Dr. Tortenkopf is making Terminators great again

After working into the morning hours on Saturday I printed and sealed the decal sheet in the evening. Today, on Sunday it was ready to use and I was able to apply the missing chapter markings. And some text on the larger bits of scroll work.

And before we forget, this project was about scaling the Terminators to look more natural, both next to the Primaris, but also by themselves. Because somehow they always look as if the person wearing the armor doesn’t have a head. Or as if their head was growing out of their chest somehow. All of that while wearing Terminator-Plate is supposed to just be a change of clothes for a Space Marine.

So I took the following group shot to show two of the Terminators next to the Primaris Captain in Gravis Armor and a regular Primaris Marine.

I am rather pleased with how this has turned out. The Terminators will be able to serve next to the Primaris Marines without looking like humpbacked dwarves and the Gravis Armor is still a bit taller. I looks like it just has really thick soles though.

And this is where I leave you. At least with this project. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot as well.

I would like to thank everyone who looked at the project and clicked the buttons. Without you I might not always have had the motivation to keep the pace I had to set in order to finish the project.

It is 03:13 on the  24th and I am ready to call this project done.

The Terminators have all been mounted to their bases and the last details have painted. I might still be touching up a few details, over the coming days, but nothing major is going to change anymore.

Except for one thing. I still need to add the griffon rampant to their right shoulders. However since it is the right shoulder the griffon will need to be flipped in order to still be facing forward. The red and yellow fields are also flipped opposed to the standard theme on the two Terminators in night world livery.

And that means I have to print a new transfer sheet. However due to domestic reasons  I was unable to print during the week. Hopefully I will be able to add the decals over the course of the weekend.

But until then here are the best gallery shots I could come up with at this time of night:

Here is my progress on the sergeants power sword.

I used two tones of blue: Vallejo Magic Blue and Vallejo Electric Blue as well as white.

First I gave the power sword a series of glazes with Electric Blue so the color would be stronger towards the hilt of the sword. I then deepened the blue near the hilt using a glaze of Magic Blue. Vallejo colors can easily be thinned into glazes, however I add a little bit of Matt Medium in order to keep the thinned down paint controllable.

After the glazes were done I painted a electric arc pattern onto the blade using Electric Blue and white as a highlight.

Well, I finished painting them by picking out the cabling in blue, red and copper and the pipes in grey. Also I finished the silver rim and highlights. Look:

Yesterday, apart from working on the remaining details on the miniatures, I have been nusy painting the Terminator sergeant’s tabard.

Here is a quick rundown of how I usually do light cloth like this:

The cloth had previously been base coated with Deck Tan, a nicely muted flat and very light grey. Asa first step painted the recessed areas of the cloth with WWII Beige and after that added thin line in Neutral Grey.

The raised areas are then highlighted first in Ivory and finally, very thinly in pure White.

As a last step I have added a bit of feathering to slightly blend the colours into each other.

This technicque provides very high contrast on the cloth and while the the feathering will only go so far to blend the colours it looks very good from a regular gaming distance.

During these last days of the project I am somewhat frantically trying to finish the paintjobs and get the minis based. Here is the state of the project from about two days ago.

The highlighting on the armor had at that point been finished and I had made a start on some of the details.

I just finished the red and yellow highlights on the three Terminators with the standard color scheme. Here is a quick update on how they now look.

Yesterday I finished the yellow highlighting on one half of one Terminator.

For this I mix Citadel Averland Sunset with Vallejo Bone White in a 2/3 Ratio. The Averland Sunset has previously been stretched with Winsor&Newton Matt Medium. I always do that to Citadel Base Colors as they are far too goopy for my taste and contain enough pigment to make them last twice as long.

The highlight mix turns out slightly transparent, which is good because it allows me to apply it very carefully as adding to strong highlights can easily ruin a yellow miniature. I takes about two or three passes in the brighter areas to build up a sufficient highlight.

Yellow is always mentioned as a hard color to work with. This is why:

Humans are worse at perceiving color gradients in the yellow band of the spectrum, than they are in other color bands. The reason for this is, that the yellow information is extrapolated from the luminosity values of the red and green signals. This is also why people with red green blindness can perceive yellow. Their cones do not distinguish between red and green wavelength, but do register the luminosity of those color bands separately.

In short: Unless you are a tetrachromat you do not actually have the capacity to see yellow. Your brain compensates for that by combining parts of the red and green signals.

Because all the initial information we have on yellow light is its luminosity we do not perceive a lot of highlighting on yellow surfaces. Yellow is just always bright. Its perceived color intensity, compared to the other color bands, hardly changes.

This is why making yellow highlights more yellow wont look good. In order for them to look natural, they need to be brighter and less saturated. An that is the reason why I mix the Averland Sunset with a bone colour in order to create a highlight, that both stands out on a miniature to our poor, incapable eyes while seeming natural and believable.

Source:

Wikipedia on Color Vision