Hobby: Painting Genestealers

I've had some extra time to paint this week and had some new inspiration to finish up my first big squad of genestealers.  If you're familiar with my scheme, it's basically metallic green chitin with metallic black limbs, white claws, and brown bases.  My new idea was to go back and drybrush more metallic colors onto the models and redo some of the highlighting.

Here are some shots of new and improved genestealers.  The bases are beat up and not finished so ignore them for now.

Here's what I did.  I drybrushed metallic purple over all the black parts and then re-highlighted with mixtures of purple and white.  I wanted to retain the near blackness of their body parts like ants and beetles, but also get back in touch with the purples of historical genestealer imagery.  It's not a dominant purple, just a hint in the right light.

I punched in the darker parts of the tentacles and carapace with some intense black washes.  Then, I drybrushed some metallic blues onto the green carapace to give it some more interesting iridescence.  Finally, I brought out the highlights on the carapace and tentacles with brighter whites.

I'm pretty happy with the new look, but I'm a long way off from bringing 20 genestealers up to this level.  Right now, I'm investing about 2 hours on each genestealer depending on how distracting the tv shows in the background are.  None of my monsterous creatures have the purples and blues either so this will require a full revamp of every model.  Total production uses nearly 10 colors though and should get me good painting points in tournament so it's worth the effort I hope!

For those interested, I'm using very cheap craft store paints.  I'm using the $0.99 Folk Art paints including: Metallic Sequin Black (body base color), Metallic Amethyst (body dry brush), Metallic Blue Sapphire (carapace dry brush), Metallic Emerald Green (carapace base color), Bright Green (eye base), Lemon Custard (eye highlights), Ivory White (used in mixing highlights), Pure Black (washes), Metallic Garnet Red (tentacles), and Linen (brown for base).  Primer is chaos black.