How I Develop an Army Scheme - Case Study

Hello again friends,

Here’s a little insight into how I decide on what army to build next. After finishing my initial Kharadron force I’d been thinking about what vanguard-sized army to build next. I wanted to make a significant change from the satisfying-yet-slow approach of the extensive hand-painting I’d done on the sky dwarves.

My roommate and I moved recently into a lovely new flat that has allowed me to set up my first ever dedicated hobby table. Having all of my materials ready and available instead of needing to constantly set it them up and tear them down has been a huge boost for me in staying engaged with the hobby. This is particularly noticeable with the airbrush, which required a large amount of a setup previously that involve laying a canvas painting sheet over our kitchen table when no-one else was home.

So, I knew I wanted to make extensive use of the airbrush. I began looking online for techniques and tips and fell completely under the spell of Marco Frisoni. His youtube channel is superb, he’s a brilliant painter, and he’s got a great joyful vibe. I definitely recommend you check it out.

I particularly enjoyed his videos on:

• Blanchitsu Oil Washing
• Airbrush preshading and zenithal use
• Airbrushing with Inks to add color tones

Note that these videos are not exclusively about the above techniques, but provide strong examples of them that inspired me. I knew I wanted to try out some combination of these techniques so I dug out my old oil paints, and bought some inks to start experimenting with.

I felt that these techniques would work really well on models that have a lot of robes and metals on them. Robes in particular have always been a huge weakness of mine, as I’ve struggled in the past to know where to put highlights and how to push contrasts on large expanses of cloth. I settled on either Lumineth Realmlords or Sacrosanct Chamber Stormcast Eternals to experiment on, and got a box of each.

Before getting into the test models properly I slapped together some easy-to-build space marines I had lying around to see how the inks and my contrast paints would work through the airbrush, as well as how they’d interact with oil. It was very illuminating. Another thing to note is that for both the schemes below there were an additional 1-2 test models where I tried slight variations of the same thing, and the Stormcast I actually stripped before repainting them in a similar scheme to get what I wanted.

While it is a little exhausting, it is quite an organic experience to try out different things and make subtle alterations to how you approach different figures. It's quite satisfying to develop a strategy for an army-size project like this, especially when you’re pushing yourself and using new techniques. It saves you a huge amount of headache in the long run and means you can zero in on what you want and get a consistent looking force. One final note, make sure you write down every detail of your process so once you get the final result you haven't forget anything!

Here is what I came up with for the Lumineth and Stormcast test models:

This Lumineth scheme has a blue done with airbrush zenithal highlights using inks, and then I used a very heavy oil washing to make them grimy and grimdark. I really liked the idea of the typically-fancy looking Lumineth getting grimy and dirty, but I can’t say I loved the need to keep the colors bright silver and blue in order to show off the oil wash. I also didn’t really like the idea of having to do a really dirty or muddy base to give it visual continuity, messy bases don't really appeal to me.

This was my approach with the Stormcast, I didn’t use oils here but made extensive use of the airbrush where I did an initial zenithal highlight with a warm ivory tone, then sprayed a green contrast paint through the airbrush on the main robes which acted as a filter and kept the zenithal highlights underneath. After that I painted the armor by hand before airbrush shading everything with washes or inks from the bottom using sepia and earth tones. There were some final brushed highlights on the top portions of the robes/metals.

I really loved how all of this airbrush work accentuated the cloaks. It was the first time I’d felt like I’d done cloth justice, and had actually made a model look more 3D with my painting.

I also enjoyed the warm tones of the green/gold/brown color scheme and immediately had some strong thematic ideas in my head about where to go with it. The monk-like appearance of the Sacrosanct chamber led me to start thinking about flagstone bases that closely resembled the ones from these easy-to-build test models.

The finished test models.
Note that the white balance in this picture is off, and they are less yellowy than this.

I ended up finishing the models. and while I’ll likely tweak a bit of the shading to make it less heavy, this is pretty much exactly how I want them to look.

For the bases I’ve decided to try out Green Stuff World’s textured rolling pins with some sculpting material from a local arts store and so far, I’m very impressed. I'm planning on having them look like they're part of a monastery of some kind.

Given how much I liked the scheme, and the strong thematic impression that came out of it, I’ve decided to continue with the Stormcast army rather than the Lumineth. I’m looking forward to giving you more updates as they come together.

Thanks for reading!