Vehicles are a pain in the butt.

I love painting miniatures, but when it gets to doing vehicles, not so much. I don't really have the tools on hand to get through them smoothly and quickly, so they end up taking a long, long, long time.

I finished my Ravenwing Dark Talon about a month ago. It turned out pretty good, but a lot of things didn't work quite like I wanted.

As I said, I do like the end result. It's just a couple of issues. Learning experiences and all. Sometimes the best way to learn is by making mistakes.

The wings came out pretty cool. It was just a flat grey with white lightning highlights, followed up with a red wash applied as thiny as I could in streaks to give it kind of a reddish hue. I was going for a marble look and fell far short of that, but at least now I know what not to do.

The cockpit was a hit and a miss. The hit was the actual guy inside, the miss was unintentionally obscuring him.

First off, the huge thumb print on the right side of the cockpit (so, our left.) Ugh. That was a mistake while gluing and by the time the glue dried so I could actually see what a mistake I'd made, it was too late to try to go back to fix it. So what I tried to do to cover it up a bit was give the glass a green tint. I figured applying a green glaze over it would do the trick, but unfortunately it made the entire thing blurry. I had to go and use my thumbnail to scratch it off as best I could so it just left the green around the edges. Totally not what I wanted and it looks messy. I'm still bummed about it, but at least from a distance it looks okay.

The side cathedral looking statues also came out really good.

Like whenever I do stone or what I want to appear to be stone, it's simply drybrushed twice with lighter layers of the shade of grey. One of these days I'll go in and freehand cracks when I do stonework, but today is not that day. The banner across the status says "MORTIS ANGELS," just for the record. It's not my best lettering work, but it's sufficient. The other side looks nicer. There isn't the spilled red from the wire, and the lettering is more crisp.

Also, just wanted to say I'm stoked with how the engines turned out. I used drybrushing with some metallic bronzes and flat browns, then finished with a drybrush of my brightest metallic looking drybrush paint so keep the edges still appearing silvery. Gives them a burnt metal kind of look like you see on jet engines that have seen too much use and not enough care, or like on the edges of a blowtorch.

The weaponry was fun to do. I didn't pay much attention to what is oddly the most useful weapon on it, but that's because boltguns are pretty simple and basic. Plus they are hidden in a little pod so you can't see them all that well anyway.

I tried to make them appear to be glowing. The success at doing so, arguable, but you have to start somewhere, right? The Rift Cannon on the front I put some green stripes in, and the Stasis Anomaly Bomb, I tried to make it look like it was glowing with some pretty heavy bright blue lighting. The bomb came out terrific. It's a shame it's on the bottom of the model so it's not more readily available!





I tell you all these mistakes so we can see how well I don't repeat them on my Nephilim Jetfighter. It's currently pretty much just basecoateded in black though I did throw down some metal engine basecoating and got some white on the wings. The white, however, is not very smooth so later today, I plan to pick up some white spray paint, mask out the wings, and make it really smooth. Should look great.

Just for the same of comparing to when I get the whole thing finished, here's my current Nephilim Jetfighter.

I know the picture quality there is rubbish but it's a work in progress shot so I'm not too worried about it. :D

You can still see what I mean about the white not applying smoothly. In the corner of the wing, you can see me attempting to go from my basecoat of Celestra Grey to Ulthan Grey, and the results are pretty disastrous. I just can't get white to apply smoothly on flat surfaces. It's fairly easy to do it on figurines as they have all sorts of contours that help hide brush strokes, such as on the pants of my "Horace Action Jackson" reaper miniature.

Hopefully I'll have updates of my jetfighter later on today, time permitting!