Imperial Fists – Yellow Tests 2 & 3

After several days ill last week, and the jobs still mounting in the new pad, it's been a struggle getting any hobby time in – thank god for scheduled posts!

These next two tests for the yellow Imperial Fists armour were a variation on the first. Instead of spraying the Daemonic Yellow directly onto the bare plastic, I decided to undercoat the models first – one in white and the other in black.

I went about adding the yellow spray whilst doing chores today, stopping the work periodically to add some more colour before going back to the job in hand.

At first glance everything looks pretty rosy in the image above, but not so.

As you can see, spraying over a black undercoat makes everything a dirty greeny colour. The coverage wasn't great and there was a lot of texture.

The coverage on the white undercoat was much better, maybe slightly better than Test 1 last week. I thought that I might have found my solution until closer inspection revealed, just like the black test, there was a shocking amount of texture on the model. Once a colour wash hits these yellow surfaces this texture will show up like a neon light. Such a shame.

It's looking like the yellow spray is not the way to go – the search continues…

Imperial Fists – Resin Test 1

I had decided to try replicating the sculpted shoulder pads for my Imperial Fists. The image above shows the official GW pads, after a lot of cleaning up – they were a mess when they arrived, not finished at all. I know from my experiences with the resin bases that without some kind of vacuum chamber bubbles will be an issue. However, as long as they're not too bad they can be written off as battle damage.

Eventually I found my resin gear amongst the boxes still piled high in the garage. I had stuck the pads on a bit of plastic sprue to help the flow and created my silicone mold. The materials I have are quite old now so I wasn't expecting great results if I'm honest.

The mold was left overnight to cure, then the tricky task of digging out the original pads without damaging the silicone began. At times like these my patience goes out of the window as my excitement takes over. Despite this, I got the pads out unscathed.

Next I mixed up (way too much) resin and started to inject it carefully into the mold. A couple of hours later (just to be sure) it was ready and I released my shiny new white pads to inspect the results.

One had a large bubble all but destroying the icon. The other three looked pretty good and I cleaned then up with a knife and file. Alas, in my enthusiasm I broke one, but I still had two which looked pretty good.

The real test will come once they are painted but they'll do for now.

More soon…

Imperial Fists – Yellow Test 1

So I got a few minutes this weekend to try out one of the options for painting up my new Imperial Fists army. Option 1 consists of a large can of Army Painter Daemonic Yellow, spraying directly onto the bare plastic model.

The coverage was pretty good, although the finish was a bit heavy and textured – I mustn't have given the spray can a good enough shake! I also used a ridiculous amount of spray paint for one model, very uneconomical but needed to be tested.

Once the spraying was dry I went in with the same coloured paint on a brush to touch up the gaps. Alas, the tube version of this colour was very opaque and wouldn't cover the last bits of exposed plastic. It did boost the colour of the paint already on the model.

Once this was dry (or maybe slightly before as I was excited to see results) I added some W&N Sunshine Yellow ink – watered down at first, then straight out of the bottle. Again it boosted the colour of the armour and sat in the recesses to underpin the edge of armour plates.

A rather rough looking model at the moment but I've learned a lot. I was a little disappointed if I'm honest as I was hoping this would be the ideal solution straight off the bat. I have a couple of other options to try before I choose which one to go with.

Stay tuned…