Ork Battlewagon Part One

August tends to be a little hectic here in the higher education business so we are behind on the once a week post pace but not too far.  Today I will looking at an Ork Battle wagon I'm painting.  I like to do vehicles first in an army to serve as inspiration as well as a guide to theme and color.  For this battle wagon I'll be trying some army painter quickshade and using the airbrush.

So like many projects that take on a life of their own so did this battle wagon.  First I base coated the model in Vallejo Heavy Goldbrown the equivalent of GW foundation Iyanden Darksun.  I featured this in my first blog on Bad Moon Orks

I started with black as the undercoat because I like the shadow effect leaving some of the black for shadow the heavy goldbrown is a good  midtone to make the jump to a brighter yellow.  I don't favor a white undercoat because then the yellow and the model will just be too bright.  In addition when you airbrush coverage is not an issue

Initially I airbrushed the wagon with Golden Diarylide Yellow but after I was done I felt the wagon had too much of an orange tone and the subsequent quickshade would darken the model further and would be too far off yellow.  You can see the wonderful coverage with the airbrush.

So not being satisfied I decided to go a shade higher and use Golden Hansa Yellow Medium.  I don't like airbrushing a second coat on top of another as it can get sloppy but the airbrush is a precise instrument with a lot of control so you can do a good second coat.

The results were fairly good on close up near some of the bolts you can see some buildup where the paint has pooled but that can easily be shaded.

Here is a larger shot of the model after the second airbrush coat.  You can see pooling near the bolts here as well but once again not bad at all.

I then tried the quickshade from army painter you can see the results here this is the soft tone

Army painter quickshade does work as advertised.  You can see some wonderful shading here and it collected in the areas where there was some pooling in the airbrush coat and this subsequently created a good shading effect.  I felt this was a little light so for the rest of the wagon I went with quickshade strongtone.  I wanted more of a dirty look to the vehicle.  I preffer to use highlights to pick out the yellow color as opposed to a strong overall yellow coat.

The vehicle is not yet completed but you can see here the result of the strongtone.

The top picture shows where the wagon is currently.  I have coated some parts in black and started to add some paint chip areas where the metal would show.  The quickshade gave some good shading and also added an overall grime look I wanted.

The results are good with army painter quickshade but their are some concerns.  One this is a varnish most of the material I work with will clean up with water you need mineral spirits to clean up quickshade.  Quickshade when it dries is a high gloss.  I don't like the idea of painting all the parts and then shading the model and varnishing.  I need to see the shade to decide on highlights and other features.  Now army painter has their own matte varnish they say can be sprayed on and painted on top of.  I used this spray varnish and got frosting on my model.  Not severe it was in select spots but this was the first time I ever had frosting and it was not a welcomed sight.  I was able to cover it up fortunately, but this was a big scare.  I used a fleshtone wash and got pretty close to the same results.  I will take some pictures of that for a future entry.

This project is ongoing and is a good example of how things can sometimes go astray when your painting but if your patient and take your time you can turn most situations around.  I expect to be toiling away on this model for a little while and when it's done you will see the final results.  Thanks for reading and happy painting.