Crucium Giger's Miniatures Blog: April 2022

Sunday 3 April 2022

Core Space: First Born

As a change of pace from the mountain of Chaos Marines I've been painting this last year I've spent the last month and a half painting the newly arrived Core Space: First Born miniatures. I enjoyed painting the first batch of Core Space miniatures, both from the initial Kickstarter and the smaller expansions, but there has been a real improvement with the sculpts this time round which made painting them all the better.

Much like the last couple of expansions that were released at retail, I started these off with a zenithal prime using the rattle cans from Colour Forge (https://thecolourforge.com) starting with black and then a grey before a final light spray with white just from above. This time however I followed this up with a white dry brush all over the miniature to help pop the edges more. Then it was time to crack out the contrast paints, instead of loading the brush what I try to do is paint a relatively thin layer so that the zenithal highlight really shows through though occasionally you do need to do a second layer of paint depending on the pigment strength of the colour you are using.

Another departure from how I painted the last batch of Core Space miniatures is that when I got to the First Born I finished them off with a very light dry brush of Pale Sand (after watching many Youtube vids extolling its virtues), which really helped push the highlights in a very natural way.

Right towards the end of this project I also received my delivery of the Army Painter Speed Paints so I wanted to use them somewhere to give them a first try. In the end I painted the Rock Worms carapace with there Malignant Green and the robes of the True God with their dark red. They flow a lot more than the Contrast paints, more wash like, and so can easily run over into areas you don't intend if you overload your brush however the actual finish on them is superb. To me the recesses and highlights seem more pronounced than the contrast paints really showing off detail and texture and there was very little to no pooling (or coffee staining) with these which is one thing I do not like about the Contrast paints. Case in point, I painted the Drones with a very thin layer of Basilicanum Grey and yet because of the flat surfaces the finish was very inconsistent so I had to dry brush some light grey over the top to even this out yet on the Rock worms the Speed paint applied so smoothly and any pooling seem to dissipate during the drying process. They are going to take time to get a proper handle on but the Speed paints are definitely going to see some heavy use in future.

As always to finish of I painted the bases in black and then matte varnished the miniatures, which I always think gives a better finish to Contrast paints as well as providing a protective layer.