WIP: BA Sergeants

I'd mentioned earlier that I'd gotten a box of Tactical marines to get my Mech Angels to WYSIWYG-land. What I needed was 2 more sergeants with Infernus pistols and one more dude with a meltagun. I took the oppurtunity to refine my spraying technique a bit further. Here's how it went...


First off, a few tips on spraying. Your best friend when spraying (besides the actual spray paint) is Blu Tack. Mostly, you'll need it for mounting your minis on something so you can easily turn them around while you spray. Some prefer to use double-sided tape on a long piece of wood. I favour Blu Tack and the handy little box the minis came in. Here's an example of some Assault Marines I did some months back:

You may notice they're all headless. Well, since Blood Angel Assault Marines wear yellow helmets, Devastators wear blue, Veterans wear gold and damn near all my sergeants have lovely blonde locks to show off, I usually spray the heads black and paint them seperately.

How to spray? Take the box in hand (preferably wearing a glove) and spray in this pattern, at about 8 inches away:

1) Lower front left;
2) Lower front right;
3) Lower rear left;
4) Lower rear right;
5) Upper front left;
6) Upper front right;
7) Upper rear left;
8) Upper rear right;
9) Directly above.

This is basically how I spray all my minis and get a decently even coat all round. It's best to leave it to dry a while and inspect the models for any spots you've missed. Steps 1-4 and 5-8 are perfectly interchangable, and it's how I did my Necrons:

With my lovely new sergeants, I tried out something a little different. First, I did steps 1-4 with the darker Krylon Burgundy. After that dried, I did steps 5-9 with Army Painter's Dragon Red. The result:

Along the bottom are the heads, mounted on paperclips. The little balls on the models sitting where the heads should be are lumps of Blu Tack, there to mask the area and leave some bare plastic to make glueing the heads on easier. I noticed the red still wasn't quite the angry, bloody red of Citadel's Blood Red, so I went over the model again with a quick thin coat of Blood Red. After that, a splash of Baal Red over everything, and Bob's your uncle. The results are below, with the new sergeants on the left, the old ones on the right.

There's still some work to be done on them, i.e. line highlighting the armour with Blazing Orange (the most tedious damn thing about Blood Angels...), washing some metal bits with Badab Black and maybe a couple of highlights here and there. Still, I'm pretty happy to field them. Here's one of the new sergeants with his squad...

And that's it from me. Hope that was informative. Fingers crossed, the next post will be me unboxing my lovely new Warmachine Battle Box!