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Thanks to grey_death who organised the 'God Bless the Infantry' painting contest, and well done to Wayfarer, the well-deserved winner.
My entry was the adeptus mechanicus ogryn; and to be honest it was a bit of a snap decision to enter – I'd been painting my army for a while earlier that evening, and thought that since I was painting infantry, I'd enter one.

Unfortunately, I'd finished all of the basic hypaspists I was working on, and the only thing I had to hand was an Ogryn. Not really a bog-standard infantryman, but certainly smelly enough to go with the 'God Bless the Infantry' title!

I'll be the first to admit that it's not all that cleanly painted: encouraged by a couple of pints of synthale*, I decided to try out some new techniques – wet-on-wet skin blending to get a John Blanche-style effect to the skin; and source lighting for the eyes and beneath the hood.

Lesson one: don't drink and paint, fleshlings.

I took a quick shot of the undercoated model, then got stuck in. Ten minutes later, I'd got the base colours in. Half an hour later, the skin was pretty much complete; and fifteen minutes later I'd completed the hood and most of the detailing. At this point, I was really panicking: I'd never get it done in an hour! Two minutes of dithering later, I decided to give the skin a quick glaze, and got the finished shot...

Lesson two: read the rules.

Of course, the contest didn't have a time limit after all. D'oh!
I'll go back sometime and clean up the worst bits – the metal, the belt decorations and the trousers; all of which only got the most perfunctory treatment.

A couple of people wanted some better shots – I'll be the first to say that my photo-fu is really poor, but hopefully these are a little better.

First off, a couple of pictures of the front of the Praetogryn BONEhead:

The eyes get a lot of attention, but light sourcing turns out to be pretty easy – paint the eyes and surrounds white, then add dilute yellow into the eyes. Next, mix the dilute yellow into whatever colours surround the area, and finish the job – nice and quick!
This shot also shows the black-and-white Cult Mechanicus skull mask I painted on to the cowl itself. This was quite fun to do, and I think it adds to the Adeptus Mechanicus feel of the conversion.

Speaking of the conversion, it's a fairly stock Renegade Militaia Ogryn from Forgeworld, with a sculpted hood, trimmed-down punch knife (left hand) and the original pneumatic drill replaced with the tail weapon of a squiggoth. I wanted the model to look brutal, but also as though it had been designed to be used militarily, rather than the more rag-tag original renegades.


Note the veins on the right pectoral – I wanted the thing's skin to have a translucent quality; and figured that ogryn blood would be thick, highly oxygenated and sluggish as it pushes its way through inch-wide weins.

Then a rear picture of the beast!

This shows the wet-on-wet skin technique quite nicely – and hopefully demonstrates why it gobbled up most of my time! I was pretty pleased with the skin; and hope that it conveys that 'Blanche' feel. Also, check out the highly-polished leather on the boots – I was happy with that effect.

And a couple of detail shots.

Not a great shot, but you can see the hood decoration pretty well here, and I hope the red looks quite nice – it's quite a challenging colour! You can see the veins pretty well here; and you can also see the light leaking from the other holes in the hood – I wanted these to be subtle, so that it didn't detract from the effect of the eyes themselves.


Ah. much better! You can see the veins, the bruised flesh around the implants, the skull cowl, the light sourcing; and also the decoration on both the outside and inside of the hood (where it's blown inside-out on the right of the picture). I decided round spirals on the inside would be a nice contrast to the square ones on the outside rim.

I painted the remainder of the maniple the following day (two had already been done):

They're just waiting for resin bases.

Thanks for the votes, and hope you've found this explanation interesting.

*A vital support when you're painting forty-five identical ad mech guardsmen in a day.