Crazyredcoat's Crazy Compendium of Collected Creativity

Realistically, Cypher is now done. He’s not on a base, yet, but I’m thinking of adding him to a 40mm base to match my other Marine characters rather than the 32mm he came on, but the main painting is done! I was most sruprised just how ‘finished’ he looked the moment I put the basecoat for the robes on, but that’s just one of those things all minis have. Carrying on from where we left off, let’s get on with it!

(The lighting is also a little better this time round…though the pictures are still in portrait…I promise the final with base attached will be in landscape…)

The basecoat here was Zandri Dust, followed by a shade of Agrax Earthshade. Rather than ‘brighten up’ with the Zandri Dust, I instead went for layers of thinned Ushabti Bone to give it a nice bright finish to contrast better to the darker armour. This did take time, and I was not happy with how it looked for the first few layers of paint, but nice thin coats allows a few mistakes to be made that can be easily tidied up. You may notice a blob of this colour on the red of the lining that I could tidy up with a small coat of Mephiston Red, for example. We all make mistakes, after all, and the robes on this chap are quite difficult to work around (hence the improvised holder and no attached base). After the layering, I highlighted up with some Screaming Skull along the edges and tears in the fabric. If you wanted to you could push to Pallid Wych Flesh on the real sharp corners for that final spark, but I decided that I liked the look I had. After that I added some thinned Dryad Bark to the few stiches holding part of the robes together. I used thinned stuff here to allow some of the base to show through so I wouldn’t have to worry about highlighting, but you could highlight with a touch of Gorthor Brown.

I didn’t do a step-by-step for the sword, simply because the details are small and it would be painful to watch each stripe be painted… The big problem I had here was the skulls, not because of the painting, but because of colour. My typical colours for skulls very closely match what I did for the robes, and I needed a bit of contrast, so I did two things. First I changed the shade I used (Serephim Sepia in this case) and secondly I overbrushed the details rather than layered them. This gives a different tone and finish that I’m quite happy with that don’t blend in to the robe colour all around them. Other than that, it was mainly just base/shade/layer/highlight, but with different colours, most of which have been done in earlier posts here, or in the previous posts about Cypher himself.

Hopefully I can get a proper picture of him on his base and ready for combat, but that’s for a future post!