Terminators: Arms & Armaments

Last post left off with me having finished up 15 magnetised terminator models - which of course left me with a massive pile of magnetised arms to paint as well... 

For some reason I thought these would be super quick, and while individually that is probably true... I had 24 pairs of arms (plus 2 cyclone launchers) for a hefty 50 pieces to paint. In hindsight, the 15 bodies were only really a start...

To make these a little easier to work around, I can conveniently stick them onto the finished bodies with the magnets... starting with the 5 thunder hammer sets, going metals (leadbelcher), black and then golds. 

For those with wing details, these get a couple of layers of celestra gray, followed by drakenhof wash. 

I've never quite nailed a great colour of bone without having it look a little chalky - I decided to try the method in the Sons of Sanguinius guide for the crux terminatus markings on the left shoulder. This has been done with skavenblight dinge as a base, dawnstone to brighten it up and then a nuln oil wash to darken the crevices. 

In the photo below, I've started the final step (on the crossed bones) with a thin layer of karak stone (happens to be a pot of the airbrush version). 

Also going back over the white wings with a layer of pallid wych flesh - picking out each feather to bring the depth out. Top model in the picture below just has the blue wash - the bottom one has the white layer and it's looking pretty decent. 

With the thunder hammer set pretty much done, I swing across to the lightning claw arms, as well as the 1st company banner. I missed getting a few pics of these while working up the colours, but most of it's the same process on slightly different parts. 

So... with 10 sets of arms down, I'm nearly half way there. 10 sets of bolters to go plus 6 heavy weapon sets - the most time consuming part of this is blocking out black, leadbelcher and grey parts. You can get a sense of how much of the pieces need to be repainted with leadbelcher from the cannon below. 

For the regular bolter arms, I've generally kept them in their original pairs - nice advantage of alternating the left and right arm magnets is they can be stuck together in storage :-)

Right... that is pretty much all the colour blocking in, with washes still to go. 

There is a slightly long process that I missed photos of - going around glazing and edge highlighting the reds up through mephiston red, evil sunz scarlet and panzer aces new wood. 

This is pretty much my standard red highlighting (which I now realise is quite laborious relative to what I could have done just using an airbrush) - but I'm committed to for my blood angels now. 

Last real detail is the chapter decals - right shoulder gets 2 layers of ardcoat varnish and then 24 hours to dry thoroughly. 

The gloss varnish makes all the difference in getting decals to stick down neatly, combined with sopping them with microsol. I usually find it takes 3-4 treatments with microsol to smooth out the shoulder decals as the blood angel wings always have a little kink right between the two wings. The terminator shoulders are a little bigger and flatter than a standard marine, so was probably 1 less coating. 

I would ideally then coat the whole model with a matt varnish - cheating this time, I've put a couple of thin coats of lahmian medium over the gloss to knock it back down to a standard finish. 

The last thing before packing these away was to colour the barrels with some heat bloom - sepia, purple and then blue washes on the end 50% of the assault cannon barrels. Er... in an embarassing oversight, I forgot to photograph the end result before packing everything away. 

Well... I guess that builds a little suspense - I'll unpack the SLR and couple of lamps for some proper wrap up pictures of the terminators sometime soon. 

These have been quite a bit of fun to paint - they are different to the regular marines, and I have wanted to have a go at some terminators for about 25 years. 

On the other hand, I think I need another break from painting red armour for a while :-)