Project P30 Building a ‘better’ tank - Part 3.

Painting some nasty nurgly gnashers!

I’ve been having a busy few weeks but I’m happy to say that a big part of that has involved some hobby time and my tank has seen the benefits. The challenge I faced was to paint the belly-mouth and cannon and it turned out to be a positive experience. I’ll admit to being daunted by the size of this model because it’s so much bigger than anything I’ve painted before. I struggled to adapt my painting style to the larger surface areas involved and I found the first stages to be very tricky!

However it almost always pays to persevere and as I went along I began to get to grips with the challenges. The trick was in having the confidence to start my work in a loose messy style and then gradually refine things as I progressed. That’s not so different from my normal way of painting but, on larger areas, the messy painting is a lot more obvious. Once I overcame my urge to always neaten everything up from the start, things progressed more easily and rapidly became very enjoyable.

The mouth, teeth and gums are all painted dark to light using Rhinox Hide as a base colour. This helped me to block in the interior of the mouth seamlessly but it also gave me a base and shadow colour that will help to dirty down and desaturate my palette. I think it would be all too easy for me to have a saturated colour palette that, on a model this size, would look very cartoony.

You can see the colours I’ve used below. The bottle with no label contains P3 Rucksack Tan. I progressed from the darkest up to the lightest mixing intermediary shades as I went. To paint the teeth and gums I’ve used a combination of layering, stippling and cross-hatching.

The teeth already have a ridged texture but I wanted to add more interest, as they are a very prominent feature of the model. In addition I felt they needed some decay and damage to make them feel more Nurgly. To do this I’ve used a combination of painted cracks and staining. Some of the stains/rot were applied with a sponge using the new contrast paints. In the past I’ve used washes for this sort of effect but I was very impressed with how well the contrast paints did the job.

While they have the same sort of transparency as washes, the thicker consistency of the contrast paints makes them perfect for sponging. I will definitely be using them in this way again. I’ve also used the contrast paints to build up some brown staining at the roots of the teeth. I diluted them down with the new contrast medium. While I could have easily done this with washes, I wanted to see if I could use the new paints to glaze in this way and I was most happy with the subtly of the final effect!

With the teeth and gums painted it was time to fix the cannon into place and once that was done I could finally fix the demon’s torso onto the tank. I’ll be posting in more detail about how I’m dealing with the union of the torso and tank but, for the time being, here is a picture of how things are currently looking.