Wings of Change

So last week I introduced my latest project with a lord of change having decided to use it to get my mojo back and left you with a picture of the basic colour blocking out. From this I've gone on to paint up both wings and today after the break I'll share that progress.

First job was to paint the whole of the feathers and skin with regal blue before a drybrush of regal/enchanted blue mixed. I really am going to need to update some of these colours at some point. Next up came the washes, I knew I wanted to have some variation of colour so the whole of each wing got a Blue wash to start. Then the long feathers received a heavily watered down Purple wash to about 3 quarters of the way down followed by another much stronger wash to about a third of the way from the tip.
I spent some time re-highlight the blue feather with the 50/50 mix (I have a pot of it as a vital part of my nids) before moving onto my pot of enchanted blue/Ice blue which had some slight improvements made to the tone as I always found the Ice blue final highlight quite stark and the 3 stages of the two mixes with enchanted blue in the middle too similar and not enough difference to warrant all three. After my initial tests with the blues the pair of wings turned out like this.

From this point I moved onto doing a single wing at a time and having visited GW to sort my selection of purples out I started with Xereus Purple then genestealer Purple with a final of Dechala Lilac towards the edge. One of the things I try to do is something new for each project and with this one appropriately enough it was feathering. Having worked on edge highlights I figured it was time to also get feathering down or at least passable.

Once I'd finished on the purple I went back to the blue for a final finish of the previous stages and then a band of Ice blue final highlights on the largest of the blue feathers to help distinguish them from the smaller ones.
With that done it was time for a basecoat of the details ready for the final touches.

After this, the first wing was completed fairly quickly and I moved onto the second. It had already had a few stages so didn't take long to get moving along.

AT this point (mid December) things stumbled a bit due to and assignment and Christmas coming up but I managed to keep chipping away slowly here and there. Then over the new year I finished the wings moments before the countdown to new year. with my parents over we had been chilling and watching TV so not the most exiting celebration but I was happy to call the wings finished. 

WIth the wings finished I moved onto the body, however I'd had some issues with paint rubbing off the tips on the wings and similarly with the body, this lead to me contemplating the base and so about two weeks back I made my first cuts to convert the base how I wanted it. SO next time I'll go through the base build as it ended up quite details (and also no that useful for holding the model as you'll see).

Until then please let me know what you think and TTFN