WIP: Blood Angels tactical squad progress update

Today I have a brief update on the Blood Angels tactical squad. Work is progressing on the test piece for this squad. I've never painted Blood Angels before, so I'm using a scheme based on several others I've seen elsewhere. As with any kind of squad, I like to do a test piece before I plough ahead with the rest of the unit. In my last update, I assembled and based the model. This time around I'm priming and basecoating. Read on...

I prime nearly all of my miniatures with Chaos Black spray. This project is no exception. I've seen suggestions of using a white or grey primer as it would make the red brighter, but I decided to try black first. For one thing, it's less effort: because my bases are flocked before I undercoat, and as they need to be black, I'd have had to mask them off to prime the rest of the model white. I'm also a fan of darker tones and think this will show through better. Very bright, vivid colours are all well and good, but this is a war zone. I also want to stay away from very bright red as this is one of the things that originally put me off Blood Angels many years ago.

With the undercoat done, the next stage is to paint the base. The sand texture lends itself well to dry-brushing*, but that's a messy process so it's best to get that out of the way before spending a lot of time and effort on the much neater parts of the model. I use five levels of dry-brushing on my bases, working through several different brown tones, from very dark to very light. A friend of mine asked me to do a tutorial, so I may cover that in more detail another time. This base, like most, also features several small rocks, which are painted grey afterwards and highlighted with lighter tones. In the picture above I've also painted the decoration on the base (a 'crux terminatus') in gold with a green gem. On most projects, I'll do details like this as I go along, but since I'm photographing this model (albeit still on an iPhone camera, hence the rough quality), I thought I'd finish the base at this stage.

In this last image, I've painted most of the red. This was actually quite quick. The whole model was given a couple of thin coats of Mephiston Red. I then painted Agrax Earthshade into the recesses. Some areas needed an extra coat. I tidied up any areas where the shade had spread with Mephiston Red. The highlighting was done in two stages: firstly with Wild Rider Red, then with Ungor Flesh; the latter applied sparingly as an edge highlight to the most prominent ridges and any sharp corners. To finish, the whole model was given a glaze of Bloodletter, diluted with Lahmian Medium. I'm quite pleased with the result. It's a strong red without being too bright. More to come...

* Dry-brushing involves using a brush with hardly any paint left on the bristles and gently dragging it over an area so that only the most pronounced points pick up any paint, leaving the recesses in the original colour.