WIP: Dark Talon

So I’m still alive but only barely as Papa Nurgle has seen fit to bless me with a raspy throat and difficulty breathing. Nonetheless, I trudged forward and put a ton of work into the Ravenwing Dark Talon. Since the beginning of October I not only cleaned and assembled the Dark Talon I’m almost done painting it, which puts it at the fastest I would have ever finished a unit.

For this project I really wanted to find a way to differentiate between multiple Dark Talons at a glance. So I looked other peoples Dark Talons I decided on making the wing marking distinct colors. But I didn’t just want to make it a single color, and for a while I wanted to try this marbling technique from Lil Legend Studios.

The technique is pretty simple and centers around using a dried out baby wipe. So after basecoating the Dark Talon black I masked off the area around the wing marking using some Tamiya masking tape and regular painters tape (making sure to reduce the stickiness by repeatedly taking it on and off my hand). Then the baby wipe is carefully stretched out in multiple directions so that it does not tear, this results in a fine spiderweb design that will act as our stencil for the marbling. We lay out the now stretched out baby wipe on the wing, checking the pattern to see if we are happy with it. It’s important to note that I spent the better part of a day practicing this technique on some extra plastic bases I had just so I could get a feel for how the pattern should be and to see how different color combinations worked.

Once I was happy with the pattern, I sprayed some white Stynylrez primer over it using the airbrush. I then carefully removed the stencil so as to not damage the white I just laid down and proceeded to airbrushing a thinned down blue ink on just the white sections until I reached the saturation I wanted. I took the time to avoid the black marbling because during my testing I discovered that spraying the blue ink all over caused the black veins to blur into the blue sections too much and the effect is greatly diminished.

I decided to paint the individual parts of the side mausoleum ornaments rather than making it all one stone like color. All that is really left to do is highlight the skulls using a near white and to paint the lenses on the two side skulls either red or blue. Overall it was a pretty simple affair but I just lingered on these pieces for no real reason, I guess the perfectionist in me was taking over.

If you look back to the first photo you will notice that I am not using the normal flight stand from Games Workshop. Dragon Forge Designs does this great thing where if you get one of their flight stand kits and a base, the guy who makes the bases will drill a hole in it to fit the flight stand. However, I haven’t even started on the base yet, but that is more of a treat that I’m saving for after the Dark Talon is finished.

The only other major things left to do are all the guns for the hurricane bolters which for some reason is sculpted as individual front halves of boltguns. Also, I have not painted the symbols of the Ravenwing or Dark Angels that are on the tail and underside respectively. But if all goes to plan one more weekend of work and I should be able to finish it.

Till next time my wayward compadres.