February Painting Pledge - Cypher Complete

Morning folks,

I had an hour spare last night so I made a bit of progress on my painting list for the month...

When I finished off my Dark Eldar, I ran out of my most cherished painting posession - Badab Black. This left me in a situation as I'd heard initially bad comparisons between Badab Black and it's replacement Nuln Oil.

I'd originally thought about investing in some Army Painter dark tone "Quick Shade" but it would add a lot of extra time onto painting and it's hard to get time to varnish at home. Plus, I can't get it as easily at short notice, unlike GW materials.

Anyway... I got some Nuln Oil and figured I'd do Cypher as a test model, since if he turned out badly he could get stripped pretty easily or be left as is since he doesn't have to match up with an army.

It's easy to spot the big splodges on the bottom of the robe, but really bad on his left side gun pouch...

I realised when taking the pictures this morning that there's a splodge of Dheneb Stone on the inside of his right leg, but I've since fixed that.

Overall, Nuln Oil isn't the same as Badab Black, but it's close enough for me not to be fussed. It runs into crevices better, but doesn't coat the flat areas so well. In other words, I just have to be a bit more careful with how I apply it, rather than slop it on. Possibly having to do a re-wipe with a clean brush to distribute the blobs of Shade a bit better.

Also when painting Cypher I tried out using Orkhide Shade as a base for the armour, rather than Knarloc Green like my original Dark Angels stuff. I much prefer the darker armour as I've always thought my Green armoured DA looked a bit too much like Salamanders colours - so this might tempt me to go back and re-paint their armour at some point.

So he's done and checked off... and last Friday I bought the new DA codex (thoughts coming when I can read it properly!) so time to tick stuff off the February list!

• Paint 10 Dark Angels Tactical Marines
• Paint 5 Deathwing Terminators
• Paint 3 Ravenwing Bikers
• Paint Dark Angel Chaplain
• Paint Dark Angel Captain
• Paint Dark Angel Librarian
• Paint Cypher
• Buy the Dark Angels Codex 

As for the rest of the list, I've basecoated them all in black undercoat (touching up the areas the spray missed)

And then while I was ploughing on I did a batch of Leadbelcher drybrushing on everything. I've since gone back and made a start touching up the Ravenwing armour.

The plan is to paint all these side by side, so this week's job will be the armour on everything and hopefully that's the bulk of the work done...

That's all for now folks. I've got to decide whether or not I want to paint my Tactical Marines and characters with the darkened green, which will then mean re-painting my Drop Pods, Terminator shoulder pads and more importantly, the older tactical marines.

Bye for now!
SB