Monday, November 8, 2010

Blood Angels Sanguinor work in progress and some starter wet blending tips :D

Hi,

I decided that it is time to paint my Sanguinor model that waited for 6 month for this moment hehe. This one is a serious NMM chalange and i hipe i will do this sculpt justice.

I managed to paint the front of him but there is much work to do and some areas ned more work to be finished, but here u have him.


I must add some blinks here and there but I’m overall happy how he looks now so lets hope the rest will turn out great.

For the golden NMM I used:
Shades - were made with a mix of Snakebite Leather and Chaos Black in proportions of 1:1 (u can add a little brush of Regal Blue to push the color into dark green color).
Base Color - Snakebite Leather
First highlight - here I used Bleached Bone.
Second final highlight - a mix of Bleached Bone and Skull White. the blicks were done with pure Bleached Bone.

I use glazes but most of the time I paint using the wet blending technique.
Wet blending originates from oil paints and its used there very often. Some ppl say that its difficult to blend with acrylic colors but its possible and it can be done even with a Retarder Medium (
this substance prolongs the drying time so u can blend more easily).

If you want to learn a basic thing about wet blending try to make this exercise and maybe you will like the results.

First of all we will use the same colours that I used for Sanguinors NMM (Chaos Black/Snake bite 1:1 mix, Snakebite Leather, Bleached Bone, Skull White). Then you must have a soft brush and the larger areas you paint the larger brush you should use because it will be easier to blend.

For the demonstration I used a 20mm plasticard square but I recommend to use a 10mm one and it will be easier to do it. I used a retarder medium but I recommend to use it only on lager surfaces (such as cloaks or vehicles).

  1. Apply the base color first to cover the undercoat because it will help to keep the middle color visible and you wont have problems with covering white or black primer while blending.
  2. Seconldy aplay starting from the left: Chaos Black/Bleached Bone Mix, Snake Bite Leather, Bleahced Bone. The trick is to do it fast so the paints are still wet (the retarder medium helps with this problem)
  3. If you have all the colors in place you can now start to blend. You do it with clean smooth strokes starting from the brightest color and going to the darkest. The only way to blend is to move the brush vertically (looking at the photo it will be up and down) and going from the brightest to the darkest color as I mentioned earlier. The whole process is similar to dry brushing but the paint is on our painted surface. It should look like this if you do it properly.
  4. Sometimes it will be necessary to put more paint on the painted surface because of over blending a chosen color so its not visible and with bigger surfaces you should blend the surface few times to have the final.

If you have some questions just ask them and I will try to help because unfortunately its hard to show this in a written tutorial. This technique isn’t easy at start but if you master it will be a good addition to your painting arsenal.

So I wish you happy painting ^_^

2 comments:

  1. My first time posting here, I arrived here from a miniature of a champion in coolminiornot, amazing job. Congratulations.

    My question is... blending is more for other kind of paints, that was my thinking... but blending with acrylics were allways hard for me to blend, that is why I am using transparencies instead.
    But... here I can see that you achive a good blending, so you can gess now my question :-).
    How did you do to avoid that the acrylic get dry before you start the blending?, do you use a retarder (I don't know if I used the right word, I wanted to say something that delay the paint to dry). Besides that what do you use to dilute the acrylic? water? a mix of something?
    Thank you. Eduardo (from Argentina)

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  2. Hi. I use water to dilue acrylic paint and Valejo Drying Retarder to prolong the draying process. The Drying Retarder helps me with larger surfaces but on smaller ones I manage to do it withought its help but you must do it fast. I hope this helps but I should tell you that at start it was hard form me to :D

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