The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

- by Iain Wilson

Over the past couple of months, I've been slowly putting together an underhive table, based very loosely on the designs of the terrain from the original Necromunda starter set. With the first half a dozen buildings assembled, the time has finally come to get some paint on them!




To get things started, I pulled a bunch of spray paints out from the store room, and sprayed on the bulk undercoats, for the most part just going with whatever colour was going to make up the majority of the structure.



On most of the buildings, during construction I tried to leave parts unglued where painting with them assembled would be problematic, although they still promised to have some tricky parts left over here and there.



Once the sprays had time to dry properly, I took everything upstairs and set to work blocking in the rest of the base colours. Walls were all either coloured or grey for bare cement, floors were likewise filled in with grey, and bare metal sections were undercoated with a dark brown to form a rust base layer.



Painting structures of this size, production-lining it only really gets you so far before it starts feeling counter-productive. I also wanted to try out a couple of new ideas before hitting the whole collection with them, so at this point pushed the other buildings aside and focused in on the watch tower. I wanted a streaky, weathered look to the walls, which on this tower were going to be bare cement. So I took a wide, flat and wet brush and some very watered down pale grey paint, and applied light streaks by just passing the brush gently down the wall, dipping the brush in some water and going back over it if the grey lines came out too intense.



I wanted these buildings to look nicely 'lived in', with wear and tear and graffiti all over the place to add colour. To give the grafitti more of an aged appearance, I decided to paint it on before doing the rest of the weathering. I also added a large building number (or possibly a sector number... haven't decided yet!) to either side of the tower with a stencil whipped up on the PC. The graffit was all painted in freehand - I drew in an outline with a fineliner pen, and then painted in the colours using inks. Any messy bits or errors would be covered up (more or less) by the weathering!



I then sponged some darker grey liberally all over the walls.



Carrying right on with the weathering, I sponged dark brown over the support struts running up the edges of the walls, and then drybrushed over all of the metal parts with a light orange. I also glued the base on, and blacklined in the panel lines on the walls with a fineliner.



To finish up, I applied some Dry Rust effects paint liberally over the metal sections, and added some dirt and dust into the creases with a drybrush of brown. With a few extra nicks and scratches and some stains on the base using drops of ink, the tower was complete!













Stay tuned for part 2!

To build your own underhive metropolis, you can pick up the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprues along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge range, from the webstore here.

As always, feel free to share your models and terrain, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

Buildings are all well and good, but sometimes you want to get out of the urban sprawl, and wage apocalyptic war surrounded by nature! I've shared articles previously covering alien forest bases made from silicon aquarium plants and cactus clumps made from foam balls, but this week we're tackling the ever-popular stacked rock outcrops.




These rocky terrain features are made from sheets of expanded polystyrene. I've used pieces cut from an old foam vegetable box here, because that's what I had laying about. You can generally buy expanded polystyene by the sheet in various grades and thicknesses from hardware stores or foam specialty stores, but if you're more thrifty-minded it's worth asking your local fruit and vegetable retailer if they have any old boxes laying around, or you can save the packaging inserts from electrical equipment.

Expanded polystyrene is composed of loads of small balls of foam pressed together to form a sheet. For this sort of project, you want polystyrene composed of relatively small beads (under 2mm), as the larger sort is much harder to cut cleanly and is more prone to damage.



The first step is to cut a piece of foam to form the base of the outcrop. This can be whatever shape you like, just remember to leave one or more flat spots for the stacked rock spires. For cutting the foam, you can buy heated wire cutters specifically for the purpose, but generally a sharp knife will do the job - just don't use the good kitchen knives, as cutting foam does tend to blunt the knife fairly quickly.



Next, cut rocks for the stacks, starting larger and making each successive rock a little smaller, for however many you want to stack up. Rocks come in all sorts of different shapes and textures, so the actual shape here isn't too important, but I like to use largely flat cuts to create a faceted look. Avoid making really sharp edges on the foam, as these will be fragile. Make your rocks different thicknesses, and you can angle the tops a little to avoid the stack looking too artificial.



Once you have your rocks cut, glue the stacks in place with PVA glue. Don't use superglue or plastic cement, as these will melt the foam. For a little extra strength, you can push toothpicks or wooden skewers cut to an appropriate length down the centre of the rock spires. Push this in until it is sitting just below the surface of the topmost rock, and then glue a scrap piece of foam into the hole to plug it up.



Now we need to disguise the foam a little, as just painting over the foam with regular paint tends to look like, well, painted foam.

So instead, paint the outcrop with a textured paint. Again, the specific texture is more or less up to you depending on the look you want, but here I'm using a Dulux 'River Rock' textured paint. This is an acrylic, indoor house paint with a fine sand texture mixed through it. You can generally pick up sample pots of similar paint from hardware or paint stores, or check out their clearance bins for mis-tinted paving paint, which you can sometimes grab for cheap. If you can find a colour that you want to use as a base colour (as I've done here) that's great, but otherwise you can just paint over it, so the actual colour of the textured paint isn't too important. You can also just use regular paint and stir in some fine sand - silversand (sold in pet stores) is ideal for this.

Dab the paint on with an old brush, rather than brushing it. This avoids brushstrokes and helps to clump the texture. The paint I'm using takes two coats to build up the level of texture I wanted for this outcrop, but coverage will vary depending on the paint you use.



To add some visual interest, glue some sand and/or small gravel to the top surface of the base of the outcrop with PVA glue, and once the glue is dry, undercoat with a similar colour to your textured surface - a few shades darker or lighter is fine, once again just depending on the look you want.



Finally, choose a lighter colour and drybrush over the whole thing. Here, I've used Army Painter Ash Grey, as it's a nice, pale grey with a slight brownish tinge, so it ties into the textured basecoat nicely. If you're unfamiliar with drybrushing, you take a large brush, dip it in your paint, wipe it on some paper until there is hardly any colour still coming off, and then brush that over the surface to be painted. With so little paint on the brush, it just picks up the raised detail, leaving the base coat in the crevasses. You can slowly build up the colour in this way until you get the level of highlighting that you want. It's a great technique for painting rough surfaces like rocks or fur, or for getting worn metal effects.

The finished outcrop, ready for the table:



You can glue your outcrop down to a piece of hardboard to give it some extra weight if you wish - this can be a help in preventing it from sliding around the table!





Keen to give it a go? Be sure to share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

You can pick up the entire Maelstrom's Edge model range, including our plastic urban terrain detail sprue in the webstore here.

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

Our new, upcoming terrain sprue is themed around Broken terrain - delapidated, cobbled-together structures either repaired from abandoned ruins or cobbled together from salvage. I've been putting together a series of run-down shanty buildings and thought I would share my method for painting them up and making them all grubby and rusty!





The building I'm painting up here is the one shown in the walkthrough in the first preview article here.



The first step is a basecoat of dark brown. The exact colour doesn't matter too much, but here, I'm using an AK Interactive Rust Basecoat.



Over the brown goes a spray of cream, sprayed downwards at an angle to let the brown form some natural shading. I'm using a Dulux Chalky Finish cream spray, as it gives a fantastic, non-glossy surface finish.



Over the areas of exposed metal, re-undercoat with a dark brown. For painted metal areas, like the reinforcing struts, apply the dark brown with a sponge. (You can find a tutorial on sponge weathering here). The exact shade of brown doesn't matter too much, as rust comes in a wide range of shades dependong on age and exposure, but I've used AK Interactive Shadow Rust here.

For areas of lighter rust, apply a sponge of dark gray over the brown. This will give the effect of old but unrusted metal showing through the rust in places. Where you want heavier rust, like on the roof, leave this off. For this building, I used Vallejo Heavy Charcoal for this step. I have also painted the base with Vallejo Neutral Grey at this stage.



On the larger rusted surfaces, like the roof and door, apply a rough drybrush of orange. This doesn't need to be particularly even - you're aiming to create a rough highlight to accentuate the patchiness of the rust.



Now the magic part! The final coat of rust is applies with Vallejo Dry Rust. This is a worryingly bright orange paint that goes on gloopy and dries down to a very flat finish. Applied over the brown, the orange is dulled down to a perfect rust finish. Use an old brush and just dab it on, working downwards so that the rust collects most strongly on upper surfaces. As with the drybrush layer, the aim isn't to evenly coat everything, but to create a blotchy effect with the rust heavier on raised, exposed areas and lighter on undersides.



Around this time, drybrush the base with Valljeo Light Grey or similar.

Once the rust has dried, it's time to add some dirt. But first, paint in any remaining details - lights, control panels, grafitti or other markings on the walls, are all best added in now, so that the weathering goes over the top and they don't look out of place with the rest of the structure.

Then, use a medium brown (Vallejo Beasty Brown here) and drybrush around the bottom edges of the walls, in any vertical raised recesses, along the edge of the roof under the corrugated card, and along the tops of doors and windows. This is also a good time to drybrush some dirty patches on the base.



Finally, use a small drybrush to add some more brown along any remaining upper surfaces, like the tops of each segment on the reinforcing struts, the rim of the light fitting and anywhere else that dirt and dust would collect. I also like to add some oil (or other fluid) stains around the base by applying small drops of Army Painter Quickshade wash and leaving them to dry.











The new terrain sprue will be available soon. In the meantime, you can still pick up the original terrain sprue along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

As fun as it is to mess about with different colour schemes and builds, sooner or later you just have to throw some dice. I decided it was time to stop building random Remnant Militus suits, and put together an actual, playable fire team.

And so, after consulting the force lists and jotting down a quick list, and piecing together the remaining suits that I needed to make it work, the Aurum Blade was born!





This is a 120 point force, which is a good size for small, quick games. It also serves as a nice core for expansion later, as I intend to add some Nimbus and Brutus suits once those kits are ready to go.

The Aurum Blade - 120 point Artarian Remnant force

Command - Militus Warrior Prime - 34 points

• Arc Splitter
• Aruval Phase Blade
• Prime Array
• Vent System
• Defensive Countermeasures

Some of the gear that I wanted for this model isn't available yet (coming in an upgrade pack as soon as we can get it finished!), so I used a couple of fill-in parts. The Aruval Blade is taken from a Warhammer 40000 Space Wolf kit, the Defensive Countermeasures are trimmed off the Epirian Master Handler's missile pods, and the Prime Array is the back end of an Incursion Blaster, sliced off and flipped upside down.



***

Core - Militus Warrior - 17 points

• Combat Gauntlet
• Combat Gauntlet with Reflex Shield
• Lorican Field Generator

This model was a conversion I had to make after I wound up with some leftover parts from a Warhammer 40000 Ork Trukk that I kitbashed into an Epirian Contractor Truck. While the saws are big and showy, it made the most sense to just treat them as combat gauntlets, rules-wise. The saws are attached to trimmed-down reflex shield arms, but that's just represented as a single reflex shield due to there being no benefit to taking two of them!

***

Core - Militus Warrior - 21 points

• Conflagration Launcher
• Combat Gauntlet
• Incursion Blaster

This was one of the first models I painted up for the Remnant, and is still one of my favourites, so it was a fairly obvious idea to base a fire team around him.

***

Anvil - Militus Dominator - 30 points

• Conflagration Launcher x2
• Incursion Blaster x2

You might remember this suit from such articles as Building the Militus Dominator! He's just itching to lay down some firepower.

***

Vanguard - Militus Skyrunner Initiate - 18 points

• Incursion Blaster x2
• Mark of the Initiate

This last model was also assembled and painted for a previous article, showing how to paint the gold used on this fire team. The Mark of the Initiate means that he takes to the field with lower stats then the rest of the team, but also makes him five points cheaper, which meant that the fire team came in bang on the 120 points without having to sacrifice any gear.

As an initiate, I left his suit simpler than the rest of the fire team, with the only white decoration being the initiate shield on his left shoulder pad.

***

The team all assembled:



All that's left now is to test them out on the table! I'll make no promises on their performance there - I tend to build lists around the models that I want to I like the look of, with very little regard for what will be most effective in battle. Part of the challenge is in taking whatever you wind up with and finding ways to make it work!

More on that soon!



To put together your own Remnant fire team, pick up the Militus battlesuit from the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

If you've been following this blog with even passing attention, you might have noticed that I've been on a bit of a Militus spree. In between the assorted conversions and random paint schemes that I've been trying out, I shared a suit in a dark gold scheme way back when the kit was released, and then revisited that colour scheme with the recent Dominator conversion article. With two suits now matching, it seemed like a good idea to keep going, so right now I'm putting together a 120-point force, which will feature in an upcoming article. In the meantime, I thought I would share the method I came up with for painting the gold, using Army Painter Warpaints and Quickshade.





I'm using a Militus suit here, but obviously this technique can be applied to whatever you want to put it on. I start out by spraying the suit with Army Painter Plate Armour. That's specifically for the Militus, as it lets me run Dark Tone wash over the mechanical underlayer and then move on to the armour. You could also use a grey basecoat for a similar effect, or use white or beige if you would like a slightly brighter end result.



Over the Plate Metal, I paint a coat of Wasteland Soil. This goes on horribly over the plate metal, and looks a bit streaky and patchy, but that's absolutely fine for this effect. If it bothers you, you can give it a second coat to smooth it out, but there's really no need - the purple is just there to give the gold some depth, and you won't see it in the end.

You could use a medium-tone brown instead, but I find that tends to give a more muddy-looking result.



Next up, I paint on two coats of Bright Gold over the purple. This results in a rather strange look - from some angles, the gold will look smooth, and from other angles the purple will show through. As with the previous step - don't worry, magic happens in a minute!



Over the gold, I lightly drybrush with Shining Silver to pick up the raised edges.



And finally, I apply a liberal coat of Mid Brown Quickshade wash. This does a couple of things - it deepens up the colour of the gold, and it adds a brown tint over the purple, turning it into shadow. It's a fairly common technique when wet blending or glazing to add purple into the colour you're shading as you work into the deeper creases. This is sort of the same thing, but in reverse.



After leaving the wash to dry, the model is ready to move on to detailing. If you think it needs it, you can accentuate the highlights with some more gold or silver on raised edges, but I like it as is.

The finished model:





Want to give it a go? You can pick up the Militus battlesuit, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

I picked up three of the new Citadel Contrast paints to have a play with when they were released - a yellow, orange and red. This was partly just from curiosity as to how they worked, and partly hoping to plug the colour gaps not filled by the other washes (mostly Army Painter) in my current paint collection. I showed off my initial dabblings a few weeks back, with a metallic red and yellow Militus battlesuit (here, if you missed it), using the Contrast as intended, but with the orange I wanted to see of these paints could be used for a thinner, layering style instead of just glopping it on and hoping for the best. So I broke out another Militus suit, and wound up with this:





The model I started with was a Militus suit that I had slightly converted by adding some spare knee wings to the shoulder pads and a flappy cape sort of thing hanging from his belt that was taken from the Karist Kaddar Nova kit.



As with the previous suit, I started out with a basecoat of Army Painter Plate Metal spray.



Over the mechanical undersuit parts and the arm-mounted conflagration launchers, I painted a layer of Army Painter Dark Tone.



When that was dry, I gave the rest of the armour a light coat of Gryph-Hound Orange, keeping it thin enough that it didn't pool. This looked a bit scrappy, but that's ok for now.



I then started building up the orange with successive, light layers. These layers slowly work back from raised edge, building up heavier colour in creases, lower edges of plates and other shaded areas. Once the orange was about as dark as I thought it was going to get, I used a little Blood Angels Red to add some extra shading.





Once I was finished with the Contrast layers, I painted the helmet crest and the cape with Citadel Macragge Blue, and the eyes, inner strip details on the cape and some detail on the sides of the guns with Army Painter Ash Grey. I also basecoated the base with Vallejo Basalt Grey.



To finish up, I gave the blue a light drybrush with some old Citadel Ice Blue to pick up the detail and then washed it with a generous coat of Army Painter Blue Tone. Over the Ash Grey I added a highlight of white, and then I went over the raised edges of the armour with some Coat D'Arms Fiery Orange, with a final spot highlight of white wherever it seemed appropriate. The base was finished off with a drybrush of Vallejo Light Grey and my usual 'urban' detailing.



Some final thoughts: Over the Plate Metal basecoat, the orange wound up more of a coppery brown. I don't dislike the colour, but a white or cream base would be needed for more of an 'orange' orange. I also found that the red faded considerably as it dried, so the final level of contrast on the armour plates isn't as high as I had intended. Some over-compensation would clearly be required when shading this way with the Contrast paints in this way.

Another minor issue is that the Contrast rubbed off on raised edges really easily with handling during painting. I had heard that the Contrast paints were a little more fragile than regular acrylics, and are best sealed for handling, and this would seem to be made worse by the thinner coats used here. A light coat of sealer between layers now and then would probably be a good idea for keeping the paint intact while working, although I'm not sure how the Contrast goes over sealer.

Overall, though, the process seems to work, it just needs some refining as the Contrast behaves quite differently to the Army Painter Quickshades that I usually use for this sort of method.



You can pick up the Militus battlesuit, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

If you've been following my articles for any length of time, you may have noticed that I like using lots of ink washes in my painting. Washes are a great way of quickly adding shading to a model, and so are an invaluable tool if you want to get your models painted speedily and easily. So when the new Citadel Contrast paints came out this month, I couldn't resist taking them for a spin to see what they could do. I specifically wanted to try out a bright red and a yellow, as these are shades that weren't already covered well by my existing collection of washes, and so dug out a Militus Battlesuit from the to-be-painted pile that seemed like a good candidate for the experiment.





The model I chose to paint up was one of the conversions featured in the Militus conversion spotlight article from back in April. This is a mostly-stock model, with a little trimming on the leg joints to allow more of a crouched pose than is otherwise available to the kit.



There are a range of specific basecoat sprays available for the Contrast range, but working on the assumption that following instructions never got anyone anywhere interesting, I chose to use Army Painter Plate Metal spray as a base instead.



Red inks tend to give a richer colour over gold than silver, but that worked into the overall plan. I started out by giving the whole model a generous coat of Iyanden Yellow.



After leaving that to fully dry, I went back over the armour plating with Blood Angels Red, leaving the yellow on the suit's mechanical underlayer and a few other strategic spots.



And just like that, the model was 90% finished. I finished up by adding in some blue detailing on the weapon, chest, boostpack exhaust and helmet eye-lens, and some dark grey on the incursion rifle barrel. I also painted up the metal grating base structure with some Macragge Blue on the vertical panels, and then some Army Painter Strong Tone and Dry Rust over the whole thing. Finally, the base itself was painted with Vallejo Basalt Grey, drybrushed with Vallejo Light Grey and Beasy Brown, and given a few nicks and scratches with black and some more light grey.



As with any ink-painting technique, the end result is not perfectly neat, but what it lacks in accuracy it makes up for in speed. Although if you wanted to spend some more time on it, it should be possible to get neater shading by applying multiple, light coats - This won't be as subtle, or as suitable for paler colours as when done with Army Painter Quickshades, due to the Contrast paints being so much more heavily pigmented, but it should still work ok for darker shades. I'll be testing that theory in a later article.





If you're feeling inspired, you can pick up the Militus kit, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

I've been playing around with speed painting a lot lately (so much to paint, so little time!) and have been having a lot of fun experimenting with inks to achieve quick and easy shaded, table-top level results. This week I decided to see what I could do with some Army Painter Quickshades and the new SecDef Lieutenant model.





To start out, I basecoated the model with a flat, cream coloured spray.



I then gave everything except his head a coat of Military Shader.



Once that first layer of ink had dried, I went over the armour plates with a second coat of Military Shader, and boots, pouches and gloves with two generous coats of Mid Brown. On the pistol and the exo-skeleton on the arms and legs, I used Purple Tone, which over the green resulted in a nice, slightly bluish-tinged grey.



I decided that there wasn't quite enough contrast on the plates and exo-skeleton, so went over them with a coat of Dark Tone.



For his head, I painted on a generous coat of Flesh Wash.



To finish up, I painted in his eyes with fine, white horizontal lines, and small dots of black in the middle. For his beard and some characterful head-stubble, I added a thin coat of Dark Tone. I also went over the lens in the targeter and the helmet lenses with white, then a layer of Red Tone, and then a highlight dot of white. Finally, I added some fine gravel to the base, and painted it with Army Green, a coat of Strong Tone, and then a light drybrush of Ash Grey, with a couple of grass tufts added for colour.



To take the paint job that little bit further, he could use a light edge highlight on the armour plates and exoskeleton, but for a quick, rough and ready job he's all set for the tabletop.



To start your own SecDef muster, you can pick up the SecDef Lieutenant, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

A beautifully painted army that someone has slaved over for more hours than is healthy can be a truly wonderful thing to behold. Sometimes, though, we just want to get some models on the table as quickly as possible. Way back when I first started writing these articles, I shared a tutorial on painting with washes, as it's a really simple technique for speed painting. (Don't look at it, the pictures are horrible and I really need to redo them...)

I thought I would revisit it this week, with a step-by-step walkthrough painting a Broken Pa'Ku (almost) entirely with Army Painter Quickshade washes.





A quick note before starting: Army Painter have two different product ranges under their 'Quickshade' banner. The first are dips, which come in a tin and are used precisely as the name implies - you essentially paint the model in basic colours, drop it in the dip, shake or wipe off the excess dip, and call the job a good 'un. These are good for quickly adding shading to a bunch of models, but can result in a rather muted overall effect due to everything being shaded the same colour. The second product is what we're using here. These are washes, sold in dropper bottles. Washes are thinner than regular acrylic paint, and are usually painted on over lighter colours, where they settle into the creases and darken everything up. Instead of doing that, I'm painting directly over a flat white spray undercoat.



My previous Pa'ku was painted green, so I decided to change it up a little and go blue this time. The first step, then, is to paint a generous coat of Blue Tone all over the Pa'ku's skin. Because the wash is quite watery, this isn't a precise operation. You're unlikely to win awards with models painted using this technique, as regardless of how careful you are, a little bit of wash running into places it doesn't belong as more or less unavoidable. If it gets too messy, you can wait until the first layer dries and then touch up the rest of the model with some white paint before proceeding.



Next up, I painted the straps and bindings with a coat of Mid Brown.



I wanted the large bumps on his back to contrast with the blue skin, so used Flesh Wash. Over the white, this created a light, weathered-bone sort of colour. This needed to go on quite heavily, and required a couple of touchups after it dried, as the flesh tone is very light. In hindsight, Soft Tone might have worked better.



For some brighter colour, I painted the armour pads with Purple Tone.



That left the gun and other metal parts, and the fur around his back pad. I painted these with Dark Tone. For the metal, I was aiming for a dark grey/black tone rather than a true metallic. If you want more of a metal tone, then painting the metal parts with Gun Metal before washing would have done the trick. Instead, I opted for a couple of coats of Dark Tone, with the below picture showing the first coat.



To finish up, I applied the second coat of Dark Tone to the metal parts, and ran a coat of Strong Tone over the fur to help differentiate it slightly from the metal. I also decided that the brown was paler than I wanted, so gave it a second coat of Mid Brown. The Quickshades lend themselves well to this sort of layering - they're heavily pigmented, but over the white the effect is light enough that you can get subtle colour effects with light coats, and a more vibrant colour with a heavy coat, or layer extra coats (or different coloured washes) over the top for a darker finish.



I also went over the targeter lens with some Red Tone, and added a little Dark Tone into the other three eyes, following up with a small dot of regular white paint (hence the 'almost' disclaimer!) in the center of each eye and the targeter when the washes dried.



The base was painted with Army Green, washed with Strong Tone, and then drybrushed with Ash Grey.



The end result is a fairly basic colour scheme - If I was so inclined, I could go back over and tidy up a few small areas of splash-over from the wash, and add a few extra details here and there like the cabling on the gun.



If you're looking for quick and easy, though, it's a really handy technique to play around with, and can easily be adapted to other colour schemes using different wash shades.



If you're keen to paint up your own big, blue, artillery frog, you can pick up the resin Pa'ku kit, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

Last month saw the release of the fantastic new Militus suit for the Artarian Remnant, a brand new faction being introduced to Maelstrom's Edge. The Remnant wage war using elite Champions is advanced, armoured suits, and the Militus is the first of three suit variants to see the purplish-tainted light of day. From a modeling perspective, the Remnant are a joy. For starters, the Militus is a multi-part, articulated plastic kit with a huge range of posability (as shown in my recent Militus Spotlight article). To add to the fun, Remnant Champions are big fans of personal heraldry, with each suit being uniquely decorated with the Champion's Fire Team and House colours. So this week, I decided to write up a step-by-step painting guide for a colour scheme I chose for one of my converted Militus suits.





The model I chose to paint up was one of the conversions featured in the spotlight article mentioned above. I built this suit using a mix of plastic Militus parts and a bunch of resin components from Max Mini that I've had sitting around in the bits box for some time now. I didn't want to spoil his pretty, detailed shoulder pads by mounting a weapon up there, so I also built him a weapon drone using a modified jump pack.



Rather unusually for me, this model was painted entirely with Army Painter paints - normall I use a mix of different brands depending on what suits the current project, but in this instance I happened to have all of the colours I needed in the one range!

To start things off, I base coated the model with a spray of Platemetal.



I then painted the armour with a couple of coats of Ash Grey, and the trim with Wasteland Soil. For the base, I used a generous coat of Army Green.



The trim then received two coats of Bright Gold, and the suit's mechanical underlayer, sword blade and the drone's Incursion Blaster were all given a heavy wash with Dark Tone.



I painted the shield background and the helmet crest with Pure Red. Over the gold, I applied a coat of Flesh Wash, and also added a thick wash of Strong Tone over the base.



When the washes were completely dry, I drybrushed the base with Ash Grey, and added a light drybrushed highlight of Shining Silver to the gold. I then went over the grey armour with Matt White and Ash Grey, using pure white on upward facing plates, and blending down with Ash Grey on angled facings, leaving pure grey on downward-facing portions. I also added a wash of Red Tone over the red on the shield and helmet crest.



This just left some final detail work. A added a highlight to the shield and crest with a mix of Pure Red and Matt White, although I wasn't happy with the finishing tone on the crest - I fixed this with another wash of Red Tone. I also picked out the gems on his shoulders and sword with red, shading with Dark Tone and adding specular highlights with white. I also added a red glow to the sword blade and the drone's jets using a mix of red and white, and added some nice, bright red in the eye hollows. And finally, I painted around the base rim with black, and added a couple of tufts of grass for a little contrasting colour.



The finished suit in action, taking on some Karist troopers!





You can pick up the Militus kit, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range in the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your creations, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

- by Iain Wilson

I'm home from Salute (which was a blast!) and a regrettably very short stay in London, and now getting caught up on everything. As a result, this week's modeling article is a short and sweet one, which also creates a little more progress on my landing pad display board. One of the features I wanted to add on was a viewscreen displaying a 'Welcome' message to new arrivals to the pad. I wanted this to give the illusion of being an illuminated screen without actually having to resort to playing around with LEDs and the like, and below is a quick rundown on how I set this up.





The frame for the viewscreen was made from a garage door from the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue. I cut the door out with a razor saw, and then sliced up the doorframe and rearranged it into a smaller rectangle. (You could also just use a rectangle of thick plasticard with the middle cut out!) This was then painted using my normal weathered metal technique.



I wanted the back of the screen to be slightly smaller than the frame, so that the viewscreen would look like it was sitting out slightly from the wall rather than having the sides sit flush against it. So I traced around the frame onto a piece of thin plasticard, and then it cut out about 1.5mm inside the line to make it smaller than the tracing. I then glued this piece to the back of the frame, and painted around the outside edge with some Vallejo Heavy Charcoal so there wouldn't be any white peeking out from behind once it was mounted on the wall.





For the image on the screen, I grabbed an appropriate picture and added some text in Gimp, before printing it out at an appropriate size on glossy photo paper.



I sprayed the picture with a light coat of gloss sealer to protect it, and then glued it in place inside the frame.



To give the illusion of a glow, I painted around the inside edge of the frame with silver, and then added a couple of coats of brush-on gloss varnish. The gloss creates a dull reflection around the edges of the frame - it's a subtle effect, but enough to convey the idea of a low-powered screen that doesn't throw out a lot of excess light.



An alternative to this effect would have been to paint around the inner edges of the frame with colours matching the adjoining parts of the picture. This can create a much brighter 'glow' than the method I've used above, but can also look off if you look at it from the wrong angle.

With that done, it's time to get cracking on the rest of the display board, since I'm getting rather impatient to see it finished!



Build your own viewscreen by picking up the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range from the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your work, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.