Heresy Era World Eaters - First Test Model!

As I'd mentioned in my last post, I have been working on a test model for the World Eaters to try out some various new techniques that I haven't used recently. My Thousand Sons were done up in a "fresh of the showroom floor" style, but I think the World Eaters would benefit from looking a bit more worn and grimy (and blood spattered). In order to give myself some decent areas to work on, I grabbed one of the Contemptor Dreads, stripped the old paint and gave it a shot!

Remember this guy? He was originally intended for the Thousand Sons, but I decided that it didn't really fit my theme. That said, he now looks like this:

Again, leaning heavily on Ron from From The Warp's tutorials on painting white, I started with a zenithal primering method. I started off with a medium grey primer and gave the whole thing a good coat, then grabbed a light grey primer and gave it another coat, though this time I only hit it from a little above horizontal up to vertical. After that dried I hit it one more time with a pure white primer though only from (more or less) directly overhead. This gave the whole model a fairly decent grey-to-white shading for all the armor plates. I touched up some of the edges with skull white, but other than that, relied on the white primer entirely for the armor itself. Easy peasy!

After that step, I went in and painted all of the bits that were going to be metal in chaos black, followed by a boltgun metal layer and a black wash. The blue areas were coated in Regal Blue with an Ultramarines Blue highlight, and the various purity seals and whatnot were picked out in their appropriate colors. Then I took a run at painting on the World Eaters symbol as detailed in my previous post.

To represent the weathering and blood spatter, I went at the lower legs and feet with Chaos Black stippled on with a sponge, and similarly with Dark Flesh on the power claws. Then I went in and drybrushed Boltgun Metal over the black, and Red Gore over the Dark Flesh, leaving some of the darker colors in the recesses. I used some Blood Red sparingly on the extreme edges of the Red Gore, then used an old toothbrush to 'flick' some Blood Red spatters onto the model. In all cases I think I was a little too heavy-handed in my application - definitely a case of "less is more", and in the future I'll be more reserved about adding on the weathering and spatter.

I also gave some thought to what company the World Eaters would be part of - The 8th company was led by Kharn, but I'm not planning on using him, so I settled on the 7th company. After all, I am Mordian 7th! Seemed appropriate. Heh. For the base I wanted something muted so I went with Shadow Grey on the rock and Graveyard Earth on the dirt. Over all of that I gave it a liberal application of Devlan Mud, followed by a drybrush of Stonewall Grey on the rock, and some tufts of static grass on the dirt.

All in all I'm about 85% pleased with how it turned out - learned a lot about the paint scheme and I'm looking forward to working on the rest of the army!