After the hound debacle, I decided to work on some Marauders of Chaos. The guys over in the WoC forum were really helpful when it came to information about assembling and painting these guys.
With their advice, I decided to do some bit-raiding from my Marauder Horsemen and a Chaos Spawn. Sadly, however, I was not in possession of those of kits and would have to wait.
Since a friend had given me what looks like about 30 Marauder models in different states of assembly, most of them un-primed, I decided to do a practice round with some of his guys. I scraped off mold lines, went ahead and glued on the shields knowing I'd wait for that on the next Marauders, washed them with soap and water and once dry, priming them with Floquil's Black Base Figure-Primer, a spray that's made by Testor's IIRC.
I also decided not to worry about the shoulder joints. I might try tattoos on these guys, though I've never really pushed myself to learn freehand. On the next guys, the fancy ones, I'll use shoulder pads because green stuffing these spaces is going to be a pain in the ass.
I did the metal with a mix of dark steel and black, washed it with GW's purple wash followed by the GW sepia wash. Then I drybrushed it with dark steel and medium steel to highlight. It looks like crap, but them my metals usually do.
Eventually, these guys will be mounted on slate bases from Back2Base-IX, but for now I superglued them to their GW bases for painting. I'll pop them off later with a hobby knife or paring knife.
I intend to use sprue trimmings to make crystals to embed among the rocks. It's something I saw a guy named Corai do to his units on another forum, Asrai.org, I think. He did a great job, and I plan to do something similar and make a display board to go along with the theme. I can't decide if I want to do snow on the rocks yet. When I think of the colors I'm going to paint the army, I'll probably stick to summer or autumn.
Observations along the way:
Some of the sculpting is just bad, and there's a pronounced difference between the new and old plastic sculpts. The shoulder and arms don't fit well, especially if either the shield or weapon arm is positioned too closely to the body. Some of the weapon hafts, chest straps, and wristbands have metal studs that will make painting the leather a pain. On the next batch, I'll probably shave all those off. I did it on some here, but not enough.
I also altered some of the helmets. The horns are at bent at awkward angles for painting. Some I clipped off, and for the pairs I left, I'll keep them fairly simple.
Here are the paints I'm using for the skin. I always mix up a good batch of black and whatever colors I'm using, in this case GW's foundation Tallarn flesh. The black serves as my eraser. The Tallarn flesh has to be thinned quite a bit. GW advertises it as covering in one coat, which I suppose it does if you put it on undiluted. It takes me about 20-25 minutes to apply a basecoat consisting of about 3 diluted layers of Tallarn flesh to a single model.
It's painstaking, and right now, my fingers hurt. I lost several hours painting today due to a squirrel in my attic, or I'd have all the buggers done.
Tomorrow, I'll paint the neck bands, something I should've done along with the metallics. I'll use Vallejo's tin bitz because it's the darkest bronze I have. I'll wash the necklaces and flesh either with Ogryn or Sepia, not sure yet. Then I'll paint the skin with the RMS Tanned Skin triad and move on to the pants, foot and legware, and leather.