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Some of you might have seen my Ask-for-Help-Thread in the painting&modelling subforum.
Well, I'm done. Done with my very first Tactical Squad of Dark Angels.

Since I got some very helpful advice there, I want to share the results of your hints, tips, guides and express my thanks again in the same way.
For many of you this paintjop is nothing special, but I'm pretty proud over how far I got in the matter of 2 weeks.

Now, without further ado, here is Raphael and his men:

Daylight/natural light:


Flashlight for excrutiatingly bad details


(old Incarnation of Raphael - he since underwent some improvements, as seen above)

Excuse the poor picture quality, I will try to improve on this

Edit: I redid the robes today and touched up some of the colours to cover better. Also I experimented with a thin blue shade on the banner to give it a wee lil bit more effect. Definately an mprovement, first pic is a new one.

Looks good.

I'd say you definitely leveled up!

Looking good. Maybe drill the barrels, especially the plasma pistol - it's quick and easy. Good stuff!

Nice work. You may want to investigate some camera techniques, but your models look very good!

Great job, i look forward to more.

Very good for a beginner!

Your lines are clean and the paint looks smooth, not thick/lumpy.

It's a bit hard to tell from the pic but to take them to the next level you can give the armor a thinned wash of Nuln Oil, then do edge highlighting with the original dark green and add a bit of yellow, or a brighter green to it.

Wow, thanks for the praise! Lifts the spirit tremendously

I'll definately look and try some simple techniques... white background etc. Still gonna be taken with a handy cam, and the natural daylight is bad this time of the year when I get home from work, but I'll experiment a bit and upload better pics when I'm done.

Actually I'm a wee bit scared of drilling the holes... I'm not 100% sure I'll drill them centered, so I might ruin the model. I need to get smth for marking the drill point. A old nail I used doesn't really do the trick for me, but I'll try.

Will definately consider the edge highlighting. For today I plan to rework the feathers on Raphael's powerpack to add some depth, take new pics with my new warm light bulb and MAYBE try the edge highlights.

And I now consider myself a novice
Next level - Tabletopper



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Alright, I did as I was told I edited 2 new pics into the first post with some white background.

I drilled out the plasma barrel with medium success
I applied some edges with the bright green - Warpwood glow, especially visible in the unforgiving picture with flashlight on for your scrutiny.

You've done a pretty good job, keep at it and you're bound to get even better.

It looks good for LEVEL: Beginner. To get more XP you should try adding another layer on the Face to give more detail and highlights/shadows. It is pretty easy and will definitly step the game up and give your characters more depth.

These look awesome for being new to it.

If your interested a few things that brought me even further when I was progressing over the last 2 years was blending.

A wet pallet is amazeballs for that. P3 (Privateer Press) sells them for around 12 bucks I think. There are a ton of tuts on here too on how to use them.


Basically for dark angles green the quick and dirty is this.

Blob some Dark Angles green down on the wet pallet. Base coat your armor in it.

Take your highlight color (not sure the proper name but the next shade of green) and mix it with whats left of your dark angles green on the pallet. Looking for a 50/50 ratio about. Go over the edges in a fairly thick brush with it.

Then do a fine edge high lite in your hi lite color. No mixing needed for that one just make sure its watered down a bit.

After to blend them all together you can get one of the GW glazes. No need to dilute it just brush it on the armor all over.

The same thing can be done with the robes.

Just work from a brown up to bleached bone and use white as your high lite.


Hope this helps! Really made me look back once I mastered it and go ....wow...

Keep it up though. You show great promise.

What I did to the face was basecoat it with...
*runs to the other room*
Cadian Fleshtone, shade that with Reikland Fleshshade and add some highlights again with the Cadian.
It was pretty simple, but faces is something I need to improve on. Gotta watch some tutorials.

Blending is something I still have some difficulties with..
You can't really see it on the pictures right now, but I did pretty much exactly that. On the Tac Marines it's more visible, since I added some edgehighlights to Raphael.
I mixed Caliban Green with Warpwood Glow to a 50/50, shaded the result with Biel-Tan Green, reaplied the mixed green and added a highlight with pure Warpwood glow.
The THEORY is clear, its the practice that actually lacks a bit
The miniatures are pretty small to accurately make an area that actually can hold 3 different layers for blending...Often I overpaint the previous layer since the base layer of 50/50 is already so damn SMALL.

On the robes I started with Ushabti Bone, shaded it with Seraphim Sepia, then tried Highlights with Screaming Skull.. But that one is too similar to Ushabti Bone to be really noticable sadly. You barely see it even with the flashlight... Guess I will try a white there.

The glaze is interesting though.. Could it replace the Biel-Tan Green?
Oh, this is getting quite confusing... ^^


Edit: Here's an older pic of the Plasma Cannon Marine I was rather satisfied with.. a few days ago
In that one you can see my attempts of blending.... I'd do it a bit better in the mean time, but the gist is the same.