Contrast Chaos Warriors

I am making some progress with the chaos warriors. Over the weekend I finished half the unit, the remaining half are quite well progressed too. I had the camera set up for commission work so decided to grab a quick shot and waffle a bit about the painting process.

As with most of my work I started with a light undercoat. In the past I have sprayed white, then added a wash and worked from that point. For these figures I primed black all over, then from above with a grey, then dry brushed with white. This gave me a much better range of tonal values, albeit monochromatic to start with, a good base to glaze over with contrast paints. 

I painted the cloaks first as I thought these (front bits) would be hardest to reach with the brush. I used flesh tearer red contrast paint, diluted with a little flow aid and matte medium. This gave a surprisingly good finish, I could easily have left it at this, but I did add a little more shading in the deeper creases using contrast cygor brown, which is a red brown.

The fur trim was washed with skeleton horde contrast, as usual thinned with flow aid and matte medium. I suspect this is how contrast paints are made, with pigment added of course. I then dry brushed with white for an easy, effective, light fur effect. I splashed in other glazes to the fur as I painted the armour, greys, browns, yellow at random, to make it look a bit less uniform, a bit more natural.

The black armour was a bit more fiddly. I used black Templar contrast paint, which has a green/blue tendency over white. Ideally suited to sci fi figures but not my taste. So I glazed with browns and yellows to warm the tone. I then added random patches of grey and highlights with light colours from my palette, and also used white contrast paint to really try to achieve some variation in tone. Black alone is so flat and uninteresting. There was quite a bit of lightening and darkening going on with white, grey, brown and black, some glazing, some stippling, until I was happy with the result. It’s not as simple a process as the fur but then it’s a more complex thing to paint.

Hopefully it will not be too long before I finish the rest of them and I can put up a unit shot. The project is ticking along at a nice pace so far, hopefully I can keep at it, not get distracted by other projects. I spend more time painting canvas than miniatures these days, this Realm of Chaos project could be my swan song.