Painting Deathwatch army: Week 1; #Warmaster's Crusade

Recently, Volomir.com presented their challenge "Warmaster's Crusade". Basically, a couple of painters have a limited time to complete a 1000 points Warhammer 40.000 army.

They did something close some months ago with "Age of Sigmar", but then it was a closed event, the difference right now is that this one is open to the community.

I followed closely the first one and I really want to participate in this second one, also, you know I love Space Marines, but my work usually doesn't allow me to paint what I want to.

Fortunately, this time I have a commission that fits perfectly in deadline and theme, unfortunately, it's not big enough to complete 1000 points. So I talk with Rafa (Volomir) to join them as the community until 3rd Checkpoint in June, where every Warmaster must have completed 500 points.

My commission consists of a 710 points army, top quality paint job, that includes the whole Cassius kill team + Deathwatch Warmaster. (12 Marines)

Also, I should complete them in about 8 weeks. I started on 5th March, so around 23th April (or 30th as I probably will take a holiday week in eastern), it's my deadline.

I want to share with you all my weekly advances.
Let's start then with week 1?



My first week was just to assemble, clean and prime the miniatures. Seems not so much work, but considering I do a grisaille primming and I just colourize this work to paint the main servo armours, then is a very important work!.

Previously I primmed them with an Army painter black spray. It's great because it's coverage and protection against chips is amazing, but it's a bit satin and first paint coats used to slide over it, so I covered with a carbon black from Josonja's coat airbrushed.

I'll only show the work on one single space marine, but the work is done in every one of them at the same time.

I airbrushed 3 different lights with grey, adding a bit more white every time, painting first cenitally and later focusing on reflections and volume. The last step in the priming process is to recover some shadows with black.

Next step is to colorize the previous work, so I mixed dark blue sea in my airbrush (dark blue sea is a colour that doesn't mix very well with my thinner, so I did it using dark sea blue from model air, that is much bluer than the model color's range, with carbon black, from Josonja's and French Blue, from Josonja's too) and applied some glazes of this color to the whole miniature.

I chose this blue tone because it's the same I use to paint chaos space marines and I know later it will work great with powerful colours adding contrast and reaching the "black" sensation for the servo armour.

If just a tabletop mini, this step is enough so you can go to outlines step, but as we are looking for top quality, I recovered maximum highlights and maximum shadows adding a bit of red before going to shadows outline step, that is my actual status (I still have to do in half of the minis).

So, I hope you liked it. I must keep working and see you next Monday with week 2 :)