Come see the 4 inspirational secrets for saving money on the hobby, staying focused and of course learning to paint better!
The new Black Coach is the reason I first started wanting to collect the Nighthaunt army, and so seeing an incredibly good deal on eBay I had to snatch it up a couple of months ago.
Since then it has been silently staring at me from my bookshelf, judging me for not getting paint on it. Well, judge me no more as I spent the past couple of weeks slinging paint on this bad boy! Before we dive into the painting though I want to cover a couple of things I touched on a few years ago but might help serve as a good reminder.
1: Used Models
eBay and places like Facebook Marketplace can be your wallets best friend if your patient! Every couple of days it doesn’t hurt to see what is in the “auction” section of eBay to see if there is an army lot that contains some items that you are interested in. In my case, I really wanted a black coach and found one that was fully assembled and primed for $50.00.
I did have to wait 3ish weeks for it to arrive from the UK but that saved me hours of putting the model together and was around 50% of what I would have paid new. eBay is legit with using pay pal, but if you are buying through Facebook marketplace or a similar used model marketplace it doesn’t hurt to select goods and services when paying someone through PayPal. This costs a little bit more, but it does protect you the buyer from someone who might try and just take your money and run with it.
2: Paint Stripping
So, in the case of the Black Coach, it needed some very light paint stripping, and the best thing I have found for this is called LA Awesome. You can buy bottles of this stuff for a dollar a piece at your local dollar store (not sure what the non-US dollar store is called…) and it pays to have a couple of bottle on hand.
Just pour this stuff into a container and submerge your model and let it set between an hour and a day. Attack it with a toothbrush (another dollar store purchase) and it should get the paint off easily. One thing though is that even after a day of soaking and hitting a model with a toothbrush for hours some paint or primer will just not come off.
In that event, I tend to strip off as much of the loose paint as I can and get as close to bare plastic as I can and then just prime over again with black primer.
Editor’s Note: I’ve been using Testor’s ELO for 30+ years. It’s amazingly quick, super effective, and re-usable. However it can be a little pricy, but for me, it’s totally worth it.
3: Inspiration
It’s ok to use paint schemes from pictures you see online of similar models that you really like. There is no monopoly on using a color scheme that you see someone showing off, in fact, that is kind of why they are showing it on the internet.
Personally, I really liked the way Tyler Mengel (another Mitten state Warhammer player) painted parts of his Black Coach from his article on Warhammer Community. So I copied it, and then followed a similar pattern to what I have been doing with my other Nighthaunts to make it cohesive with the rest of my army. Before slinging any paint first though, I documented what parts I was going to do in what order as well as the paints I wanted to use for that particular part.
4: Preparation
Now that we covered some pre-painting tips, let’s get to the airbrushing and painting of the model! In my last airbrushing article, someone noted that I was using way too many colors for such simple models. Thinking about that he is slightly right, especially if you do not have all the paints that I do- I am certainly not suggesting you have to go out and buy them all.
In fact, the Nighthaunts do lend themselves very easily to just airbrushing a bright and dark color together to get a ghostly theme. Perfect for beginners! However, I like painting and picking out all the details and things like that so that is why you see so many more colors. For this article, I am going to list the four main colors I used, which IMHO is enough to make this model look good.
Airbrushing:
One thing about buying used is that if it is already put together it might limit what you are able to airbrush. For example, the Black Coach is a great example of the subassembly style paint job. Becuase for the most part, you might want to paint all the parts individually or in groups (coffin, horses, coach, etc.) all separate from one another.
With my model being already completely put together and, on the base, I had to limit what I could airbrush just because I was going to end up spraying paint on everything. Or I could have taken apart the model, but the seller used some strong glue and I didn’t want to risk breaking the model.
With that in mind, I started with the green and brown parts of the ghost guys trying to get that nice fade in there together. I was worried at first that the brown would look bad being a slightly warmer color, but the result I think is fantastic. I also hit the horses clothing with black and then a few shades more of lighter grey, but once that was finish, I knew I couldn’t do any more airbrushing and switch to brushwork.
Airbrush Pros, Cons, Tips:
I cannot stress how much I like the flow improver over the thinner for creating my own paint mixes now. It has made things so much easier than when I first started.
One thing I am getting a little bummed out about though is how grainy it can look when you switch colors. I want to try and make the gradients smoother with my next models, but I am not sure how to do that.
Editor’s Note: You can try adjusting your mix to be more watery and lower or increase the PSI as results warrant. Some colors such as white or some metals are very difficult to achieve finer sprays unless you use a different paint type altogether like Scale 75 or Pro Acryl.
Also, this is the first time I took a piece of cardboard and used it to block off parts of the model while I airbrushed. That helped a bit in terms of keeping some of the white areas white while doing the black cloth on the horses. Besides the grainy effect and me not sure what I can do with that I also am starting to get more bummed that I cannot get in to do fine detail work using my current airbrush.
I think when budget allows, I am going to possibly look and see if there is a smaller needle for this model airbrush or something and mess around with that. Barring that once this project is over in October, look at shelling out a bit more dough on a more advanced model. I really like my current one and for learning and general use this thing is a workhorse, but I really like the effect it gives and wish I could do it on a smaller scale.
My last tip is rather than go all in on cleaning the thing every time I used it, this time around I gave the airbrush a quick scrub and clean at the end of the day. Then when I was done with all the airbrushing and moving onto just brush work for the next couple of weeks, I decided to do the soak and clean it then. That worked great as any of the dried-on paint got cleaned out and I saved a lot of time in general for being a little lazier with the cleaning.
Editor’s Note: things like this are not as possible with a lower quality airbrush than what Travis is using.
Brush Work:
The following is all the colors I used for brush work, but as I mentioned above with the Nighthaunts you really could just use one or two colors to get a nice ghostly effect if you want. I am a glutton for punishment though and love to pick out details on my models. It is all pretty basic stuff here, the only thing that is slightly different is I tried to create a glow effect from the lanterns which was done by taking Moot green and watering it down with Waywatcher green and painting that one the wood.
Models Finished to Date:
- 6 Spirit Hosts: Battleline, 240 Points
- 20 Chainrasps Horde: Battleline, 160 Points
- Lord Executioner: Leader, 80 Points
- Guardian of Souls with Lantern: Leader, 140 Points
- Spirit Torment: Leader, 120 Points
- Knight of Shrouds on Etheral Steed: Leader, 140 Points
- Black Coach: Behemoth, 280 Points
- Total 1160 Points (Over half way woohoo)
On the Paint Table:
I am going to try and knock out a unit of 12 Myrmourn Banshees and Lady Olynder, Mortarch of Grief at the same time over the next couple of weeks. This will put me in really good shape moving into the Summer to get my 2000 points done freeing up time to work on my display board.
Previous Airbrushing Articles:
- Intro to Airbrushing Project
- Airbrush Round 1 (Spirit Hosts)
- Airbrush Round 2 (Chainrasp Horde)
- Airbrush Lessons Learned
More AoS How-To For Noobs!
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