House Raven Knight

Well my House Terryn Knight went to a new home in New Zealand but there was a local painting competition at the GW store last Saturday and I just had to enter.

So I bought myself a new Knight kit and set about painting up a House Raven Knight for the competition.

Now this one didn't go quite as smoothly as the first knight partly because my brain had decided I already knew how to paint one so I wasn't being quite as careful as I should have been. I did some stupid things like glue the hand-holds to the top carapace before I had painted the chevrons which meant that I only put chevrons on the back half of the model.

 I painted this Knight starting with the armour plates rather than the skeleton. This was partly because painting the skeleton of a Knight is pretty much the same regardless of which house you choose so I started with the bit that was different.

I painted the yellow for the chevrons first over the entire top-carapace. I actually painted the yellow over black rather than white (as I do for my Eldar army) and while it took a lot more coats to cover properly it was easier to get some good shading going.

Next was masking off the chevrons with tape. I actually put the tape on the model then draw the chevrons on with a pencil and then cut the tape on the model. Some people cut tape to the right width first but I found this way to be easier.

Spray the carapace black. Mask off the entire chevron area and then pre-shade with some white and cover with Ferrai Red to finish up the armour plates.

The trim was painted on by hand this time using Vallejo MA Chrome. This was actually much easier, faster and neater than masking with liquid mask. I then applied a pin-wash to all the panel lines and rivets using my "Armour Wash" recipe (4 parts Nuln Oil, 2 parts Drakenhoff Nightshade, 1 part Athonian Camoshade and diluted 1:1 with water).

Everything else was pretty much the same as my previous Knight except that I painted the entire thing in a single night over about 12 hours because the competition was the next day at 11AM. I finished up with the model at 9:30AM and started at 7PM the previous day (with a break for dinner).

In the end I came in second which I put down to the competition being stuffed full of House Raven Knights. Had I known there would be so many I would have gone Hawkshroud. The winner was a custom Freeblade with custom decals and really deserved to win.

This lad is currently up for sale on eBay.

Painting an Imperial Knight - The Heraldry & Base

With the bulk of the work done it's time to paint all the details and heraldry on the Knight.

I started out by picking out the details on the top carapace. Hand holds got painted with Vallejo MA Chrome and the viewport was just painted with black paint and given a white spot highlight in one corner.

The personal heraldry on the knee and shoulder pad were painted by masking off one stripe, spraying it black and then doing the other. This was because it was too fiddly to do both stripes at the same time. I accidentally went a bit too thick on the shoulder pad stripes though.

I used some Seraphim Sepia to separate the gold from the painted armour. This was fairly painstaking and took a while but the result made the gold pop far more and hid a lot of areas where the rub n buff hadn't covered properly (if I'm honest I'm not going to use rub n buff again for this. Hand painting with Vallejo metallics would be much faster and roughly the same result).

Lastly came the decals. First I coated the model with some gloss varnish and let it dry for about an hour. If you try and apply waterslide transfers onto gloss varnish that is only touch dry then the water has a tendency to make the varnish shrink away from the model and go wrinkly.

I'm not going into detail about applying decals here. I only use water and don't use any specialist decal chemicals and I still get good results.  Once the decals are applied I coat the model with another coat of gloss varnish to seal them.

I actually prepared the base separately from the model and pinned it after I was done. I just marked where the feet would go and made sure there was plenty of room to glue him to the base. I used my standard temperate basing style that most of my 4K armies are done with using some Flock, GW clump foliage and a lot of dried herbs. I actually use water effects to secure my flock not PVA because it flows around all the details on the base just by tipping the base at an angle. I also weathered the feet with a sponge and covered them in some Forgeworld mud weathering powders.

Once everything was dry I went over the armour plates with some matte varnish so only the gold was nice and shiny. You can see some pictures of the finished product below.