emperor's children commanders

here's the 2 HQ choices i'm working on for my heresy army. the one on the left will be my Praetor, the one on the right will be my Primus Medicae.



im on the fence whether i should keep the medicae's faceplate white, or paint it gold since i'll be making all the other guys with gold face plates.

I kinda like the white. Do you have a dude w\ gold painted so I could imagine what they'd look like?

Just the commander's helmet so far. Its in the left guy's right hand tuck beside his waist. I haven't made any other infantry yet since I'm debating what mk of armour to use. Lately I'm seeing a lot of mk 3 and mk 4 painted as EC, so I might go with mk 3 for my troop choices, with mk 4 for all my special chars, like these 2.

here's a little more progress on the two:

Are you looking for advice/opinions?

yea, do you think the white helmet should have a gold face plate or keep him white?

here's a shot of the face guy with his face done. still need to choose a suitable jump pack for him. havent decided what would look best. i dont want to use any mk7 packs if possible, but that means i'll have to decide whether i want the mk 2, 4, or 5 jump packs, and have to go about finding a single set. mk 4 is just a sanguinary guard pack minus the wings, so that wont be hard to find. any suggestions what would be best for the literal general of the army (second only to the primarch)?

2 critiques:

1) Aren't EC a deeper, darker blue? These look like you're teaming with me, Gav and Dana:)

2) I don't like the eyes. I'm not sayin I could do better, but I don't like em. He looks like the Apoth just checked his colon.

Do you use washes? Looks that a light wash of the face with the flesh wash might settle into the recesses and give it some definition.

Eyes are a tricky thing.

They start to look a bit wonky when you push the pure white up to flesh. Everyones eyes, be it shadow or lashes.or whtever, tend to darken around the perimeter... And in the end you really never see that much of a white in the eyes.

I used to do the same thing .. And eventually became frustrated because everyonw always looked shocked. My favorite technique.. Which i still use to this day is the simpke paint the eye black.. Then add two whitw dots. Bam.. Eye done.

I think the white would be better than gold. But.. The white needs a bit of depth.. A light wash of somethong and pure white on the highlights. White's always a pain because it only looks normal when the top highlight is pure white..

Its coming along though. I like the rules for heresy armies.

Well I'll keep the helmet white then. Agreed. Eyes turned out like crap. The skin was a flesh paint, earthshade wash, then I did the flesh again, but the paint was over thinned and pooled into the recesses; boo. EC are royal purple with gold, beau.

Until I get all the models I need, I'm gonna cop out and just do a cheap 3 color tabletop standard, and once they're all done, I'm gonna go back and make some of it look better, including battle scarring. Since I wanna do a high volume of models in a short time, I think I'm gonna do beau-s method and lower my paint standards "for now" per say, and make them look better down the line. For mow these two are hitting the shelf and I'll start painting the diemos predator next.

Out of curiosity, what looks better; the green lenses or the red for the helmets? I'm leaning to the green so far as it seems like it'll pop better with the purple armor

dusktiger wrote:Well I'll keep the helmet white then. Agreed. Eyes turned out like crap. The skin was a flesh paint, earthshade wash, then I did the flesh again, but the paint was over thinned and pooled into the recesses; boo. EC are royal purple with gold, beau.

Until I get all the models I need, I'm gonna cop out and just do a cheap 3 color tabletop standard, and once they're all done, I'm gonna go back and make some of it look better, including battle scarring. Since I wanna do a high volume of models in a short time, I think I'm gonna do beau-s method and lower my paint standards "for now" per say, and make them look better down the line. For mow these two are hitting the shelf and I'll start painting the diemos predator next.

Out of curiosity, what looks better; the green lenses or the red for the helmets? I'm leaning to the green so far as it seems like it'll pop better with the purple armor

They look blue to me. Quit makin fun of the colorblind dude:)

I'd think Green for pop and red for a more subtle look?

This is where I tell you, Beau, that you're avatar isn't papa smurf but a perfectly normal dude.

I can see you didn't read the fluff in the HH book but there eyes are suppose to be purple in color and I also believe the purple is a little to "in your face shall we say" but to his their own, much iron hands aren't completely black, also if ppl are interested fw has a painting guide out on how they did their models

A couple ways to make eyes look better...

Don't use pure white or pure black. A 1/2 mix of white and bleached bone and a 1/2 mix of scorched brown and black will look less jarring.

Paint the entire eye socket the dark black/brown mix. Then paint the near white mix into the socket but leave the dark mix around the edges so it looks black lined in effect. Then dot the eyes with the dark mix colour.

Edit! Read Robyn's reply after, his way works super good too!

Its funny.. But ive always better luck with eyes using the dark, two white dot method opposes to the white.one dot.method. My problem was always getting the dark dot in the middle.. And the same size/positioning for each eye. I find it way easier using the two dots.. Easier to smudge and cheat?

I m with beau, i cant tell if theyre purple or blue.. Although id know if i read the label

I do a three step process similar to Scott. I picked up that method wayyyyy back when from an article McVey wrote in white dwarf 120-something.

i'll go with the green then for the lenses. i also just looked at some pics of the EC in the HH book and they happened to use green on all of them too.

i had done your method to start, robyn, but then i over thinned the white and the dot became a 'whoosh!!" and the whole eye, his eyelids, and part of his nose was all white. "fuck." i think i might go back over the eyes again with the flesh and make more of the 'eyelids' flesh so his eyes look more squinty to hide my fuckup there.

i like how the green lens on his helmet turned out. i did a basecoat of runefang steel, and then a wash of biel-tann green. its a nice...transluscent? effect in person.

....you know dan, i totally blanked on that, and i've been reading Fulgrim too. fuck. that's right, all EC have lavender irises and pale hair like their primarch. if i do any other guys with faces i'll have to remember that.

.. Ahh yes.. Ive done it with paint thinned to much as well.. A royal pain.

hopefully this looks a little better:


i changed the irises to lavender to be closer to the books, then washed the face again. lost some most of the white in the eyes though.

out of these shots, my fav part of the model now is his helmet. these shots look like i nailed the gold on his rebreather. looks like the aquila on his chest needs more griffon gold highlights though.

Don't be afraid top try some mithril silver (Or whatever the brightest GW metal is called now) on the brightest highlights for your gold.

to be honest, i never liked that effect on gold. it looks really fake to me, since i've yet to see real gold ever have a silver glint on any of its edges.

It's the best way to get gold metalics to pop. If you're painting effectively so something looks good you can't settle for just duplicating reality. If that were the case you would simply basecoat everything and not worry about adding shadows or anything else. You'd just let real life take care of all the contrast for you. Painting mini's is at best an excercise in trying to duplicate realistic effects using unrealistic techniques. I think anyway. Just think of using white metal as the same when you see people using white on their gold NMM. If you stick to just the metalic's that are gold coloured esp. in the GW range you won't ever be able to get the most contrast out of your metalic paintjobs.

If you look at the pic's you've posted on the far right pic on the shoulder pad. Along the gold paint running vertically across his shoulder about level with the aquila you can see the effect of the light bouncing off the paint towards the camera. You can duplicate this effect with using the lightest shade of white metal paint available to you. Or not. Just sayin' is all.

hopefully these look better, i did upper and lower shots to see if its just the angles. nothing's different just yet, apart from the details on the pack are painted now, and i gave him eyebrows.

I think the eye brows really help.