Coils of the Hydra: Heresy Alpha Legion Tactical Squad 1 WIP

Now that my Infinity itch is scratched and the Ordinatus Ulator is consecrated and ready for mass destruction, its time to slip back into the Hydras grasp and get some more mini's done!

Now you may be asking, dear reader, what happened to the Sicarian? Well, for all intensive purposes it is complete, but i am waiting for something special to arrive from Fallout Hobbies before i can call it finished. More on that soon!

In  the meantime I've turned my attention to one of two Tactical Squads that I've got tee'd up for the Alpha Legion.

Before i started i got the whole squad mounted on some wooden blocks for easy of painting. Not something I've usually bothered with before, but due to the amount of airbrushing the Alpha Legion require i took the time do get it done. This squad had had the Alpha Legion torsos and heads added. 

Right onto the painting. After completing the Destroyer Squad i wanted to see if i could achieve better shading during the application of the Teal base coat, which would of course aid the washes later on. So i decided to give zentithal shading/base coating a go.

When i tried to achieve better shading on the Sicarian i used black on a white undercoat. This made the Teal darker in the areas where the black was applied. Afterwards i thought the black made the Teal a bit to dark, so this time i'm going to apply the same principle but with grey. So i tried the whole process on a test model before i rolled it out on the rest of the squad.

Then i applied white to the areas that i wanted the Teal to be brighter on. In retrospect i should have been a bit more careful in the application here, but i pressed on.

Feeling rather good about things so far, i pressed on with a thin coat of my transitional Teal paint. And that was where the magic ended....the paint killed the whole effect and did nothing for the model at all!

Feeling despondent about my experiment, i tried to reverse engineer the effect by spraying on some Teal lightened with some white. This only went on to kill the teal effect and make the colour 'matt' rather than metallic!! Disaster!

Never mind, back to the original plan of white undercoat with Teal over the top then!

I'm glad i gave it a go, but to be honest, i think the paint selection let me down here. I think this effect will work much better with colours that are a bit more transparent (like washes or very thinned acrylics) so that the effect shows through. The Teal paint is a bit to heavy for it here. As I've got units on the go in this scheme as well, i can't face changing it now.

After the failed experiment i moved on to the squads bases. Urban rubble is the theme here (as it is for most of my armies!) I applied some green stuff to the bases first to give them a bit of texture, then sanded and sprayed. I may add some black oil paint wash over them as well to give them a bit more definition.

More on these and the Sicarian soon!

The GunGrave