Iron Hands - Land Raider painted

Well, the forge world order has been delayed - Apparently the Iron Hands shoulder pads that I'd included in the order are pre-order only (thought they had already been released) which means the whole shipment is going to be on hold until the 30th. That's a little annoying as it means I have two less weeks to get everything finished than I had thought. On the up side that also means that the second half of the order (which I'd figured on making as soon as the order page comes up for Massacre) will likely arrive at the same time as the first. It's gonna be an avalanche of resin!

So, since I don't have any Iron Hands to work on, I figured I'd work on some Iron Hands. Heh. In order to 'get my eye in' on the paint scheme for the 30k models I figured that I'll just churn along on the 40k ones. I wanted to try out the vehicle scheme, so out came a conversion model that my friend gave me (along with the rest of the 40k Iron Hands as well). Needed a little TLC, but all in all I love the extended assault ramp and the big ol' mechanicus symbol!

 

Fairly simple scheme - prime black, give the whole thing a drybrush of shadow grey (hitting the upper edges especially), hit all of the metal parts in boltgun metal, then wash it all down with black. The white parts are then picked out in shadow grey followed by ghost grey, with the extreme edges hit with skull white. Ridged cabling in blue, smooth cabling in yellow, pick out lenses and headlamps and done! Of course, that means you end up with a sort of boring black brick. Time to bust out the sponges!

 

I'm still a novice at weathering, but I feel like I'm starting the get the hang of it. I've always painted my tracks in a dark flesh/earth brown tone, so those colors were then sponged on to the lower half of the tank, trying to mimic the direction the mud would tend to spatter (up and rearward). Then a light sponging of khaki just here and there was applied to push the color a little further.

 

Finally I went in and daubed some chocolate brown here and there where I wanted to represent places the paint had been worn down to bare metal - Places such as leading edges where it would logically be scraped away, around the sill of the doors where they'd hit the ground. Once that was on, they got picked out in boltgun metal (leaving some of the brown showing) and the extreme edges in shiny silver. I tried my hand at some long scrapes along the top of the tank, but they are less convincing than I'd like. Still, practice makes perfect!

All in all it took about three hours, and turned out looking pretty decent. I'm definitely going to be adding similar weathering to my guard tanks, it really helps break up the monotony of all that black!