The new guard and a painting journey.

Have you guys seen any pics of the new guard online yet? I will post one pic here but for the most part I think the pics have been pretty well played out all over the net. The pic I am posting is the Valkerie pic that Plastic Legions put up. I got it from Riddle of Steel so thanks has to go out to both of them.
What a cool and inspiring photo. I can just picture painting one of them up in the flavor of Ultramar. There are lot's of other preview pics on warseer and Dakka Dakka respectively. Both of which can be reached by going to those sites. I am sure they will be easy to find. If anyone can't find them let me know and I will post threads or just PM you on Ordo. I am really excited about the new guard codex coming out. Not sure when exactly I am going to be starting this army as with this economy those types of questions are tentative at best but I know I am really warming to the Ultramar concept and it will most likely happen at some point.

A painting journey

Tonight I am going to start painting on some of the newer models in my collection that I am going to be bringing to TSHFT. In doing so I will go through the process of what I do when I paint them up. If any of you see any real flaws in what I am doing please let me know so that I can change bad habits.

The first thing I do with my minis is clean them, file off the mold lines, and then prime them with black primer. I was thinking about doing white for the scouts but decided against it and went with the black. Once that is done I dry brush the whole mini in boltgun metal. This brings out the details of the mini and let's you know where all the shading details should be. It's like a guide coat for your placement of paint and highlights. Here is an example that I photographed earlier tonight.

You can see that when you do this the details of highlight and shadow really stand out. Take a look at the pants and the arms, also the highlights and shadows in the face are more defined to. This is a real dry brush to. There is barely any paint on it at all. It is even dryer than a dry brush would normally be. I actually used a bit to much paint for these.

Anyways now when I go to paint the actual colors onto the mini I will be able to make out the highlights that I want to accentuate while keeping brighter colors away from the shadows easily. I was taught this technique by an excellent top notch painter who probably would not want me to expose his name here. His technique is much more precise and expert than mine but I took what he taught me and have tried to batch paint with it. It has worked fairly well so far but the results are far from the master of this technique. You know who you are.

Anyway that sums up the basic steps I go through when starting a model. I will post more techniques as I go through the posts and may even post more tonight. I would not count on it though. I am going to bed soon. LOL. Thanks again for following the blog. I really appreciate it.