Part two of my Hellbound article, and I’ll begin by saying it all went horribly wrong, very quickly.

I have a certain way of painting purple troops, as Emperors Children are one of my 40k armies, there’s a triple base of VERY watery Lyche Purple, giving a really solid almost glowing effect. This is followed by thinned highlights of the Lyche Purple/Genestealer Purple mix, then Stealer Purple, and on character models I’ve started thinning down the dry colour Lucius Purple for extreme edge highlights.

I had a really smooth purple base on the Hell Brute, and thought hey why don’t i use some ink here to bring out the detail. Smashed the lot with Druichii Purple, let it dry, then realised I’d potentially ruined the whole thing.

Due to the amount of mental detail on the model and the amount the model had darkened with the ink wash, my usual tactic of wet edge highlights for a clean finish just weren’t going to work. I think looking back id just paint ink in to the recesses of the model and take it from there. Alas this was no longer an option so I had to drybrush the lot.

I began with the base colour, then added Genestealer Purple until I was using raw Lucius lightly drybrushing over the whole model. This did I’ll admit, look pretty good, thankfully, despite me not being a real fan of drybrushing until recently (which I’ll discuss in my forthcoming Dryads article).

With the purple base down, it was time to hit the gold. I wanted a lot of gold, as this was not only III Legion, but a dreadnought to boot, just one that had been warped a bit. 99% of the edging would be gold so I based with Balthasar Gold, then washed with Agrax after a test between that and Ogryn Flesh Wash. This gave a darker finish but also lined it in round the edges giving a nice deep shadow between the gold and any other surface it bumped up against. I then painted a layer of Balthasar over that, then Gehenna Gold then finally Auric Armour to get a really bright clean gold effect, it helps here if you thin down the paints. I’m pretty pleased with how that’s come out.

I painted the model in bits to begin with, as the head is behind layers of teeth, which need painting separately. The head was a simple base of bleached bone with highlights of Pallid Wych Flesh and two glazes of Seraphim Sepia. Metals were done as standard, base, Nuln, highlight. It would mostly be obscured so I didn’t put too much attention in to the pipes and such. I’ll mention it might be an idea to cut the pins off your model for assembly later, its a pain to put together and you don’t want to scratch your paint job, clip all the pins off and just glue the model round the edges. I’d change the order I did mine as I have mould lines visible too. I’d paint the face, make the body but leave the spined panel off the front, then assemble after fitting the head. then finally add the front spine piece and the top of the power fist and melta when painted perhaps.

Anyway, on to the rest of the model. As it is, I’ve only just finished up the metals on the fist which I added a brassy colour to counteract the silver and gold and add variety. I did the same on my marines, while this is only 10,000 years previous to 40k and not 1860ad, I wanted an almost steampunk feel to parts to show that these guys were using relics from the Heresy. Hence the brass for the pistons and some of he fine detailing. I used Tin Bitz, which is THE most useful paint ever, given that I never used it at all as a kid. Once washed with Nuln (also very useful) I drybrushed with Tin Bitz again then with Dwarf Bronze. Really looks good, clean and breassy/coppery in shade which is what I was after.

The tentacles I needed to tie in to my other troops, who all have pastel blue hair fading to white, so these would be no different. Its a real Slaaanesh colour and looks boss next to the purples and metals. I base with Enchanted blue thinned down as this is a really thick pigment heavy colour, wash with Asuremen Blue then dry brush up from Enchanted, through Ice Blue on to Skull White at the end. I added another glaze of Guilleman Blue to the base where it hit the warped mouth its coming out of.

My next task is to pick out all the detail on the thing, and there is a whole lot of that, there’s actually more detail on this than my forgeworld Sonic Dread which is surprising. I’ll go over what I did on the rest next session.

I have added below some WIP images of the Nurgle dread as well for comparison, it looks really pallid and ill, much more biological than the Emperors Children dread, its going to be interesting to see the final based models together.