Painting: Grey Knights Part 4: Eyes and Blade  

Posted by Michael Hogan in , , ,

Welcome to the latest and last part of the beginner's guide on how to paint Grey Knights. In this last part, I will cover painting the eyes and Nemesis Force Weapon with a turquoise and blue shade. It's a very simple and quick process and I prefer to do it in batches. I leave these parts unfinished until I paint a couple models up to that point and do them all at once. Anyways, onto the actual painting.
The end product looks something like this:


Let's focus on the eyes first. I use three colors for this. I do a base of Hawk Turquoise, an oval of Ice Blue, and a single dot of Skull White to represent the very middle of the eye. You can throw Enchanted Blue before the Ice Blue and that will give you a more blue color than green.

It's tough to get a large picture of the eye with it still being in focus, so I "drew" one. It's a bit pathetic, but I hope the concept is intact.
Keep in mind that the white dot can really be anywhere in the Ice Blue circle, it will probably look fine. It's often too difficult to control where exactly it ends up and will probably be a bit larger compared to the other circles, but the general concepts of the colors is usually enough to give a nice effect.

So first color we are going to use is Hawk Turquoise. Get a really tiny detail brush and just try to fill the area in the eye with the color. Don't worry if you get it on the edge that is inside of the eye but part of the armor as it won't be noticeable and it will look fine in the end. Paint the other eye and give it a couple seconds, around 15 or so, to dry and clean off your brush completely with water.

Dry off your brush and then get a tiny bit of Ice Blue. Just dab it onto the area you want the inner circle and repeat for the other eye. Try to be consistent and have both be around the same spot, that way it doesn't look like your brave Knight has crossed eyes. I usually place mine close to the middle but leaning towards the far side of the eyes a tiny bit. The part of the helmet where the "eye" (which is actually a visor-goggle-thing, but I'll keep calling it an eye) dips down is where I aim for, but I always find it much more difficult on the side closer to the Storm Bolter.

Anyways, once you have both of your Ice Blue circles done, clean your brush again and get a tiny dot of Skull White on your brush. Then just lightly dab onto the eye where you want the final glare of white to be. If you can't see it that well just add another dab or two until you are happy. Normally for Space Marines, Games Workshop has a dot in the very corner of the eye, but because those Space Marines' eyes aren't depressed, it looks more natural that way. With this method I like the dot to be in the middle to show where most of the light or psychic power originates from.

That's it for the eye. If you want, you can add some drybrushing around the eye to show an illumination of energy or you can leave it like this. It's a bit tough to get a nice looking glow, so if you are just beginning I would let it be for now until you become a bit more familiar with painting.

Next is the blade. I would pick up your basecoating brush form the other parts and wash it nice and clean. Before we start painting, we should get a simple idea of what we are going for. Here is where my paint skills come in, again. We are going to want to give the weapon a nice undercoat of a desired color, and then kind of wetblend some more color on. You're going to want to be a bit quick and do one side at a time in order to make sure your paints don't dry. So, just for a bit of show, let's say that we want a black base and then "wetblend" red onto it.
We start out looking like this.

Now we want to put a nice and thick line of our red color to blend with.
Chances are, your "black" paint (more generally said: your undercoat) will still be wet when you do this, and that is good. It will mix the colors together nicely and make it look much more smooth. Anyways, while this color is red, we'll want to pull it down the blade, spreading it as we go.
Hopefully, you'll have something like that. In order to give a better idea on how to do this, I'll once again refer to Jawaballs' videos.


Now that you hopefully have a good idea how to do this, let's finish this blade.
I do a coat of Hawk Turquoise, followed by a decently thick amount of Enchanted Blue. I then finish it off with Ice Blue. I'll usually go over with pure Ice blue around the edges of the blade lightly and down the middle. I also paint this from the hilt towards the end, instead of making the end the more colorful piece. Either way, it's a nice effect. You can add colors to my recipe or just use two of them. In the end, it'll be good looking.
You can also paint some Codex or Fortress Grey on the Storm Bolter. Here is how mine looked after some highlights. Just try to get corners and edges, and try to focus on direction of light source.



Here is the finished guy.
(The end Knight)

I hope you enjoyed this final tutorial. If you have any questions or concerns, leave a comment. This overall tutorial should be helpful to any new painter, so be sure to show a friend who is picking up the hobby.
Also be sure to keep up with Fritz40k, as I'll be doing guest posts there, but I'll post most of the related ones here.
Until next time,
Xethik

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at Tuesday, November 16, 2010 and is filed under , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

3 comments

i really like your power weapons

November 22, 2010 at 6:59 PM

Thanks. They are pretty easy to make, too, so don't be discouraged to try. If you have any troubles, just let me know and I'll try to help out.

November 22, 2010 at 7:42 PM

Cool to hear your posting on Fritz's blog!
I normally go for more gradient (more eye catching :P and takes attention from other not so good details) but you have a nice smooth gradient and it looks amazing!

November 24, 2010 at 8:27 AM

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