Duel of the Fates

Before I start a note on paints.  All of the paints used are from the Citadel  Range unless I specifically mention otherwise.

I work long hours and my daughter stays at weekend so my opportunities for lie ins are few and far between so every week or so I just crash, and that was last night.  Having had a night off due to just being tired, I pushed on with the bit of the project I was looking forward to the least.  Darth Maul’s black robes.  I hate black.  I find it difficult to paint and I am rarely happy with the results;  also because it’s not particularly interesting, it’s hard to maintain focus.  But it needs doing all the same and, when it’s done its out of the way.

In a previous post I identified 3 major areas of his outfit – Robes, Trousers and leather (belt and gloves).  So not only do I have a lot of black to paint, I have 3 shades of it 🙁  People often say when you paint black or white the trick is to remember you’re not painting black or white.  I approach it differently; when you are painting black, you only need to concern yourself with the highlights, and when you paint white you need concern yourself with the shadows.  So in this case, to achieve the effect of three different shades I opted for 3 shades of grey

The robes are the bulk of the model and they will take up the majority of this update.  These I did using Corvus Black as the first highlight, this was applied quite liberally which lightened the overall tone.  I then mixed in a little Eshin Grey to the Corvus black, about 50/50 to provide a mid-highlight and then highlighted again with pure Eshin grey.  To finish off I added a few very fine highlights using Mechanicus Grey.  I have taken photographs of the progress of this, however trying to photograph black is proving quite challenging.

For the trousers I had originally used a mixture of Death Korps Drab with some Corvus Black which created a slightly brown shade of grey.  To highlight that I added a little skavenblight dinge and then a little more for a second highlight.  The final highlight was done using pure skavenblight dinge.  Fairly simple really and the final result is a dark grey.

The Leather I did some fine highlights using mechanicus grey before doing an edge highlight using dawnstone.  Then I Washed it down with Nuln Oil to create very dark colour with just the bright highlights showing.

Overall, the results are passable, I am not overly happy with the highlights on the leather.

I also took some time to do the Lightsaber.  Due to time constraints I didn’t actually take step by step photos of this.  However I can talk you through it.

I painted the entire blade in Evil Suns Scarlet as the orginal base colour of Mephiston Red is far too dark.  Next I painted a wide stripe of Wildrider Red along the upper edge of the blades, from hilt to tip, and then a thin stripe of the same on the lower edge.  This pattern of a wider stripe at the top and a thinner stripe at the bottom would be repeated for all steps, so I won’t keep repeating myself.  The colour progression from Wildrider Red was done by adding some Luganath Orange (where the hell to they get these names?) in gradual stages working all the way up to pure luganath orange, painting slightly thinner stripes onto the blade each time.  Then at the very end I painted a very thin white stripe along the top edge, but not along the bottom.  I then used a red glaze to soften the transitions

And that’s it for today.  Hopefully you can see the details on Darth Maul’s face a little better now