Works Raptor Assembly & Painting Part 1

Well it seems to be a very busy time of year in all aspects of life at the moment...work, personal and of course, Firestorm Armada. In addition to various playtests of the new v2.0 rules and the unboxing posts, I've also been progressing with the actual ships already unboxed. For me, that means the menacing Works Raptor.

So we've seen how their ships are sleek and stealthy, and I'm following that vein with a stealth-inspired paint scheme. That means after their wash to remove demould agents, and removal of any flash/mould pouring burrs (which are almost non-existant in my examples), they're straight into a matt black auto-primer spray base. This will form the base on which I'll then spray lighter shades of grey onto to create some illusion of depth, which is always the problem with a dark colour - it can look flat and featureless without some attention.

Here they are at the black primer stage;

Assembly also takes place at this point, as the recesses behind the stealthy armour panels should remain dark to artificially creae shadow there. Of course I don't want to have to keep re-gluing the panels if at all possible, so the first thing to do is scrape off the primer from the locations where I'm going to superglue them.

Assembly is a little fiddly, with the Interdictor inner shields proving most troubling (surprisingly - I thought the Attrition was going to be the most difficult). Still, with some patience and a little time, the fleet builds up pretty quickly. Here they are again looking like carved pieces of carbon!

Now onto the paint...first off I resprayed them with primer, to cover any nicks and scrapes and also to ensure a good uniform coating. The first real paint, however, is an overall airbrush misting of dark grey - this is the real basecoat for the ships and defines the deep shadow of primer mentioned above.

Then onto a mid-tone, sprayed centre-out on most panels.

Finally, a lighter grey sprayed in the centre of panels - at least three shades are needed for this kind of "flat" scheme.

After that, it's time for hand-brushing - first a dry-brush of the main hull and panels with a light grey to catch the edges, followed by another with white.

Now that's all done, the ships can be given a black wash to tie in and tone down the shading, and accentuate the deep panel lines.

Here's the process for the other ships, Corvettes first - the one on the right has just the first dark grey misting, the three on the left have the second airbrush shading;

And here's the Attrition;

Now the basic ship basecoat done, it'll be back to the airbrush for some glow on the power cores, drives and weapons...