Brbla’s Thunderwolf Cavalry

As per my friend’s request I started working on the Space Wolves first. The paints I got were: The Fang for the armour (more dark blue-ish grey than what you usually see for these), Mephiston Red for the shoulderpads and Screaming Skull for some of the details.

I started by painting the armour, trying to get as even coat as possible, then painted the shoulderpads red. I didn’t do the symbols on them yet, as I am not sure whether it would be better to wash them first or not.

Then I went on to the small details on the armour, painting them carefully with Screaming Skull.

As I was painting the shields I was wondering if I could do something special with them. While I was looking at various reference pictures I saw weapons with these gorgeous blue-ish gradients and I absolutely loved that so I thought “hey let’s try this!” 😀

I basically painted the shields with The Fang, same as the armour and then tried to create a gradient from the center with a lighter blue I had (Calgar Blue). I have attemped to use the overloaded brush technique I found just yesterday… somehow it worked, although I think I didn’t use it properly 😀

Of course I’ll need to go back to them to do the runes, it will be a challenge not to ruin the gradient.

I finally ran out of patience with my paints going dry too quickly, so I decided to try a homemade wet palette.

I bought a cheap plastic container, some sponges, paper towels and baking paper. Put all of that stuff into the container, added water and voila, a wet palette was born 😀

I was a bit worried about the baking paper because apparently not every baking paper works, but this one seems to do the job just fine. The paints stayed usable the whole evening yesterday, which is all I really wanted. We’ll see how they do today.

The paint seems to be soaking through the baking paper a bit, but I guess that’s nothing surprising, it’s semipermeable after all.

So tonight I have been working on the shiny parts. Tiny tiny details! I have used Balthasar Gold, because I think any other more… vibrant gold would look pretty cheap with this colour scheme.

Yesterday I set on painting the faces, hair and some more details like the runes on the shields, gems on the armour etc.

I tried to shade the faces, I might have overdone it so I feel like I’ll need to go back to them later still. The hair would also deserve some more attention so I think this is by no means done. But I tried to do the eyes, which you sadly can’t see on the pics, because my phone’s camera has a lot of problems focusing the minis, but… they are there! More or less…

With the runes I initially painted one shield with a very dark wash, and then thought that light colour might look quite good as well so I tried a light blue. I quite like the light ones, but ultimately Brbla wanted the dark ones so… one special snowflake!

I have finished the 5 Space Wolves! They could use some more shading and highlighting, but as I was pressured for time… this’ll have to do. I played around a little more with the faces, did some freehanding on their shoulder armour and washed them very very carefully (this time it went a little better).

Here are some solo pics.