Dark Angels Drop Pod

After much longer than I would have liked, the drop pod is complete. It is a very simple kit, yet I did have some serious design decisions, that I will go over in the full story.

My troops have been lacking trasport for a long time now, so it's high time that they finally got something! :) Before I get into the WIP details, I wanted to say a few words on the design for this thing. At first, I wanted to go the usual GW route with silver on those outside flaps/panels(?) and I did just that, but as it turned out, I couldn't quite do a nice smooth wash on them :O and the whole thing started to look too silvery anyway. That's when I took some inspiration from the internet and figured that the yellow/black stripes will look totally awesome and provide a nice contrast to the overwhelming green.

OK! time for a quick runthrough of the paintjob. It was quite similar to the rifledread but with some additional shenenigans so:

Airbrush part:

- grey primer
- black preshading
- VA olive green basecoat
- VA gunship green highlights
- VA silver for metal parts
- VA gold yellow for the stripes 
- VA black for heat residue
- VA medium brown into khaki brown into light brown for dust

Needless to say, I painted the model in parts. I can't really imagine doing all that stuff when the whole thing is assembled :) A lot of masking was used for various things like stripes, ramps and so on. To be honest, that was the part that I've spent most of the time on. Masking/basecoating/highlighting with the airbrush. As far as washes go, I've only used 3, namely nuln oil for metal parts, sepia for stripes and thrakka green in an airbrush over all the green parts.

Last part was the battle damage. I had a difficult time (again), figuring out what kind of battle damage would look both realistic and visually appealing on such dark green color. Well, obviously the deep metal scratches do so I did those, but I also tried some light black scratches, highlighted with rotting flesh and it turned out very nice, giving some 3D to the model. I did a similar treatment with those yellow stripes, so black scratches applied with a sponge, followed by a highlight of white with a dab of yellow.

Final step was adding pigment to the ramps. I wanted an earth tone, but I only have a few pigments (mostly rust for my nurgle projects :) so I improvised by mixing a dark earth tone with some very light rust but in the end it looks more like rust than dusty earth. Too bad, but what can you do at this point :)

Also, you might wonder WTF with the white background. Yea, I definitely prefer those color ones, but this model is too big for them + I recently purchased a cheap but large "photo tent" so decided to use that.

So that's that and you'll be surprised to know that my next project is the Dark Eldar Talos! Yes, I'm starting a new Dark Eldar army! :)