Painting dreadfleet

The Bloody Reaver is the flagship of the undead. The biggest ship in the game! The base is about 50 % longer than the base of the Heldenhammer. I kept this ship for last, to gain some experience painting these ships first and because it was a daunting prospect to start on this one. The ship is a rock with a castle on top. The rock rests on the hulls of different ships.

Basecoat

After priming black, I used these colours for the basecoats:

• Model Air Medium Sea Grey: rocks
• Model Color Chocolate Brown: hulls, masts
• Model Color Light Grey: castle, “horns” (don’t know how else to call them)
• Model Color Burnt Red: roofs and ram
• Game Color Off White: “ribcage” (that’s what they remind me of)
• Model Color Carmine Red: flags (after painting them light grey first)
• The Army Painter Weapon Bronze: dragon on the prow of the ship and a few decorations on the hull

Highlight

As usual I’ve highlighted by drybrushing:

• Model Color Light Grey: castle, rocks, horns
• Model Color Silver Grey: castle, horns
• Model Color White Grey: castle, horns
• Model Color Orange Brown: hulls, masts
• Model Color Dark Sand: hulls, masts
• Model Color Gold: golden dragon
• Game Color Bloody Red: roofs, flags, ram
• Model Color Orange Red: roofs, flags
• Model Color Natural Steel: ram
• Model Color White: ribcage. This didn’t work to well, I did some edge highlighting

It’s a long list of paint, but this was done quite quickly.

Details

When beginning to paint this ship, I thought: where are the cannons? Turns out: everywhere! Many in the hulls of the ship, but there are guns in the rock and in the castle as well. I still discovered new guns while finishing the hull and correcting mistakes. I painted all the guns black. Then I painted them with The Army Painter Plate mail metal. The same process for the anchors, here and there on the rocks.

One of the shipwrecks has what looks like metal stars. These are also painted with Plate Mail Metal. I made a bit of a mess of the ship with the stars and tried to rectify this, by painting lines on it in different browns. This will hopefully make it look like planks. Finally I’ve thrown Brown Model Wash over this wreck and all the anchors. The wash makes the metallic paint look a bit more weathered and less shiny. It also makes the lines I’ve painted stand out less, creating a more natural look.

How to paint white or any colour on black primer? Painting white directly on black didn’t work well earlier in the project when painting the sails of the wrecked ships. This time I used a different approach: paint all the areas to be painted in any colour grey first. I used Model Color Light Grey for this. While painting the castle on The Bloody Reaver, I noticed this painted makes the black primer disappear completely after two coats.

Basecoating

The next step was to paint the large surfaces in the colours I wanted on top of the grey:

• Game Color Off White: the skeletons and anchors. This took several coats, even on the grey.
• Game Color Bloody Red: essentially everything I didn’t want to paint in an other colour. This is a new paint is this project. It’s a “tomato red”, brighter than Model Color Carmine Red, which I’ve used so far.
• Panzer Aces Old Wood: the scrolls
• Model Color Orange Red: the back of the scrolls

Highlights and details

Model Color White: the skeletons and anchors

Model Color Dark Sand: the edges of the scrolls

Model Color Burnt Red: the words “Bloody Reaver”! ?

And done! With the sails finished all I need to do is glue them in place. This was more complicated than it looks. It’s as if this miniature (and a few others in this game) was designed by someone who doesn’t paint miniatures. To paint in subassemblies and then put everything together was sometimes difficult. But to assemble everything first and then paint it, would have been worse.

All that remains to be done is varnishing and the Bloody Reaver is finished:

This is the end of the project. Everything has been painted and I can start playing the game! ?