Blood Angel Red

As promised I took some photos whilst painting up the red armour on my Terminator Sergeant so that I could show how I paint Blood Angels red. This is not a tutorial, professional opinion or anything as authorarative as that. This is simply a demonstration of how I paint red armour – it works for me and if you can take anything from it then great.

First thing to note is that I hate off-the-shelf models, I don't do them. In every army I have created to date, every miniature is altered in some way so as not to look like every other bod's models. With this Tale of Four Gamers project (which maybe I should re-name Tale of a Single Gamer?!) the idea is to do things I'm not used to – take me out of my comfort zone. The AoBR models are plug and play anyway, so the aim is to get a few units painted up as quickly as possible – speed is the key here. With this in mind, here is my demonstation of how I paint Blood Angels...

Taking the based and undercoated (in Black) model I take some Chaos Black and mix some Blood Red with it. I guess it would be about a 50:50 mix or maybe 60:40 in favour of black. I then overbrush the entire model, not worrying about being too neat as I will go back and black out everything not red later. Overbrushing is like Drybrushing, but with a wet brush – it works great on vehicles and now I use it on figures too for speed.

The paint will dry almost immediately so I add some more Blood Red to the mix on my palette and go round again. I find this better than trying to paint Blood Red over the undercoat due to Red being so transparent, it would take so many coats and take too long to get a flat colour. By having some Black in the mix it appears to be much more smooth and solid.

I continue this process as many or as few times as I feel necessary, or can be bothered, until I reach a pure Blood Red coat. I will probably put down two thinner coats at this stage given the transaprency of the paint.

At this point I give the whole model a liberal wash of Baal Red allowing plenty of time for it to dry thoroughly. Once this is completely dry I wash it in Devlan Mud, not letting the wash collect on any flat surfaces if possible.

Once this is dry I paint some thinned Blood Red along edges to add highlights, letting the paint go a little way in from the edge itself onto the armour. I then use Blazing Orange on the very edges themselves. At this point I mix in some Iyanden Darksun with the orange and put very delicate highlights along key edges, but not all over. The thinner the paint at this stage, the better it will blend.

I then give the model a final wash of Baal Red to unify all the highlights and deepen the colour generally before cracking open the Chaos Black to paint out where the red is not wanted.

I'm finding that painting two models at a time is about right for me. I don't get too bored and the paint doesn't dry on the palette. Having said that I've been painting the sergeants by themselves, being a bit more careful. Everything prior to the highlights takes no time at all, and I make sure I have something else to work on whilst the washes dry.