Nurgle rhino

My latest project is a big one :) In the meantime I got a bit sucked into the whole gaming aspect of WH40k and played a few games with a small army of the models that I have + some proxies.
I kind of liked it so I decided to give it a shot and got myself the anniversary kit that had a rhino and 10 csm in it.

A while back, I asked Ron from From the Warp to give me some tips on painting large vehicles without an airbrush (I have a land speeder storm for my lonely marines waiting to reinfornce them). He made a great post with many useful tips so I decided to
put them to use with this rhino. This model also gave me a chance to do some cool GS work.


I'll start off with some WIP pics:

And now for the full description:

Initially, I though I'd go with just normal brush strokes over a black undercoat but I was a bit afraid so I went to my local hobby store and picked up an Army Painter "angel green" spray primer. To be perfectly honest, once i coated the model, I wasn't very happy about this particular hue of green but it was too late so I had to go with it.

The armor:

First thing I did, was a light drybrush of catachan green over the whole model. Then I put badab black wash in the receses. Afterwards I started the highlighting with camo green and then another run with rotten flesh. This was achieved by very light drybrushing as well since I'm still not convinced about the consistency of my brush line highliting.
The next step was about adding some battle damage but I've never done it before so I didn't have a good feeling about it, hence it doesn't look too awesome. I used both a drybrush and some were applied with a sponge. At this stage I was actually quite tense because I knew that I had no way of retouching mistakes with the base color, it being the spray paint and all...

The mud:

The mud part was yet another experiment on my part. I managed to buy some cheap pigments + a fixer for them at our local "ebay" and the fun begun. I started off with doing the tracks a traditional way - putting tin bits base followed by a light drybrush of chainmail. Then it was off to the pigments. First layer was done with the lighter, mud color. I mixed it so it was really dense and applied it with an old brush (I wanted a lot of texture at this point). Once that was dry I mixed a lighter blend of brown pigment and applied it with a sponge to the bottom half, to simulate fresh mud. While doing it, I had a picture in my head of the GW tanks and how nicely transparent mud they do. I kind of wanted to copy that but I think it would require a much more fluid mix of pigment and fixer (sort of a pigment wash I guess). I'll have to try that next time. As it turned out, this effect is not so bad, it just represents a more "muddy" battlefield :)

Nurgle growth and tentacles:

Nurgle growth was pretty easy. I went with catachan green layer over the green primer and then just highlighted with camo green and rotten flesh. The tentacles were a tougher nut. Few layers of dark flesh to begin with. Then a layer of dwarf flesh followed by elf flesh. Ogryn flesh wash on top of that. Rotten flesh/bleached bone highlights for the finish. The tips were done with warlock purple and leviathan purple wash. A layer of gloss varnish on the whole thing was the final touch to make them nice and slimy.

The barrels:

Barrels were easy as well. Few layers of dark flesh, followed by some scab red drybrush and faint blood red highlights. Devlan mud wash after the first layer. Then I got the pigments in the mail and decided to use them here as well. I had both light and dark rust colors so I liberally applied both in semi equal proportions.

Dozer blade:

Started off same as the barrels so dark flesh, devlan mud wash, scab red drybrush. However, this time I wanted some see through metal so went ahead and sponged some chainmail randomly accross the whole thing, adding more to the tips. This was done before I had the pigments, so once I got them, I thought to use them here as well and applied both the light mud and brown colors delicately to the bottom parts of the blade.

I won't go into details of the marine, since it was a pretty straightforward layering/blending/highligting job with the same trusted pallette, namely catachan green, camo green, rotten flesh. I do however want to share a pretty cool technique of painting skulls and horns that I use. I start of with komando khaki, do a heavy wash of ogryn flesh and then highlight with bleached bone. Turns out pretty cool in my opinion and is quite simple. It does require some patience with the application of komando khaki since it's tough to apply to black undercoat (requires many, many thin layers to look good).

So there you have it, a decent looking rhino without an airbrush. It can be done :) My intuition tells me that quite possibly, a lot of steps I took were redundant, but I did gain a lot of experience doing it so it's not a waste. All said and done, I really want an airbrush though, mostly because of the control and repetition of the colors that it will allow.

In conclusion, big thanks to Ron for his great article on brush painting vehicles. It gave me some solid info to think about and allowe me to make more informed decisions. Btw, I used one of his background pictures in the photographs so additional kudos for those! :) The trick here was to find the right aperture to both capture as much of the model in focus and to blend away the pixels from the printout. Turns out it was impossible for me to find the sweet spot but hey, close enough! :)