Slaaneshi Whore Lord's Arachnophilia: How to paint eight-legged freaks! Part I

Slaaneshi Whore Lord from the first It came from 4chan article sent me some more stuff from his little workshop in Germany. This time he talks about the trials and tribulations of painting Arachnarok Spiders, Warbosses on spiders and he is asking you to help him decide how to paint his gobbos! So sit back, relax and read SWL's quick and easy guest post guide on painting creepy crawlies using the power of washes! While far from standard, this might be the technique that your army with over 9000 models needs.  

Spiders and trees all ready to be painted!

Step 1: Prime white. Can't stress it enough it makes it MUCH easier for bright or harsh colors and it will make sure you don't get lazy : Try missing a spot after you prime white! If you don't catch it someone will.







 

Step 2: Decided to start with a darker more magenta pink so I chose Sunset Rose, which is a Vallejo color - If you brighten GW's Warlock Purple with a bit of white or pink you should be able to reach the color. I added a Baal Red wash to this afterward to make it a bit darker and contrast with the light pink I was about to add.

Piiiink horror!

Step 3: I put the pink over it thinking it wouldn't look bad... I thought wrong, it was a terrible match up but I didn't let it get me down I just needed to pull out an old blending trick.

Step 4: When in doubt make an ink! I took some of my warlock purple from GW and added about 3 parts water to 1 part paint and mixed it together until I had a nice violent looking magenta/pink ink, I covered the spider in it causing it to blend together quite nicely if I do say so myself (there was a downside to it though, because I had started the undercoat with a color darker than the ink itself when bright light was applied to it.... 

Step 5: With the pink failure crisis averted I wanted to have another color that would contrast with the pink but not also look terrible. I decided that I would do a bright green look on the edge of the legs, so I added white once again to the legs. I also thought now would be a good time to paint the wood and the mandibles. The mandibles I did straight Chaos Black and the wood I did with Vallejo's Natural Wood (P3 also has an excellent sub called rustic tan).

 Step 6: I do most of my goblins with a vallejo color called Lime Green, which goes on like an ink, I have never had so much trouble as with this one attempting to apply this color to the end of the legs, let it be known that I actually had to buy the GW counterpart to this color (scorpion green) to get the stuff to stay on the white.

Step 7: I decided to now attach the lower part of the webs for this model ( I actually made my own larger bottom piece for this thing, the one provided is a nightmare to put together). Painted it the same wood color (except for the spider on the underside you can't see, he is blue) and started on the feathers and wagggh trophies. 

The hardest part about the feathers was choosing 4 different colors and making sure you didn't land with two that opposed next to each other or two that were the same next to each other. I went with Dark Turquoise, Liche Purple, yellow and Turquoise ink (which for some strange reason looks almost completely different from regular turquoise) the skull head was done with bleached bone and a wash of Ogryn Flesh, the human head was rotting flesh with a Gryphonne Sepia wash. 
Finally I did a dark grey for the spears with a very light highlight of white. after going over it with a badab black wash the highlights remained a semi bright grey. I finished off the wood with a nice sepia wash, it made it darken up just enough to look great.

 

-tree intermission-

Now you will notice that in this picture that the tree is the same color as the wood on the spider, but in the final pictures it is much darker, that is because I didn't like the thought of a tree with bark being the same color as a bunch of cut and bundled sticks. So I did a very heavy dry brush of Leather brown to the tree, making sure to avoid the ropes and then hit the entire thing with a sepia wash. I finished up the model by adding some elmers glue to the bottom and getting some "dirt flock" I got off ebay to the base.  

 This was Slaaneshi Whore Lord's guide on painting the Arachnarok Spider and the tree that it will eventually infest. Join us next time for Part II, which includes painting the Goblin Boss and more!