HOBBY: Warmachine: Painting the Tactical Arcanist Corps pt. 1

The first of these new additions are the Tactical Arcanist Corps. This unit has a lot of helpful abilities at its disposal, and if I’m going to play Rhulics again, I’m going to need to have them painted. The colors and techniques are more or less the same as the ones from my Earthbreaker article, but now you’ll be seeing how they’re applied to a unit.

I start the painting with a nice base of Bloodtracker Brown for my metals. This is a P3 color as are most of the ones I’ll be using. A little Ember Orange is stippled onto the piece of scrap at the bottom for some extra rust.

Next I drybrush on some Radiant Platinum. The base gets a little less than the rest so that the rust will show through more.

The next step is to wash everything with a mix of 2-1-1 Agrax Earth, Nuln Oil, and Guilliman Blue. This is thinned down with a few drops of water and a few drops of matte medium are added to make sure it still binds properly. Next all the areas I want to be Bronze are based with Traitor Green.

The bronze areas are then drybrushed with Hashut Copper (Citadel). Then they get a wash with the same mix as the steel areas. Next all the armor is basecoated with Coal Black.

Next I begin planning out the shading. I do some rough applications of Trollblood Base for the Highlights and some Thamar Black with a little Bloodstone Mixed in for the shadows.

Then comes the tricky part. I blend it all together. Here’s my blending explanation again from the Earthbreaker article. To blend, I mix up a decent amount of a transition color and add a bit of matisse drying retarder. What I mean by transition color here is a tone that will transition two of those thick bands of color you saw in the previous picture together. So to blend the basecoat into the highlight we’re talking about like a 50/50 Coal Black/Trollblood Highlight mix. This is applied between the two different areas of color, and while its still wet, I clean off my brush, load it up with some of the original color and blend it into the transition color. This is definitely something where trying it yourself and experimenting will help more than any explanation I can write. I also mix a little bit of underbelly blue in with the Trollblood Base to give my highlights a little extra punch in a few places.

Next up its the least fun step of all; dealing with all the rivets. Each one of them is painted with a spot of my black mix from before, then they get a little spot of Trollblood base on top. If you do this right you’ll leave a circle of black around the rivet which will help define them. I also Paint a thin line of Trollblood Base around all the armor plates to give them some added definition.