The Kabal of the Crimson Woe, Part 9 - Assembly line painting the troops

I had a long weekend this past week and was feeling the urge to paint. My initial intention was to paint up the Wyches for the Dark Eldar, but as I was pulling them out, I figured I may as well assembly line paint the Warriors and the Trueborn while I was at it. I snapped a couple pictures at more or less the mid-way point and figured I'd share the results:

Now, assembly line painting can get tedious quickly, so I usually try and mix up the order of the models to keep things 'fresh' as I'm going down the lines. In this instance, I made up a 5x5 pattern, alternating between the various unit types. The entire group would be painted up in essentially the same colors, as I'd settled on a red and gold scheme with a blue spot color.

The Warrior unit uses blue on the tabards to give them a little splash of color. I'm still getting a feel for line highlighting the edges of the armor plates, but have a cunning plan: Any of the plates that I felt were especially ham-handed will be painted over in gold. This allows for the models to have a somewhat personalized appearance with each individual having a slightly different pattern of red and gold on their armor. I also touched up the previously-painted Sybarite to match the new color scheme. Unfortunately I just realized in looking at the pictures that I completely missed painting the Warrior eyes along the way. Curses!

The Wyches were going to have several other colors, but to begin with I kept with the red and gold for the armor plates, while their hair picks up the blue spot color theme. The unit has an additional two colors as compared to the rest - The exposed skin was done in Dheneb Stone followed by a Leviathan Purple wash. Once that dried I went back in with Dheneb Stone again to pick out the highlights. For the leather combat suits I didn't want to go with black, so on a lark I took a shot at a dirty white leather look. The pictures are a little blown out, but the skin tone of the wyches is different enough from the leathers that they stand apart from each other.

Last up in the mix is the 5-man squad of Trueborn. Essentially they are simply Warriors with Blasters and a head swap from the Reaver sprues. I'm thinking that they'll end up with much more gold accent plates than the vanilla Warriors to help them stand out a bit. I'd just started the gold pass, but I was losing the light and wanted to snap some in-process pictures, hence the decided lack of gold on most of the models in the pictures thus far.

A phenomenon that I've noticed is at a certain point in the painting process, the models just look like garbage. When doing a large batch of models at once, I find that it is somewhat disheartening at a certain point to look at them and think "wow, they ALL look terrible!". I have to force myself to press on at that point, relying that in a couple more steps they'll turn the corner and start looking decent again.

...At least that's the theory!