Monday, February 19, 2018

Miniature Monday - Blue Kastelan Robot



Kastelan Robots are probably my favorite model in the Adeptus Mechanicus line of Warhammer 40,000 models. They're big stompy bots, which aren't cyborgs and need to be controlled by a handler in order to operate on the battlefield.

They also are very old, in 40k terms, older than the Imperium of Man. That gave me plenty of ideas to go with.

For my army, I knew that I wanted to have the robots in diffferent colors than the green that is seen across the rest of my army. The idea being that these guys collect robos and use parts from other fallen robots to rebuild two downed robos into one operational robo.

The first of many Kastelan Robots, this guy was my test run on painting them as much as he was also my first one for my army. His eyes were also the subject of my tutorial on painting glowing eyes.

Let's take a look.


Each robot has a different story to them, they aren't fleshed out narratives or anything like that though. Instead, they are seeds of ideas and ways for me to plan out which armor plates are missing and why.

For this one I was using a replacement head without the helmet on. With that in mind, I decided that the top part of his backpack, rear back panel, left arm and lower half of his leg would all be replacement parts.

The idea for the battle damage being that he was caught in an explosion, or hit with artillery, which blasted those parts off and disabled him. His arm and back were repaired with parts from another robot, but unfortunately they couldn't replace the shroud over his head, so he has to live on without.

With that in mind, I could start painting him.

I painted this robot with a mix of Black, Stegadon Scale Green and Sotek Green and Lothern Blue for the blues. I did this because I wanted to try something other than the usual Kantor Blue, Caledor Sky and Lothern Blue.

Interestingly enough, there is only a slight turquoise tint to the blue, which was surprising, I was expecting more. Either way, I like it a lot.

Once the blue was all painted I weathered it before starting on the replacement parts.

I took a natural sponge and dabbed him with Leadbelcher for miscellaneous chipping on him, and that was that.

Where the replacement parts would be I made it as heavy as I could with Leadbelcher and then dabbed it with Black and Stormhost Silver.  This gave it a nice varied surface texture, like its been beat to hell and the metal is pock marked from battle damage.

The replacement parts were all painted in the same colors as my Deathwing Terminator Captain, because I felt the contrast would work nicely and I'm also trying to challenge myself on these to come up with interesting color combos that don't look gaudy or horrible together.

These were weathered with a light sponging like the rest of the armor. I specifically kept them a bit cleaner than the blue armor, so it looked like they were definitely replacement  parts and not part of his original color scheme.

All of his weapon options are also painted, while the shoulder mounted weapons are painted with black bases on them so I don't have to worry about matching shoulder armaments with specific robots later on.

That's it for now, below you can see some detail shots as well as a 360 degree video.

Thanks for reading, and as always you can check out my progress on other projects as they happen on Twitter and Instagram