Painting Relictors

[Billyjoeray]

Hello all,

I was toying with the idea of starting a Marine Army and I really like the Idea of using the Relictors as my color scheme, but I am having an issue with the fact that they are relatively bland looking, especially from afar. I'd really like this to be a semi-competitive army, but the problem is that a good amount of the tournaments that are held in my area are ridiculously soft score heavy (over 1/4 of all possible points for overall are from paint points) and I have a problem making the dark gray/black of the Relictors really stand out and "pop" enough to get a decent paint score. It all tends to look like a poorly done paint job, especially from more than arm's distance away. I was wondering if anyone here could offer some suggestions for how I would get a nice looking Relictors scheme while keeping it in the darker gray tones. (I'm not a fan of the really light color scheme that GW has. I can't remember where it is, but it is dramatically lighter. Makes them look too much like SWs). Anyway, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Firepower]

It depends, are you going for a flat gray like codex/fortress gray, or a blue gray like Shadow gray? I ask only because there seems to be a split between the art and model present here: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Relictors

 

Still, that link gives a good hint for livening up the models. Grays, black, and some other colors are relatively quick and simple to paint, which opens up time to do more fine detail work like scripture (such as Black Templars) company/squad/honorific insignias (like most codex chapters) or, my favorite, battle damage. The drawing of the Relictor on the link is pretty banged up and dirty, and it helps significantly to break up the solid silhouette (the realistic lighting does too, but that's a much trickier thing to accomplish on a model). The other nice catch of battle damage is that it can be fairly quick and easy to accomplish, as some links i have bookmarked may demonstrate:

 

http://z11.invisionfree.com/Work_In_Progre...?showtopic=6603 -mostly useful for banging up vehicles, though the impact craters can be done on small scale if you use them sparsely and selectively. Glowing effects and stuff like that could also bring up the drab army a notch.

 

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/224015.page -quick, simple, effective.

 

There are some floating around in the tutorial sections here on B&C too, but I don't have them bookmarked. One thing I hope to find a good tutorial for is using those powder smear things to make dirt effects and such, which works a real treat and real quickly at that. I've never been able to manage the effect with paint :drool: