Step by Step: Painting Chaos Daemons Bloodletters

This is my first attempt at a step-by-step painting guide. Some of the pictures did not turn out as well as I would have liked but the guide will hopefully not suffer too much for it.

After painting over a company of Blood angles, I am sick of painting red the conventional way. With the Bloodletters, I wanted to go with something a little different than what I've done in the past.

Painting Red Daemon Skin

Step 1: For starters, I based them purple with Daemonette Hide rather than any red. I did this to give a counter point to the red color that I wanted. also, purple will darken down a lot more in the wash step and give better contrast. It also adds an otherworldly aspect to the mini that contributes to the Daemony look of things.

Step 2: After the base, I did a messy stippling of Mechrite Red (use it while you have it) over the areas of the model that I wanted to highlight like the shoulders, tops of the legs, arms, hands and tops of feet.

You can be really sloppy with this step as the latter steps will cover up any red that you get in the recesses. Go nuts.

Step 3: Now it is time to bust out the Blazing Orange and a big soft drybrush. Give the model a liberal dry brush or even two of BO. Make sure to cover the small bumps adiquately. I found that if you tried too hard, that you could end up brushing paint off of the bumps during the drybrush.

Also in this step, paint the fin, claws and sword with a 1:1 mix of Chaos Black and Codex Grey. I also painted the Khorne brands black as I could not figure out a good way to create contrast and make them stand out with brighter colors.

Step 4: Now we have a model with good contrast but no real shading. To fix this (and cover up all of our mistakes), we will wash the whole model in Carroburg Crimson. This wash is much darker than the previous red wash Baal Red. Plan on it being held more in the textured areas like where the bumps are and darkening those areas down quite a bit.

Don't worry about getting the red wash on the black areas. They are so dark that they will not really show it up but it will create a dark border between the skin and black. I did not find that the red wash hurt the black areas at all.







Step 5: Now we have a pretty dark model and need to brighten it up some more. To do that we will need to do a careful and graceful drybrush of Blazing Orange. If you hit the black areas, it will mess the illusion up but you can always touch up with the black mix from Step 3. Make sure that you pay special attention to the areas highlighted in Step 2 (tops of feet, bumps, hands, etc) or any area that would be picked up by light from above.

That's it for the red areas. 5 steps from base to finish. Overall it turns out a very dark but striking model. I like the high contrast of this look but I wished that they purple showed through a little more.

Because the model was so dark, that precipitated my choice in painting the other areas black in order to brighten up the dark skin.

Painting Black (Nails, Sword, etc)

Step 1 and 2: Starting from the 1:1 Chaos Black and Codex Grey mix, it is a short jump to either light drybrush or carefully painted on straight Codex Grey just on the hard edges or on elements that you want to highlight (like the central ridge on the sword).

Step 3: Wash the area black with Nuln Oil. No need to pay special attention to any specific areas but do not let it pool. You'll fix any areas that did not get enough attention in the next step.

After that, walk away and let it dry completely.

Step 4: Take straight Chaos Black and paint any flat areas that are nor dark enough. This is your chance to control how shiny the black is. The closer the three colors are, the more shiny the area will be.

Matte

Shiny

The last step is to take a little straight Codex Grey and touch up the hard edges like the tips of the sword and the central edge. I tend to use a broken highlight pattern rather a straight line of grey as aI feel a solid and unbroken line draws too much focus.


That's it. I could go on to describe the metals, but I'll save it for when I go over my Desert Wolves as I do the same metal effect there.













Overall, I would say that the model turned out really dark but satisfying. I do not know what I would change about the painting to improve it. If the red skin had turned out brighter, I would have liked to try some of the flame or lava effects. I skipped that as it would have been too bright and overpowered the overall tone of the model.

If you have enjoyed this tutorial, leave a comment and let me know what other step-by-steps you would like to see.