Tuesday, November 1, 2016

WIP: SDE Iron Golem


Over the last month, I've been slowly working on the new Iron Golem mini-boss for Super Dungeon Explore. Part of the reason it's taken a while is because I haven't had a lot of chair time over the last month, the other part is that each section is kind of time consuming.

This guy is all silver metals too, and my metallics game has always been on the weak side, but not nearly as bad as my non-metallic metals. For this model I decided to push my limits and really focus on making the true metallic metal paints shine.

To do this, I pulled a few plays out of the non-metallic metals playbook and decided to just play around and see what happens. Namely, pushing contrast and forcing highlights, rather than letting the metallic paint do the highlighting work. Also, I knew that I wanted to keep as far away from drybrushing the metallic paint on to the surfaces. Not that there's anything wrong with drybrushed metallics, I just knew it wasn't the look I was going for on this model.

I've gotten a fair bit of work done on him, and he's turning out great!

To start, I primed the mini with Citadel Chaos Black and then touched up any areas where the spray didn't hit (which was a lot). Sometimes I really don't care for Super Dungeon minis being fully assembled.

After the black was down, I could have started painting on the metallics right then. Instead I started blending white onto the surface in areas where the light should reflect. This worked like dual priming with a zenithal white spray would and prehighlighted the surface. This is where some NMM principles
came in and I used examples of NMM silver to decide where to place the white areas.

Next up, I used a couple rather thinned down coat of Citadel Leadbelcher over the black and white surfaces. This was followed by a blend of Vallejo Black and Leadbelcher in the darker recesses to add depth.

From there I highlighted the areas that were originally white with thinned Citadel Ironbreaker and did a little blending into the Leadbelcher coat underneath to give it a smoother transition. Some areas got 1-2 coats, while lighter areas got more, depending on the lighting.

Finally the very lightest parts as well as any hard edges that would reflect were painted with a few thin coats of Stormhost Silver. The reflecting edges actually were painted with a little bit thicker coat due to the need to keep it from randomly flowing into areas I didn't want it to go.

With the surfaces done it was time to start with the wear and tear. As of right now, I am only going to do dings and scratches, I haven't decided on rust streaks or other corrosion. So far, the surface has a lot going on, and I don't know if adding in anything more would be overkill or not. We'll see how I feel once the whole model is finished.

After the scratches were added to the metal armor, I did a couple thin glazes of Argax Earthshade on them to add in a little bit of color, other than silver to the surfaces.


That's all for now, He's been a slow going project, but he's really taking shape. I think I may have legitimately upped my TMM game on this guy and who knew that it would be from mimicing NMM style.