They’re Iyanden. Not Bananaman. Testing colour schemes for my 40K army. Part One.

Crikey, I’ve picked an army and I’ve written a list.  Now it’s time to crack on with building and painting the ar….woah, woah, woah.  Let’s just pump the brakes a bit here.

When I painted my last army (my 30K ECs) I did no testing of paint schemes before hand.  That’s how I ended up with some elements I like (the purple of the armour) and some that really hold the army back (the white).  Also, to achieve the purple of the armour I went a weird direction (it was all brush painted and involved dry brushing with chrome as zenithal highlights then layers of ink with Citadel Lahmian Medium).  It looks cool and I’m happy with it, but I have an airbrush now and I intend to use it on my 40K army to speed things up and get a more consistent finish.

Whilst the risk would be bigger with Alaitoc, I’m still very conscious of making sure that my Iyanden DON’T end up looking like a character from my childhood.  His name was Eric Wimp.  But you may have heard of him as…

Bananaman!

 

Sorry…

Bananaman!

 

How am I going to avoid this?  I think the yellow is key here.  I want something slightly off the wall rather than the canary yellow I see on all the GW images.  Something slightly warmer.  The blue I’m less concerned about – it’s a relatively easy colour to paint (certainly compared to yellow) and there will be much less of it in the army.  Getting that yellow right is key.

Soooo…Before I dive into the actual testing, what am I trying to achieve here?

• I want the colours to be very consistent across the army (no mixing)
• I want the majority of the colours to be airbrushed
• I want the army to be relatively quick to paint
• If it can’t be quick, it has to be easy (I want to avoid many hours of high end painting, I just don’t have the lifestyle to support it)
• I want the contrast between the yellow and the blue to be really strong
• I want the first pass of the army painting to be neat and simple so I can progress the army further in the future (so in the first instance I probably won’t be doing any decals or free hand, just neat tabletop).

This contrast point is a big one for me.  I think contrast makes a miniature more interesting to look at and more interesting to paint.  Contrast can be in colour terms (which is baked into the Iyanden yellow and blue scheme) but also in texture too.  I don’t want to generate lots of different textures within the colours but I’d like the yellow and the blue to be obviously different textures.

Very arbitrarily I’ve arrived at a polished marble / stone finish as one texture and a metallic finish as the other texture.  I think they are achievable with an airbrush. and very replicable.

Ok, so I’ve sat down and thought through how I could achieve those with four complete test models and with two variations of paints.  I’ve had some, small, success with Tamiya clear paint before.  When I first got my airbrush I tried them to see if I could get a metallic finish using them over metallic undercoats and they came out well:

So I’ll be using:

• Tamiya clear yellow over a metallic undercoat scheme (Vallejo gloss black primer, Vallejo acrylic metal copper, Vallejo acrylic metal gold and Vallejo acrylic metal white aluminium as a light sketch) for one of the bodies.  Anyone who has used Tamiya clears knows that they need thinning through an airbrush.  The terminator above is cool and I like him but the paint is very heavy in some areas.  That’s a 1:3 paint to thinner ratio so I’m going to go with a 1:5 ratio.  It takes a lot of painting – five coats usually – but I’m looking forward to seeing it.
• The same Tamiya clear yellow recipe over a non metallic light sketch of Vallejo Game Air brown, bone and white on another of the bodies
• Tamiya clear blue over a white metal light sketch on one of the helmets
• Tamiya clear blue over a non metallic light sketch on another of the helmets

So that will give me a metal texture body and a stone texture body and the same for the helmets all in Tamiya clears.

So I don’t have all my eggs in one basket I’ll also be replicating exactly the same undercoats as above but painting over with thinned Vallejo Game Air yellow (again 5:1 thinner to paint) again with five coats.

TL;DR I’ll have stone and metal bodies and helmets with two different paint colours for each to choose from.

Actually, this is all too long to read already so I’ll stop this here and put the actual results in a separate post.  As ever, any comments, let me know!