Sunday 29 June 2014

Painting Dwarf Irondrakes

I now have less than 2 weeks to prepare for Convic, and I haven't exactly made grand progress thus far. I have a group of 10 Thunderers who are about half-done, and I've painted a small batch of Irondrakes. This post is obviously about the latter, given they're actually done.

I've talked previously about how I don't particularly like the models as provided by GW, and did my best to add some variety to their poses and alter their appearance before I painted them. Nevertheless, when I sat down to paint them, I found myself scratching my head a bit. I painted all the armour (ie, basically the whole model) and then picked out the gold detailing, but the unit looked pretty bland and I didn't feel like it would match the brighter colours of the rest of my army at all. So I started experimenting with adding some spot colour.
6 painted Dwarf Irondrakes with random splotches of colour.
I don't think the armoured skirts were the most effective place for the colour, but I won't go back and undo it.
After the helmets, I think the coloured arm guards were the next most effective thing.
I went with red and orange, because it seemed appropriate for the fiery nature of the weapons the unit carries. I painted various parts of the armour on different models, including the helmets on a few. In the end, I think I am most happy with the red helmets. It's a prominent location for the bold colour, and I think it adds to the overall appearance. I could take or leave most of the rest, but having started with this rather haphazard approach, I will probably just stick with it for the rest of the unit in order to make them work together.

Hopefully I will knock the remaining Thunderers over in the next couple of days, and then I can get on with painting another 10 of the Irondrakes. Maybe then the Miners. Or the characters. Oh, man...

5 comments:

  1. Love the paint-job, on the gun especially!

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    1. Cheers. Yeah, the gun turned out OK, given I hadn't really worked out how I was going to do it. It started off brass like all the gold trimming, but then I put some bronze with a silver highlight on it, and it seems to do a good job of separating it from the rest of the model.

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  2. I also don't like the pure metal look of the dwarves and I think you've done an excellent job of breaking it up. I actually quite like the colour on the 'skirts' but you're right, the helmets give the best effect

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    1. I think the skirts are OK, but given I'm in a hurry to get these guys done, I suspect they won't get too much attention.

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  3. I guess painting the whole suit of armour in a colour is an option, although it would look much more like chaos dwarves than normal Khazalid dwarves, what with that being the prevailing way to paint Chaos Warriors...

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