This let them stand out from the aged scheme I used on the checkboards and really helps pop.

Well, at least it does to me.

By the end, I’d worked on some of the scroll work as evidenced by the final photo in this post.  I should say that the order the photos appear in this post aren’t exactly the order in which they were painted in (for instance, I painted all of the gold on these bits at once, so the first photo should come closer to the end).

When I write these, I just lump the photos into an order that seems to appeal to the eye and go from there.

Well, that about does it for shoulders/shins.   At this point, I have three more WIP posts on these guys to go, plus some shots of the “finished” product.

I think I can… I think I can…

 

 

Knight Titan – Working on Whites

The title of this email makes me feel uncomfortable.  Trust me when I say that I really only mean that it concerns working on painting white within my knight titan.  I don’t mean anything nefarious.

I’m sure that nobody thought I did, and now I’ve made it awkward…

I’ve been a little remiss on my blog posts as of late.  That’s not for lack of content, but rather lack of interest.  I really haven’t played 40k in a few months.  That, coupled with increased duties at work, a conference and a family vacation, plus a new hobby interest in a campaign of Seafall (posts on that coming one day), I just haven’t been interested in writing.  I do have a dozen or more post ideas queued up (many, if not most, of those are about my Knight Titans), but I just can’t be bothered to write about them.

I’m still not particularly interested in 40k (which is probably obvious, given my complete avoidance of talking about the particular project), but there’s no better way to delve into it than to just start working on something.

So, after I had wrapped up the blues on my titans, I switched over to a new formula for white.  If you recall, I wanted the colors to be similar to my Ultramarine armies, but not necessarily identical.  After all, knights are allied with my boys in blue, but aren’t necessarily from Ultramar.  Of course, I could paint them completely differently, but I do want my army to look at least somewhat cohesive.

So, instead of shading my white with a blue wash, I opted to revert to an older scheme that I used to use a dozen or more years ago.  This scheme involves painting the entire area white and shading it with bleached bone (or rather, a suitable generic replacement).  I then wash it with an older ink (chestnut, I believe?) that is very watered down around the edges.

The end result is a scheme that looks more worn–almost like an aged parchment of sorts.  In fact, this isn’t far off from the way that I wind up painting parchment (ie. scroll work & purity seals).

At this point, they’re far from finished, but you can start to see some colors coming into place.  The next step is to work on blocking in some checkers and other banding.  You can see a pic below that gives some idea of where I’m heading on this.  The vast majority of these accents I plan to do with the white, though I can foresee possibly throwing a stripe or two on the other areas as well.