HH Raven Guard Paint Scheme

[SyNidus]

So how is the HH Raven Guard paint scheme achieved? I'm planning to restart my RG army, but i don't want to go through the usual Spray chaos black and then highlight. What are some ways to add some depth?

[Imren]

Regardless of how you decide to do you paintscheme you will not escape the fact that you will have to have black as a base colour and have highlights. However, you can do the paintscheme a bit interesting with weathering so that the recessess can have dirt instead of pitch black.

Start out with a environment you want your army to be in. This will guide your weathering colour scheme. Here are suggestions:

• Desert theme: pin wash with light browns such as Raw Umber mixed in with a bit white and consider using GW Agrellan Earth drybrushed with lighter browns and bone colour. For a very nice and subtle dust effect you could airbrush a 1:1 mixture of Tamiya Flat Earth and Flat Flesh diluted 1:1 with Tamiya X20A thinner, go with a sweep over the feet and let it dry before next sweep, evaluate if you want another sweep after each sweep, the dust effect looks better when applied thin. less is more here.

• Mars theme: pin wash with Burnt Sienna and use GW Martian Ironearth for basing. For dust effect you dilute Martian Ironearth in X20A thinner (dries faster when airbrushed) and do the dust effect same way as with desert theme above.

• Wasteland/urban dirt scheme: pin wash with Van Dyke brown and have a darker browns with greys for your basing.

For the Raven guard black I suggest to consider doing your highlights with a subtle colour tint, but I stress out being subtle here, otherwise it will look like GW Dark Eldar paint scheme where you have either turqoise or purple highlights over black base.

So for painting a whole space marine army all over again I strongly suggest using airbrush. So the following paint scheme uses grey highlights but with a subtle blue tint (its a paint scheme recommended by ex-FW painters).

(VMA = Vallejo Model Air)

 

Kit list for this paint scheme is:

• Airbrush
• Tamiya flat black
• Tamiya X20A thinner
• VMA Bluegrey
• VMA Medium sea grey
• VMA Pale grey blue
• synthetic round liner size 1 or 0 or (for pin washing)

 

Procedure:

1. Prime black.
2. Decide on where to place your highlights, keep in mind that when higlighting black you want the keep the highlights close to the edges to prevent the model looking grey, however there is a cleanup step at the end that helps remedy overdoing the grey highlights.
3. 1st highlight of VMA Bluegrey over the panels and edges.
4. 2nd highlight closer to the panel edges with VMA medium sea grey.
5. 3rd and final higlight with VMA pale grey blue only at the very edges.
6. Bring down your airbrush output pressure and do a very very thin glaze all over with a 1:1 mixture of Tamiya X20A thinner and Tamiya flat black, this will bring together the highlight layers and smoothen out their transitions, also it will dull down the highlights a  bit to bring them back to blackish instead of grey and help you reblacken those aras were you overdid the grey highlights so this step you use to clean up ovedone highlights.
7. Airbrush thinned gloss varnish and do your decals/transfers.
8. Paint your detail (eye lenses, weapons, all the metals grenades pouches etc.
9. Using white spirit dilute the oilpaint of your choice for pin washing as per the basing themes above an using a fine synthetic brush (size 1 or 0 round liner is good for this) do your pin wash in the recesses around armour panels.
10. Do you final weathering with scratches on the armour.
11. Do your dust effect (as per your chosen basing theme above) around the feet of the infantry or around the lower 3rd of the vehicle hulls.

 

Good luck!

[SkimaskMohawk]

Just in terms of colour, adding a drop of blue to your black will make it deeper. I basically have a great ghetto version of the post above, but that also requires an airbrush.

Mine is Vallejo model air black with the aforementioned drop of blue angels blue in it as a base oat. Add a drop of white and do a 45 degree zenithal highlight, followed by another drop of white and a 90 degree of highlight. Glaze it down with your starting black, highlight with eshin grey (with a paint brush).

Weathering and detail work is what's going to add a lot of depth, unless you get in some sick transitions (which ruins the raven guard look imo).

 

The Reivers + Lieutenant are painted this way, the Intercessor was slightly different.

[Marshal Rohr]

I hand paint blacks using various mixtures of abaddon and stormvermin or mechanicus. I use mechanicus for cloth, and stormvermin for armor.