Home stretch now - adding some light effects over the top of everything else, then calling it a day. This has taken a bunch of hours over probably 3 months, during which the boards have mostly been either been on or resting next to our dining table.
I really have to give a lot of kudos to Duncan and Warhammer TV for their guides - I had some more complicated ideas of how this could be painted at first, but the stuff they put together in the Sector Imperialis guide is quick (even if you have to do it many times over), very accessible and very effective in adding some depth to what is really a flat surface.
Even the colour choices used in the guide are quite clever - keeping to muted greys and metallics so that you have lots of little variation in the tones, but it's still neutral enough that bolder army colours on models will still jump out. At one point I tried adding some primary colours for a change (painting the little fuel cans in the gutters with mephiston red) but they looked so out of place with such a stark colour that I very quickly went back to a grey-green.
Anyway... onto the final stages - at this point I'm definitely not following steps from the Warhammer TV guide, but adding effects that I've just wanted to have a go at. Mainly - spotlights.
The lamp housings built into the road look ok just painted grey, and probably should be left 'powered off' since the whole neighbourhood has been bombed anyway. I did want to add some colour to them and practice doing light effects so... they are going on anyway.
I wasn't entirely sure how to go about this, other than I know you are generally supposed to start with subtle and darker coloured edges with the central light source being closest to white. So this approach is a bit made up.
Starting with cassandora yellow, and working through yellow and white was the plan.
I set up airbrush and a really big heavy toolbox to rest the boards against - you kind of forget when holding a model up to be airbrushed that the airbrush itself needs to be mostly level to stop paint running out. Laying the board flat on a table doesn't help get a nice round spray.
Getting in fairly close and doing a little circle around the outside of each light. Cassandora yellow is basically a transparent yellow/orange wash, and this seems to be giving a good if subtle effect of having some haze around the light source.
Pretty quick too - really just a couple of seconds per light. It won't win any OSL highlighting awards but I worked around the 6 boards (probably about 90 lights) in maybe 15 min.
I was fairly happy at this point, however finding that the yellow paint is too transparent I jumped straight up to opaque white. White probably should have actually been step one. It pretty much wiped out and overpowered the yellow shade that had already been applied.
Eh... it's not so bad; just means I likely wasted time doing the yellow shade first. Clearly the white is now way too stark and I need to tone it back down to a dirty yellow. Rather than actually use yellow paint, I just switched back to the cassandora shade and kind of blasted that around, going a little bit beyond where the white finishes and allowing a little more to collect like a wash would and darken crevices.
That seems to have largely done the job - they aren't great, but there is a sense of light source on the board without being too bright against the grey background.
So... in future my approach will be:
1. Spot highlight with white
2. Light coat and extra circle around the outside with cassandora yellow.
Keep it to 2 steps rather than jumping backwards with 3-4 stages. I have in mind applying a similar effect to the headlights on some rhino tanks - having practiced on the boards now, I think I can just about pull this off on those more finicky areas where there is less margin for error.
A few extra details have been added with Blood for the blood god - most of these are just basic little flicks in areas that were looking a bit bare, although I was also trying to make a couple of little stories in places. For example - adding what is more like a skid mark and some pooling on one of the road sections. Trying to give the impression someone got careless while driving a tank around and Barry has gone under the wheels.
The last thing before packing the airbrush away was to add some coloured lights to the hatchways. This... wasn't great, but I think I know what went wrong.
I started by trying to apply the same approach as the yellow lights in a red version; by going white first, followed by a carroburg crimson shade through the airbrush. This gave a dreadful fluorescent pink, which looked horrible. So I went over the whole area with a vallejo scarlett red to darken it down, which then pretty much wiped out the original white. Each light got a very tiny spray of white followed by a couple of layers of red wash with a brush.
The result is *kind* of ok - at this point there are 4-5 layers in the area, so there are some rough edges where one round or another is a fraction off being centred.
If I was going to do these again, I think I'd probably go dark red first, then white, then add the cassandora (yellow) wash over the top. That should shade the pink down to more of an orange/yellow colour, which would be about right for a dim red lamp. At this point though - these ones have about enough paint applied to them.
Right... so that brings us to a finished set of Sector Imperialis boards. These could probably do with a good spray of a matt varnish to seal them against wear and tear (and probably a layer of gloss varnish on areas like the marble)... but I think I can call them done.
Sticking a couple of them side by side looks good (even if there is a slight pac-man look now with the yellow lights on the road), and they make an effective looking base for the battlefield. Some time soon, I'll lay out all 6 of them along with some terrain pieces... then stick an army out and take a few bigger photos of full effect while in use.
For the moment - I'm happy tucking these away and getting our dining table back to normal use.
In general, I'll be looking forward to painting something a bit smaller for a while. 3 sets of terminators will be on the workbench shortly, having already been primed before the boards started. Ironically they are the least likely models to appear on the sector imperialis boards as they are mainly geared for space hulk...
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