Concept "Legion of Rust" Chaos Marine

Whenever I start a new army or want to try a new color scheme, I paint a test-mini first. I'm sure a lot of people do this so that's nothing special.

We usually call this practice: "painting brother Smik", as seen in the superb webcomic Turn signals on a land raider. This webcomic had been running for a while, but was abandoned by it's creator somewhere in 2010 due to budget problems. While writing this blog-entry I went to check on the site again and seems he has posted a few new comics... I never would've found out if I hadn't started this blog, so hurray :D

Anyway, on with the order of the day...
So I painted a brother Smik for my "Legion of Rust" CSM and wasn't quite happy with it.

Meh... only picture I took of Brother Smik apparently

I was happy with the base color of the armor and the rust effect. Also, the verdigris wash on the weapons looked good as well, but I did some experimenting with green and red washes on the armor, and that came out wrong.

So I decided I needed more Smik and started preparing the Chosen from the Dark Vengeance box set.

I'm sure all of you know what a model looks like once it's undercoated black, so I don't have a picture of that.

Next, I applied a basecoat of Vallejo Game Color (VGC) Stonewall Grey using my airbrush and spraying down to create some shadows.

The shadows aren't obvious in this picture... which is the whole point when looking down on the model.

After this, I washed the entire model with a 1:1 watered down Sepia wash and when completely dry, I drybrushed over it with VGC Stonewall grey. This gives me a nice base for the armor.

This is my new Smik, I forgot to take the pre-wash picture of this model so I took another model for the previous picture.

Next up, I painted the metal bits and washed them with my own verdigris recipe: 1:1 mix of VGC Sick Green and Electric blue watered down a lot. I also basecoated the rusty parts in Charred brown.

The verdigris will be toned down as I highlight the metal.

The final thing I did yesterday was adding the first layer of orange to the rust. I will need to go back in with the orange to highlight the corroded areas. How I modeled the corrosion will be the subject of another post soon.

So this is looking quite good, in a Nurgly kind of way. The only thing I'm not sure about right now is the fact that the entire model looks a bit bland. I think I need a spot colour that really pops, maybe doing the tabard, the eyes and some details in a bright red might help... afterwards, the red will be dirtied up, of course.

Any ideas about the spot color are welcome in the comments!