Toxic's 3rd Company Ultramarines

[Gawain Veteris]

The blue on your MKV tactical marine is excellent, Brother. May I press you for a recipe?

[Toxichobbit]

Well it's been a while since i updated this - why do i agree to painting challenges when i know i'm going to be on holiday? :lol:. Well, that and helping out for a family wedding. But, i'm back from holiday now and the wedding is tomorrow, so after that i should be able to knuckle down and get my stuff finished up. Or at least that's the plan and given that it's about 3 weeks till the deadline, i'd better make sure i stick to it.

Anyway, i've still managed to get a fwe things done, so there are some actual updates.

First up we have the last two members of the assualt squad. The MkVI still needs some GS work on the knife scabard, but aside from that they're ready for priming.

Next we have the last Tactical Marine, already primed and base coated. Although i started off my WIP with a full squad of 10 Tacticals, i've made some changes to poses over the course of the challenge as i had too many in the stock pose of bolter at waist height. This guy is the final pose correction, everything else can stay as it is or i'll never get the stuff painted.

Here is the progress made on the first half of the Tactical Squad. The Marine with the targeter is the standard i'm aiming for, otherwise i'll end up with only part of my vow painted. Everything on him is painted to a basic standard. The blue is completely finished but some of the details are just flat colours. My intent is to get every Marine in my challenge painted to this level, then i can go back and take my time shading and highlighting details, until they're all at a level i'm happy with. The MkV Marine is the closest to the level i want them all at eventually, although i still need to go back and do a final highlight on the metallics (currently they're dulled by a layer of Dulcote) and use gloss varnish on the eye lenses.

I've also done a bit of work on improving my photography. I've taken new shots of the Librarian and Techmarine, this time using a better set up. It's still not perfect, i only have one light source (plus natural light) and i don't have any difusers, but i think it's still an improvement over the pictures of these two characters earlier on in the thread. I'd like to get a better balance of light across the miniature, as currently you can't tell where the shading is (as it's all in shadow from the light source) and the images are still a bit too dark (especially noticeable on the Techmarine). Plus the armour colours still look a lot flatter than they do when you look at the models normally. I'm not sure exactly how to rectify that, but i'll keep fiddling until i manage to get a result i'm happy with.

So that's it for now. I'm hoping that next week i'll be able to post the second half of the Tactical Squad, all finished to the same level as the targeter Marine earlier. That will leave me approximately two weeks to paint up the Assualt Squad and hopefully complete my ETL challenge on time.

The blue on your MKV tactical marine is excellent, Brother. May I press you for a recipe?

Sorry for the late reply, been on my hols ;). The recipe is close to the GW standard, with some colours swapped out for paints from the P3 range. The reason i use paints from P3 is that they are a liquid pigment, which makes blending a lot easier, as opposed to GW which are ... non-liquid pigment, or something like that (i can't remember the exact term). So, the recipe i used was;

Exile Blue base

Exile Blue + Thamar Black shading

Exile Blue + Ultramarines Blue (old GW as there's no P3 match for this colour) hightlight

Ultramarines Blue hightlight

Ultramarines Blue + Frostbight highlight.

Also, the technique differs from GW's technique. I've blended (or attempted to at least) the shades and highlights, taking into account a zenith (from the top) light source. So the highlights tend to be either on the top or bottom of armour plates, depending on where the shadows fall, with only a bit of edge highlighting on the very extreme areas of plate. IMHO, this gives a lot nicer effect than the standard GW shade the cracks and highlight the edges, which isn't a true shade and highligh, but more a way of seperating the different parts of the miniature and giving a lot of definition. Edge highlighting is a very good way of showcasing a sculpt as it gives good definition to each individual part, but it's not in the slightest bit realistic. I'm not sure exactly how much of an effect the different techniques have on how the recipe looks, but i suspect it has at least some impact on the blue in comparison to GWs ultramarines, even though it's an almost identical paint recipe. I'm hoping to get good with this technique one day, but for the moment the results seem to be decent so i'm happy with them.

I have no experience with the new GW range, so i have no idea what the colour conversions would be, but i do know the colour conversions for the old range at least.

Exile Blue - Regal Blue

Thamar Black - Chaos Black (or any other plain black)

Frostbight - Space Wolves Grey

Hope that helps ;).