For some reason I woke up this morning at 6.10am. It’s not a time I’m particularly fond of as it means that I should be asleep for another 35 ~ 60 minutes. However as I lay in my small 1/5th of the bed (it’s a ladies prerogative to utilise 80% of a mattress regardless of size) it dawned on me that in order to apply decals on Saturday and gloss varnish on Sunday I actually needed to have the custom decals in my hand… Ooops. So at 6.20am I was sat in front of my computer playing with Adobe InDesign and with a bit of tweaking at lunch I have produced an A4 sheet with a variety of different decals that can be used. I’ve ensured that I’ve done multiple copies and a variety of sizes as you can never be 100% sure what size you actually need until you go to put the decal in place.
I’m hoping that I’ve got all of the bits I need else I’ll have to do another design and then walk all the way into work, print out another A4 sheet and then walk all the way back (probably wasting an hour and a half). One really annoying thing is that the whole “teeth and eyes” idea I really wanted to do isn’t going to work without a lot of work as the teeth really need to be white and my freehand (especially on a curved surface) just isn’t good enough. I could technically decal on the area to paint and then fill it in, but I just don’t think I’ve given myself enough time to get this done by next Sunday (especially as I’d need to design the decals). To this end I’ve got a demon skull in black that I’m going to use in place (or I might not do anything).
One thing that I have done is to print out some bits not at 100% opacity. This has resulted in the actual decal being printed out with transparent “dots” within the decal (microscopic) that will show the base colour through, so I should end up with them being much more subtle than they would be otherwise. The only annoyance is that on a couple of the quite transparent ones one of the edges has broken up a little.
Something that has just occurred to me is that I’ve not planned in painting the genestealer. On the subject of colours, my first thought was the traditional purple & dark blue. The biggest disadvantage is that it’s quite a dark scheme to go with the subtle blue grey of the Dreadnought and grey/brown of the base. The purple ichor could also be less effective too. Beige and red would suffer a similar problem in that beige is, well beige! That largely leaves me with one ‘standard’ option open – hive fleet behemoth’s red & black/turquoise. My own slant will be giving it yellow eyes that I will spot highlight/reflect in the lens of the Dreadnought eyes. Basic colours will be Black & Hawk Turquoise going up to pure Hawk Turquoise for the carapace (not much of it needed though) and Red Gore to Blood Red and then a bit of brown in any recesses. I may alter the red colour a little as I will be painting onto a grey undercoat so it might be a little bright. A bit of bone colour (done at same time as other bone) and a pinky ‘tube’ and that’s it bar the ichor that I’ll do once it’s all assembled together.
I still do think it’s possible – especially as I managed to borrow a pot of Runelord Bass last night from a friend so don’t need to waste an hour and head into town to buy a pot tomorrow 😀
