Librarian in Terminator Armour

This guy has been kicking around my desk since about March, when I airbrushed 17 terminators and 50 magnetised arms. I left him out when batch painting all the others red, and it's taken me a while to feel like picking up another terminator...

Couple of shots here that were taken while the airbrush was out months ago... unlike the red marines, the librarian gets a black undercoat and a light dusting of vallejo grey primer from above. Followed by a top down coat of macragge blue. 

While the airbrush is still out, I also added some blue-to-white on the force axe, then masking tape/blu tac part of it and spray white-to-blue on the other edges of the blade. I then started to paint averland sunset yellow onto the cloth areas, which take about 7 layers to build up a solid colour. This is about where he stayed for the following 5 months... 

In between painting 40 Eldar guardians and cleaning up 15 wraithguard I felt the need to work on a single model so it's back in focus. Literally having to get dusted off.

I generally prefer painting squads to characters, so actively wanting to put a lot more hours into this one alone says that batch painting 40x is probably about my limit before needing a change. 

It's actually something I quite like about the hobby - since I almost always have a few different projects on the go, if any part of it becomes a grind it's easy to switch to doing something else for a while. Getting tired of mass production? - pick up a character; not feeling like there is much progress doing some tiny details on a captain? - use a 2 inch brush on terrain for a while. If painting is starting to feel like a chore - switch to build mode (thank you uncle Atom... Pachow).

The slowest moving part of characters I usually find to be blocking out base colours, mainly as they usually have a lot of details, ribbons, decoration which each need to be carefully picked out, typically with a couple of coats to get a fully opaque layer. 

Reds on shoulders and knees (khorne, mephiston red, evil suns scarlet, wild rider red); lots of averland sunset on the cloth (and about 5 layers on the cabling to the axe). Leadbelcher metal parts, zandri dust parchments, retributor armour gold, screamer pink for the book and purity seals... 

And it always makes for an interesting puzzle working out which order to apply these so that the colour applied after is easier to apply without mucking up the previous.  

Finally starting to get the first freehand details in. Abbaddon black on the cabling - using the air version which is much smoother, however takes ~2-3 touch ups to blacken properly. With the main colours blocked in I also added blue armour highlights - Altdorf blue, Calgar blue, Fenrisian. Most painting guides start with the armour highlights before doing any other colours, but I prefer (particularly for more complicated/decorated characters) to get the main colours on different areas quickly before doing highlights. If any stray marks (eg a streak of khorne red) go onto the blue, it's easier to paint over while that's still the base colour rather than 4 highlights already in place. 

At this point I kind of stuffed up from a record keeping point of view... I probably spent 3-4 hours just jumping from one detail area to the next adding a highlight or a wash and thoroughly enjoying each one popping up. Unfortunately that meant that I took basically no photos of the work in progress and instead sat back with a finished model. 

I am however, pretty happy with the result at the end of (literally) the day. It won't win any prizes for character painting, but at a tabletop standard it jumps out alongside a sea of red marines with a really unique look. I took a bunch of photos of it sitting on my wet palette... the orange isn't the best backdrop but it is under my desk lamp at least. 

Actually really liked the red weapon casing here - thinned the red colours very heavily and went back over it a few times with each and the result is very smooth. Ahem... can still see a brown wash drying on the end of the melta. 

The axe I am pretty happy with - there is a little white speckling from the final airbrush colour, but the effect doesn't detract too much. I was a little worried the number of colours (blue, red, yellow, purple) would be a little much for a small area, but those colours appear all over the rest of the model and works ok. 

The crux on this one is very similar to the rest of the terminators - skavenblight dinge followed by dawnstone, nuln oil wash, then dawnstone, karak stone. A final terminatus stone spot goes a step further than the regular terminators. The karak & terminatus colours I only have as airbrush versions (from doing rhino interiors a while ago) and the super thin paint is really easy to work with on small highlights like this. 

Finally... in keeping with my 'magnetise everything' quest with terminators I also have some alternate loadouts for the librarian. Not as many as the rest of the terminators, but still... 

The kit comes with a combi-melta and an open hand, but I've also added a regular storm bolter from one of the BA kits, all magnetised in the wrist for those three options. 

The storm bolter in particular was a small but important addition, since half the point of getting the librarian was to finish my set of Space Hulk compatible (regular) terminators - while really any modelled options would be fine, having the what-you-see-is-what-you-get loadouts to match the game rules helps my OCD. 

Sooo... in addition to finishing off the last of my 17 multipurpose terminators (the first of these being clipped from sprues over a year ago...) this also represents the very last model needed to field a full set of space hulk models across both the marine and genestealer sides. Including about 18 months of gradually building the set of 70+ plaster cast 3D floor tiles as well, that's nearly 3 years of procrastination to get everything done. It is of course, quite satisfying to have effectively scratch built and painted something like 110 gaming pieces between the board and figures. 

On the positive side - taking a bit more time on a character has prompted me to make a start on a certain famous librarian relative while I'm still in detail-painting mode. Next post will tackle that, hopefully with more work-in-progress pics this time around.