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Hey guys, my friend recently got me into WH40K and I'm loving every bit of it. I started w/ a pack of Intercessors and decided on Iron hands. Any help on furthering my skills would be greatly appreciated.

Hey,
Welcome to the hobby
That's a solid first mini. You can obviously paint neatly which is key. For next steps I would suggest shadows and highlights. Take for example the gun. You could add some brown ink over the winged skull and use a small brush to add some black or dark grey ink into the panel lines on the white casing. This will help to accentuate the recesses. Next take a lighter gold and add some highlights to the skull as if the light is coming from the top and so the same with the edges of the casing but with white.

Vim

I would second adding a “wash” step to your painting. The colouring of the armour is slightly “specly” which isn’t a problem in itself... if you drybrush to highlight that’s par for the course, but adding a wash after helps to smooth that out a bit.

It also serves to darken the recesses, and that’s what painting minis is really all about. Artificially increasing shadows in recesses and increasing brightness on the “tops” of details.

For the armour, a medium to medium-dark grey wash, and then a light-grey wash for the gun will leave it white, but with grey shadows.

*Personal preference* I don’t like having black bases. I’d either add the rock colour to the rest of the base, or choose another neutral colour to perhaps match your preferred gaming terrain colour.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I would second adding a “wash” step to your painting. The colouring of the armour is slightly “specly” which isn’t a problem in itself... if you drybrush to highlight that’s par for the course, but adding a wash after helps to smooth that out a bit..

I did add a wash (army painter dark tone) and that speckling still exists. I only dry brushed the top of the backpack area. Do I need more wash? I only did 1 coat.

You clearly have great brush control. Your colour boundries and edge highlighting are very neat. I'm very impressed that you have such great glowing red eyes on your first mini!

Did you use an aerosol varnish? Because the only reasons I can think of that would cause that speckled effect would be related to aerosol varnishes. Or maybe a dodgy aerosol primer? I don't think it's a drybrushing problem. I suppose there could be something wrong with the paint: what paint did you use for your basecoat?

Personally I like for my models to stand out from their bases, so I don't use the same colours on the base that I do on the mini. I suggest not using a neutral grey for the base when your colour scheme is so monochromatic. Just personal preference I suppose.

Btw your leather pistol holster actually ends being a focal point on the mini because it's so different in colour (and lighter too; lighter elements tend to draw the eye, at least on darker minis). Which is probably not the desired effect? I suggest using a darker, possibly somewhat desaturated, brown to avoid this.

 Soul Samurai wrote:
You clearly have great brush control. Your colour boundries and edge highlighting are very neat. I'm very impressed that you have such great glowing red eyes on your first mini!

Did you use an aerosol varnish? Because the only reasons I can think of that would cause that speckled effect would be related to aerosol varnishes. Or maybe a dodgy aerosol primer? I don't think it's a drybrushing problem. I suppose there could be something wrong with the paint: what paint did you use for your basecoat?

Personally I like for my models to stand out from their bases, so I don't use the same colours on the base that I do on the mini. I suggest not using a neutral grey for the base when your colour scheme is so monochromatic. Just personal preference I suppose.

Btw your leather pistol holster actually ends being a focal point on the mini because it's so different in colour (and lighter too; lighter elements tend to draw the eye, at least on darker minis). Which is probably not the desired effect? I suggest using a darker, possibly somewhat desaturated, brown to avoid this.

Thank you for the kind words. Now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably the prime job I did (I was a bit too heavy on the black in some spots as I have a bit of gunking on some of the back details on 2 of the models) and I also did a zenithal highlight in white which I assume I might not have prepped that can enough via shaking and maybe that's underneath and a bit of "texture" is showing through.

On the 2nd round of models I'll stick w/ solid black only and see what results I get.

Also you're point on the leather is spot on, I noticed that earlier today that my leather was quite bright compared to everyone else's color. I might go the next shade darker of brown I have and see the results that I get. Thanks again.

Regarding a second wash, if it has good contrast in person, that doesn’t always translate to a photo on the Internet. Camera settings, and display settings can change things quite a bit!

As above, if your armour is “non-chromatic” then adding colours will make those focal points. Not a problem per se, but if that’s not what you want then it becomes a problem, if you get my meaning.

Working without colour (chroma) can make painting a balanced model tricky. You really need to play with the light (brightness) to draw attention to something. Typically, the face.

If you “dusted” white primer over black primer to achieve the lighter part of the Zenithal, then that probably caused the spotting. Spray primer tends to be blobbier, with the idea that when pruning the blobs overlap, spread, and give good coverage.

Ah, yes, sounds like the zenithal highlighting is the problem. I don't have much experience with that sort of thing, but my feeling is it needs to be done with an airbrush to get coats that are smooth enough to look good but thin enough for the highlighting effect to come through. I guess?

I’m told it works better, but I don’t have an airbrush. I’ve heard you can achieve a similar Zenithal effect by starting with white primer and applying an all-over pblack wash like Nuln Oil. If you have a test mini, it might be worth a shot.

Other than the spray problem (which you've already figured out) I think it looks great (and certainly far better than my first few were!)