Warhammer: Painting a Palanite Enforcer

 Good evening! I decided it would be fun to run through my process for painting miniatures, or at least a variation of it. Tonight, I have a Palanite Enforcer, a tough private security soldier who enforces law in the bustling underhives of Necromunda. These models are fantastic and can work just as sci-fi soldiers for other games and settings. I'll likely run him and his squad as "scouts" in Kill Team, since I don't actually play Necromunda these days.

First, here is the bare plastic. It's a little messy since I had tried some Mr. Primer brush-on primer but wasn't happy with the result. It's too cold to spray primer, so I had to do something.

I brushed on some Army Painter Chaos Black. It looks pretty rough, but as they say: "trust the process!" (By the way, this is how it was done back in the day).

I let the model dry overnight since I had to work but letting it dry thirty minutes or so would have sufficed. Looks a lot better! Sometimes you may have to apply a second, more precise coat to get proper coverage, but it worked fine this time.

I decided to hop on the "Slapchop" bandwagon. While it is technically an older technique, "Slapchop" has become very popular recently. The basic idea is to quickly paint up hordes of minis to get them tabletop ready and done. You accomplish this by painting up from black to white, getting your values in, then coating it with strong tones or thin paints like Contrasts that will take advantage of the undercoat to help "automatically" highlight and shade. It's not perfect, but it does let you get a squad of guys on the table in a hurry. And it isn't a bad base to build up from, either. Ultimately, it's about how your models look rather than how you get there.

Now we block in the base colors, all Contrasts: Creed Camo for the armor, Cygor Brown for the leather (pretty rich color), Talassar Blue for the visor and lights. I also did leadbelcher for the metals, and a nice brown for the base. I also washed the grays and gunmetal afterward with Black Templar, which muted them considerably. (I then very selectively highlighted the grays again).

I decided to break up the green a bit (as nice as it is), with some yellow. I redid the gray to white basecoat, then used Bad Moon Yellow (which is alarmingly yellow) followed by Iyanden Yellow as a secondary shade (it's orangey but great).

All that was left was some cleaning up (I painted part of the mask like the visor and fixed it), some light freehand (it vaguely resembled the skull eagle thing), and some light drybrush of a bright, clean silver to accent the gunmetal. The base was stippled with brown leather and fiery orange, then some light splotches of black with gunmetal in the center for wear. Viola, a rusty deckplate base!

And there you have it. Took me about two hours overall, partly because I was experimenting and documenting as I went. His squad mates should paint up fairly quickly now that I have it down. We'll see them in the future!