Avenging Angels and Apps

This has taken me a while, but it feels good to get Azrael finally painted and finished. I've had this figure iny collection forever it seems, almost certainly since release, and never got round to painting him. I guess I wanted to do the model justice and was always intimidated by painting such an iconic character. Well he's done now and I'm reasonably happy with the end result, although I stopped once I realised I'd reached endlessly tinkering stage.


The approach was much the same as Asmodai, so lots of wet blending on the robe and armour. For the armour I worked from a black base, blending in Orkhide Shade (no idea what the new GW equivalent is) to the black, giving it a wash, then highlighting with orkhide again before blending in some DA green. A bit of fine highlighting with scorpion green, then washing with Thrakka before applying a blue wash to the recesses to "unflatten the black."

The Sword of Secrets was a fairly simple exercise in blending in the reaper dark elf skin triad, a light drybrush with Reaper Ghost White and a few washes of black and blue. I tried to give the sword as much substance as possible, hence the blue wash, otherwise it would've looked a bit flat.

Ooops - just spotted I didn't complete the shoulder scroll, will tend to that later. :o

For the base I was very keen to get a stone effect that was somewhere between sandstone and limestone, a more naturalistic earthy tone than the granite effect of my Grey Knight bases.

The base was painted first with a basecoat of Calthan Brown and then DA green applied to the recesses, before a highlight of Scorpion Green to give a little definition before washing with Thrakka. Same for the shrubbery. I then drybrushed the base with Bubonic Brown before applying a hightlight of bleached bone, washing with devlan mud, then dry brushing with bleached bone again. Not hugely complex, but the base has substance and a convincing worn look. I used the same technique for Asmodai's base.

On a related note, the photography here is somewhat better I think. This is thanks to a friend tipping me off to an iphone app called Camera+ which has some very nice features that make taking decent photos a hell of a lot easier. The standard iphone app is pretty shonky and struggles with most basic photography, whereas the software in this app allows you to do all sorts of clever stuff quite effortlessly. Which means I can take mini-photos much more quickly and efficiently, instead of having to set up a camera for macro photography, the results of which have been somewhat variable over the year. So if you're looking for a cheap, simple, solution to mini-photography and have an iphone, 69p is all the Camera+ app costs.

Next Dark Angels command mini for painting will be Ezekiel, Grand Master of the Librarians.