the horrors, the horrors- painting

The best thing about a miniature like the Horrors is that they are essentially natural. There's no strange little buttons or hoses or dials or crap all over them. That means that, minus paint drying time, you can paint a squad of them in a few hours whereas, at my fastest, I can paint one chaos marine per hour.

I want to mention here that as I am no big fan of Citadel miniatures or GW, I am loathe to recommend the use of their paints. However, I am currently at a state of my painting where I am trying something new. I'm trying to get rid of my crappy citadel paints of which I have four boxes.

I imagine it would be possible to sue Citadel for false advertising as what they sell isn't really paint. It's more like a hope of color. You pull out a tincture of "wouldn't it be nice if this would paint your miniature red" Red ($3 a bottle) apply it to your miniature and well you can't see the red. Citadel colors Red and Yellow are transparent. They must be painted over white, or else they will not show up at all. Orange being a mix of red and yellow is a joke. Their blues and greens are nice (I especially like Dark Angels Green), but let's face it, at $3 per .406 fluid ounce, you're not exactly getting a deal.

For paints, I recommend two kinds, and I'm sure there will be five thousand addendums to this later, but you want a set of really good paints (I use Golden Select professional Acrylics) and a collection of pretty cheap paints (Americana Folk Art, Apple Barrel, and Delta Creme Coat all sell a paint line that's better than Citadel for about a 1/10th the cost--nothing is more than $.99 a bottle). The good paints will, more than likely have to be mixed to get the color you want, while the cheap paints are so cheap that you can buy whatever shade you like ten a time and still not worry about it overmuch. I have about 140 cheap bottles of paint.

By the way, when I say "cheap" I am certainly NOT implying that these paints are bad. They are simply not top quality. If you want to paint with crap, paint with Citadel.

To Citadel's credit, they have a line of "inks." These are very useful. No one else seems to sell a line of inks so I can't compare citadel's to other brands. I have heard tell that inks are just magic washes, in which case I feel like an idiot for even buying the citadel brand but oh well.

Okay, all that said. To paint Horrors you will need three colors for the base coat. I'm using purple, blue, and dark blue. I put on the darkest color as a base coat and then lighten up the rest of the miniature. Some people apply the mid-range, darken recesses and lighten edges, but I find that the hardest thing in painting is to get the crevices painted. Washes do not work. Not even Magic washes, which are a little better, but not much. Therefore, I start by painting the entire miniature the color of the crevice, with one addendum...

After I get done with the main coat of paint on the miniature, I'm going to douse it in purple ink. My goal is to make the thing look purplish rather than pink, or light blue. In this case, the crevices are going to get inked as well, but that's a few steps down the road.

Okay, so step one: paint a base coat that's a few shades darker than you want the miniature to look. On to step 2.

Step 2:
While I hate Citadel and really don't much recommend buying much from them, and what I do recommend you do buy, I also recommend you buy on ebay, there is one item which I think is worth the money, and that's citadel's guide to painting, or whatever it's called. In it, I learned the difference between dry brushing and overbrushing. This is important. Overbrushing is when you still have a lot of paint on the brush and you paint over another surface, and that's what step 2 is. I painted over the blue with particularly light blue, the dark blue with magenta, and the purple with an electric pink. This is the result

Step 3:
Some may call this cheating, but I don't think so. I've got this great magnifying glass+day lamp combo. Basically, it magnifies the miniature and does so with a light specially made to simulate day light. It's frickin' awesome. In any case, you don't need the lamp if you have a steady hand. The point is to go over the miniature and paint any raised spots in a lighter shade of whatever color you overbrushed. Your goal is to get about 1/2 the miniature's surface area covered (the overbrush probably covered 90%). Don't go overboard with this, you've still got one more layer, or possibly more if you're crazy, but at least one more to go. Don't worry at this point about getting individual hairs painted, that's a project for the next step.

It's hard to give tips on a step like this, since basically what I'm saying is paint, but I will tell you how you can go wrong here. First of all, this is a very necessary and primary step. So, don't cut corners. It will save you no time dry brushing through this, nor will it save you any time attempting to overbrush this color and do multiple washes to get three "layers" of paint. Washes, except when tightly controlled, look like washes. And dry brushing, except in rare instances of supreme texture on the miniature, look scratchy at best and crap at worst. Are there ways to master these techniques? Yes. But they never look better than paint that has been responsibly and consciously applied. So, just paint.

That being said, the real trick is to get the shades so that they are not too far off. This comes with practice, but let's just say that you should be able to discern the difference between the shades from the outside of the bottle (you should be able to, for instance, tell which shade is lighter, and rather easilly), but not much more. It's bad if you can imagine numerous shades between the two colors, but you do want enough of a diffference between the colors that you can see it on a little miniature from a couple of feet away.

Some people are big fans of blending in this situation. At this level, it can sometimes come in handy. To blend, simply paint on the lighter color, and then, while the paint is still slightly wet, lick the end of the brush, and draw the paint out a little onto the darker surface.

DO NOT use glycerine to keep the paints wet or else they will not blend, but rather mix. This can be an interesting effect unto itself, but not if it isn't what you're going for.

For my miniatures, I painted Chamberlay blue over a sky blue overbrush (both Delta Creme Coat), Electric Pink (Americana) over a Magenta (Folk Art)overbrush, and Lisa Pink over Electric Pink (both Americana). As you can see, my plan to use up my Citadel paints pretty much is failing. I just can't bring myself to waste such expensive miniatures with such crappy paint.

Step 4:
Okay, at this stage it is admissable to use drybrushing but only on things that are seriously textured (hair, fur, scales, chainmail). Everything else, like these horrors are still going to require gold old painting and a steady hand. On the most raised areas get a color that's as light as you want to get. My pink horrors recieved their lightest shade with English Lace (Apple Barrel), the purple horrors with Lisa Pink, and the blue horrors with white.

This is the basic method for painting everything on these horrors, and the basics hold true for most miniatures. What remains? Well, there are the horrors mouths, their tongues, and in some cases the other horror attempting to protrude from the horror. There is also the scaly bit above each horror's eyes, some horrors have horns, fire, and let's not forget the bases.

The horns: We'll start here. Horn's are painted dark brown, and then a light, light, light tan is applied to the most of the horn. I normally try to leave a dark brown ring around the horn that's about a milimeter thick, and then I draw the tan down in straight, clearly striated lines back towards the base of the horn in lines running perpendicular to that base. Then, I pain the top and front of the horn using white. It's barely noticable, if you've picked the lightest shade of possible, but regardless, it will look better.

The tongues: Tongues are easy. Pick a color different than the rest of the miniature. Paint it the dark color, and then paint it over using a kind of stage three color (a highlight, but not extreme). You're goal is to leave only a triangle of the darker color at the tongues base. If you want you can futher highlight the tip or folds depending on the tongues length. As I'm painting demons, I felt no loyalty to pink tongues whatsoever.

Fire: Fire's easy. Paint it the brightest red you can find. Highlight it with a midrange yellow.

Scales: Scales and similiar features as those found on Tzeentch Horrors require a technique that's very close to "black lining"--a painting tabboo since about 95. Okay, first paint the whole area are dark shade of a color opposite to that of the skin. If the skin is light, the color should be dark. If the skin is dark, the color should be light--but not too light. Once this whole area is painted, spot paint the top of the scales. On a larger miniature, with far more of these scales than on the horrors, you could dry brush. DO NOT, however, drybush, EVER, small areas. You will end up getting some wrong color on the surrounding area, and it will look like crap. This is, by the way a very similar tactic to how I painted the demons eyes and teeth.

Eyes and teeth: Paint the entire area of the mouth, sans tongue, and the entire eyes socket, black. Now, either dry brush or spot brush the teeth white. If you drybrush, make sure that you go back and paint the tips white. Drybrushing creates a "faded" look. You do not want the Horror's fangs looking faded. Also, spot a point of white onto the horrors eye leaving the rest of the socket dark.

Having done all this, you should have a number of horrors that are done.

Those that aren't done are the one's with another horror attepting to escape. Simply paint that horror as if it were another model, choosing a new color this time to offset the fact that one horror is attempting to crawl out another horror's mouth.

I had a number of real success stories with these miniatures. They were certainly up to the high standard that you pay for with Citadel. I do however have some words of advice to anyone painting Horrors, and that is this: Figure out what's what on the miniature. This is certainly something you have to worry about no matter what miniature you paint, but it is especially true of the horrors. You can, for instance, very easilly paint the fur that portrudes from a horror's arm without giving it too much thought, but case in point, that fur is actually supposed to be fire. Given the way that the Horror's mouth mishapes, it's very easy to miss a tongue or to get confused about whether the arm belongs to the horror on the outside or the horror that's coming out of that horror.