Bot War - the war wages on (clearing the backlog)

Narcitron and Ravenous allowed me to experiment with a main colour which was similar to P3 Coal Black without being that colour. It is getting increasingly difficult 5o source P3 paints in the UK and those stockists that do have them have been sold out of Coal Black (an amazing paint) for a considerable amount of time and it hasn’t been looking good for restock any time soon. So to replace this I decided to mix up to Pro-acryl paints from Monument hobbies, Dark Grey Blue and Jade, which creates a slightly more vibrant coal black, perfect for my bots. Mixing up a batch of this with some airbrush thinner, I set about basecoating the majority of my Deceivers over their grey primer. I left a few out of this stage for the time being as I want to continue a retro scheme them.

To help with the impact of the scheme I decided to go in with the black-lining at this early stage. My reasons for this is that it can help me to identify the different blocks that I will add different colours too and get the dark shadow lines in at deepest and most recessed points to avoid having to do extra touch up work later.  The paint I’ve come to love for panel/black lining is the Citadel contrast Black legion paint. Being a contrast paint it is already quite thin so flows extremely well when drawing lines, and it’s quite pigmented to ensure a deep black is applied to the model in a single pass.

I set about black-lining a few of the Deceivers I basecoated (the rest of Narcitron’s Sins) so that I have a selection of models to work through in the coming week. Picking similarly sculpted bots also helped me plan out the colour blocks and make sure the scheme will translate OK onto them.

Next up I needed to breakdown a module into its primary colour blocks. For this I choose Kroar.

A close attack monster, unsurprising given his hook claws protruding from each forearm, he can unleash 3 combat attack dice, re-rolling up to 2 of them, and any damage inflicted causes additional point of damage, that’s potentially 13 damage on a charge which is more than double an average bots health stat, brutal.

So with Kroar selected I blocked in the other colours. The under armour bot parts got the usual vallejo heavy Bluegrey (the same as all of my bots).  Heavy wearing joints and the feet were coated in Scale75 scalecolor flat black. Blades and “metal” parts got a coat of P3 Bastion grey (which is a warmer grey to the Bluegrey). Purple sections got a Vallejo heavy violet for a base tone as it’s good great opacity and gives a solid foundation for further purpleness. The final colour block to go down was P3 Meredius Blue, a turquoise leaning blue which is much lighter than the main colour and is used to pick out horns, spikes and interest points on the armour.

Finishing up this entry (but not finishing the Bot) I began to work up the next level of colour.  This included adding the spot colour for energy and beginning the edge highlight of the main armour.

The armour got highlighted with scale75 fantasy & game Hiril Blue. This is a desaturated blue leaning turquoise, lighter that the Meredius Blue but similar in hue. Using this to edge the main armour will help to link the two armour colours together and gives a good harmony to the scheme.

Energy and colour spots on the Deceivers are with a contrasting pink/magenta. The first stage is to use vallejo model colour Sunset red (wow this colour is vibrant), which is then highlighted with game color Squid Pink. I did add a quick highlight to the sunset red parts with reaper foggy grey (which I will be using later to edge the grey parts) and then glazed on a couple of layers of the squid pink to give some extra pop.