These Things That I Do: Basilisk

I'm still recovering from the RC30, so it's going to be a while before the NR gets done. Well that, and the fact that I'm still short of a few paints. Still, when I get the itch to paint, it just has to be scratched. So today's ~~victim~~ project is an Imperial Guard Basilisk that my brother has had sitting in primer for almost a year. Don't ask about the missile, I think he was channeling the GI Joe school of vehicle design.

Apart from the block of black primer showing from where I was holding it, it looks pretty cool like this.

Imperial Guard vehicles are some of my favourite things to paint. They're like comic book tanks: both gritty and caricatured at the same time. They're also quicker to build than 'real' scale models and I don't feel any compulsion to paint them in 'correct' colours, which I would if I was building a Tiger or an Abrams.

My first basecoat was a Vallejo colour, Camouflage Green I believe. It went on nicely, the airbrush giving even coats. Sadly this wasn't to last: when I was spraying the black wash to provide some initial shading, I noticed that the green was separating in places. The pigment was separating from its binder. I gave the paint a good mix, waited for the model to dry and had another try. This time I found myself tearing the airbrush down because the paint had separated inside, leaving huge globs of acrylic pigment inside. Not good.

Since the Vallejo was a no go, and I don't have the GW equivalent as I had intended to gradually replace my GW stock with Vallejo (a plan which may need rethinking), I moved to only colour that seemed appropriate: Catachan green.

First coat of Catachan green goes down, in retrospect I should've re-primed first.

The Catachan green is a much darker colour than I had intended to use and when I sprayed my first black wash coat (to bring out the details) I almost shat myself, the model turned almost entirely black! It turned out lighter as the wash dried, but it still showed me that some serious highlighting work was going to be needed.

Once I had the hull detail darkened, but still lighter than I wanted it, I painted the barrel black using Adeptus Battlegrey GW Foundation paint. I then applied the final washes to the model until the hull detail was as dark as I wanted. This meant that the barrel detail was picked out, but the grey was not overly darkened by the washes. I really like applying washes with the airbrush and didn't want to have to do the barrel separately with a normal brush, so doing things this way worked out well.

Very. Very. Dark.

With the broad strokes done, I moved onto picking out the details, mostly applying metallics to the molded details. I've seen the skulls and such done up in bone before, but that doesn't make much sense to me, so I stuck with highly visible metallic silver XD. The area around the hull gun is molded oddly, so I painted it up as if it was brown leather: turn of the century style. I think its fairly fitting really.

More generally, I drybrushed lighter greens over the raised detail in order to highlight it them, the same with the edges of top surfaces: the ones likely to be hit by sunlight.The same was done in lighter gray on the main and hull guns. Metallics were carefully drybrushed over some surfaces to simulate where paint would be scratched off, such as on corners or raised areas like rivets. Some was also carefully applied around the 'ribs' of the main gun barrel.

The tracks may be virtually covered, but in my opinion, they're a detail that takes little time to paint and really adds to the look overall. My base for tank tracks is Charandon Granite GW Foundation. To this I add the drybrushing of various browns that I use on other low areas of the model, such as the dozer blade, to give the impression of being dirty. Finally, I to a very, very, faint drybrush of silver onto the edges of the track links.

Weathering a model is one of my favourite parts of the painting process, so I spend a long time with my drybrush and detail brushes applying small amounts 'dirt' and metallic silver to areas (for scraped off paint) until I'm happy with the overall look. It all depends on my mood, sometimes my vehicles look like they've just been down a farm track, other times they look like they've gone through a swamp, I just keep weathering until it feels right.

The final paintwork to be done was the missile, mostly because I forgot about it. Maybe my mind was trying to protect me from the horror. Whatever the reason,it still needed done. Given that the model was so dark and gritty, I decided to go with a semi-realistic aircraft missile paint scheme rather than a more comic-book one. To this end I painted the missile fuselage a light gray, darkening it slightly with a black wash, which also served to pick out the molded detail. For the warhead I went with a Enchanted Blue, a bright GW Blue. I was in too minds about this as I thought it may draw attention to the missile, but in the end it just felt right. So I went with it.

My major complaint with how the model turned out came right at the end. I decided to apply some decals, for once, in spite of the experience I had with the RC30 because I felt they'd add some much needed detail. Sadly, they're too bright, and my attempts to weather them ended up looking, well, crap. Even worse, they're shiny, and the excess material I had to leave around the edge (they shapes were too complex and small to just cut around the detail) just draws attention to the fact that these are in fact decals, not painted detail.