Sunday, February 13, 2011

Baal Predator: A Step by Step Painting and Assemblage Guide (Part 1)

If anyone has any shadow of a doubt that I am a Blood Angels fan, let this be squashed now. Here is some quick background information on this post. I am a relatively new player to the 40k universe and am playing in my local hobby stores escalation league, (Hobby Store: Phoenix Games) on Friday nights at around 6PM. Also, I tend to be a perfectionist, especially with painting. Most parts I have painting individually before assembling.

The paints that I am using for this are as follows:

  • Boltgun Metal

  • Codex Grey

  • Spacewolf Grey (As a highlight)

  • Chainmail

  • Scab Red

  • Red Gore

  • Blood Red

  • Blazing Orange

  • Goblin Green

  • Scorpion Green

  • Skull White

  • Hawk Turquoise

  • Bleached Bone

  • Burnished Gold

  • Shining Gold

  • Chaos Black

  • P3 Armor Wash

  • P3 Flesh Wash

  • White and Black primer


That is a pretty exhaustive list. If you are just trying to pump out a predator, rhino, whatever you can skip some of the colors and go for a more basic quick paint that you can come back to as you have time and desire to make the model pop even more.

A quick note about my priming style for vehicles: I tend to let the primer crowd in certain areas so that when it dries it has a cracked appearance to it. Not only does this make the vehicle look weathered, but it allows me to not have to put “battle damage,” everywhere in order to maintain a used look. Also, I dry brush for vehicles. Especially if I want a weathered quickly painted get back into the action type look. When I do a Tau or Eldar vehicle I tend to paint more with an airbrush and more uniformly. You’ll see this when I bust out with a Stormraven in a few months.

To start, I always leave tracks on the sprue to paint for tanks. It makes it easier to manage, little bits don’t go flying everywhere and it is just as easy to clip them off and give them a quick touch up with chaos black. In fact, this technique works very well for parts that are very small and easy to touch up. Although to be fair, I do sometimes cut out other smaller parts to make sure I get a full primer on it. Especially if that part has to hold a good amount of paint or is a very visible part of the model. Following the tracks, I remove the chassis and side walls prime them up with white primer and get them set to paint.



Here is where you can save some time. I am one of those people where if there is a modeled inside to the model, I feel compelled to paint it. If you are not one of these people you could shave a considerable amount of time by just gluing the hatch door shut and saying to hell with it. I’d estimate at least 2-3 hours, and that is being conservative. For those that do paint the inside, I painted the firewall/control panel/floor panel with boltgun metal followed with armor wash. It gives it a nice dirty used metal look. I followed this by painting the radar and track globe Goblin Green with a highlight of Scorpion Green. The buttons I colored with a mix of Hawk Turquoise, Scorpion Green, Blood Red, and a mix of Skull white/Bleached Bone. I also painted the bolter using my standard blood angels theme regarding them, (Boltgun metal, blood Red, chaos black, ink wash, skull white, and highlights of lighter colors mentioned). I spent a little bit of time painting the benches and other gadgets on this inside panel. I didn’t highlight much of the work in here, besides on the control panel. I also put work into the hatch plate, painting the braided steel with a mix of boltgun metal and chainmail with subtle highlights of codex grey and Spacewolf grey. This was also brushed over with armor wash.

After assembling the walls to the floor panel I glued in the control panel giving me this look found in the picture. Happy with the way it looked I added the top armor and found that there was a giant gap in the plastic that I had missed in my initial fitting. Damn me! Luckily, I had modeling putty around filled in the gap and gave it a very “rough repair” type look. I originally was going to sand it down and give it a nice clean look to fit with the rest of the model. However, I opted for the rough patch look pretending that this Baal Predator had survived many bolts and power fists. I’ll decide later if this worked out, and if not, I’ll be sanding that away and then repainting the front. I’ve pictured here it fully assembled missing some of the finer paint points, and a few parts including the visor that attaches above the drivers’ window in the front armor.

The last part of this post is going to a be a look at the turret. I painted all of these parts individually before assembling. These parts are movable, so I did not want any part to look unfinished. More importantly, I wanted it to fit the theme of the rest of the vehicle. The Twin-linked Autocannon is painted Boltgun Metal with threads of Chainmail. On top of that, they are “held,” together by strips of Red Gore. A quick wash of armor wash gives it a nice used look. Once assembled I did a little detail work on it, including the periscope and ammo cache. The periscope is painted exactly like the radar and globe on the control panel, with a dot of Skull White as a glare. I may go back later and hit the white dot with Bleached Bone to give it a dusty glare look. Time will tell and I’ll let you know if I make this change. The ammo cache I gave my standard metal paint to, you should know by now if you are following this post at all. I followed this up with a very thinned Burnished Gold. Not only does this drop into the crevices much like a wash would, but it gives it an amazing bronze like shine.

Here are thumbnails of my images in a somewhat random order (I'm terrible with this blog thing), including some that did not make it into this post so it doesn't look super cluttered.

That’s it for this post, I need to get back to finishing the Baal, and getting it back up here for you all to see/read and hopefully inspire you! As always, comments are always appreciated

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