Wraithguard progress: Part 3

Third and final section on my wraithguard - onto the alternate weapon selections and arms; which featured heavy use of the airbrush to add some funky colours to the mix. Happy with the purple weapons, and will be carrying these over to other units. 

Ok - I usually cheat by putting the finished picture at the top of the post so it shows on the blog feed... but it's a slight spoiler that trying out the box-art style weapons didn't work. I wanted to have a go at doing a simple wash over silver effect but they came out a bit shit. 

I tried using a couple of druchii purple washes on 2 swords and was pretty underwhelmed with the result... I probably should have tried again with a brighter silver coat underneath first, but yeah. Not happy with the look (see below). So I decided I'd try doing a power-weapon style effect with the airbrush. 

Step one is masking everything as well as possible - since the greens have already been done, the arms need to be fully masked off. The hands get a layer of blu tac like a boxing glove; then a layer of tamiya masking tape over the rest to make sure no overspray hits the green. The tape also gives me something to pick up the arms by without transferring wet paint from my latex airbrushing glove.  

The axes were both harder and simpler for masking - first pass is pretty straight forward; a post it note cut and wrapped around the handle forms a good-enough barrier to start with. Everything then gets a black primer coat to fix any gaps + darken the weapons. 

Colours are then worked up through a set of vallejo dropper colours - hexed lichen, warlord purple, squid pink, then a tiny hint of white. It sounds like a lot of steps, but but the time all the parts have had one colour, it's onto the next one.  

The sword blades came up pretty well - and I'm happy leaving those with a single colour scale. For the axes, all the blade designs have sharp awkward corners, so they get a layer of masking tape along the blade, then the same colour painted in reverse. Masking these can be a pain as most of the axes have awkward or curved shapes, so can take time to get in the right place. The painting I did pretty quickly (and felt the need to take the tape off and look before taking another photo). The result is as below, with white to purple and purple to white on opposite sides. 

With small fiddly pieces like the arms - laying out the masking and blu tac can take longer than the airbrushing. What took me ~2hrs to mask off (x45 arms) took maybe an hour or just over to airbrush 3 different colours on. It's actually pretty good doing these in bulk - once the pink or purple is in the airbrush, each individual blade only takes a matter of seconds to build up each colour. 

While I have the airbrush out - I also did a quick pass on the d-scythes. A tiny spray of electric blue, followed by an even smaller hint of white. No masking, just couple of short sprays on each side. 

With all the masking removed, the purple-pink is quite striking; I think it was a better option (and more variety) than doing them in the standard blue-white that a lot of display power weapons get. 

I worked through finishing the 30 swords first - these were pretty quick; super bright vallejo silver on any of the metal fixtures, then both any silver (including weapon grips) and any sunken runes on the blade get a carroburg crimson wash. Gems are finished with a standard red-orange colour and a few (rare) gold motifs with vallejo old gold. 

The final loadout are the axes and shields. To match the axe (roughly) the inset section of the shield is done in bright silver, then washed with carroburg crimson. The axe fitting are done with silver then recess washed with carroburg crimson. Gems done as per usual and the axe handle in black. 

I think these look the business. None of the purple weapons, black areas or the green of the wraithguard themselves have any edge highlights. These could be added, but I don't think it would make a huge difference compared to the time it would take. I think I'm ready to call these done, and with all 4 sets of arms available to use. 

Final bonus shot - I dug one of my 1997 wraithguard out of a storage box for comparison. It's a good ~3cm shorter, has significantly less bulk and is sitting on a 25mm base rather than the 40mm of the current generation. These old ones were notorious for faceplanting as the tiny base and pewter construction made them very top heavy. In some ways I think I had a slightly cleaner dark-green style of painting the old ones - but the current generation (arms excluded) were so much faster to paint.