Spud painted someone else's Onyx army

Last year for my friend Tom's birthday, I bought him an Onyx army (which he later expanded). This year for his birthday, I painted it. I am truly the best friend.

However, I was only willing to put tabletop-quality effort into it, so I tried to come up with an interesting effect for the models that would look good even when mediocrily executed. My solution to this was to apply high-contrast highlights from opposing angles on each model (one colour from the top left, and a different colour from the bottom right), which nicely accomplishes my goal of distracting the eye away from how sloppy most of the work is. Hooray for artistic deception! :D

Anyway, here's how it turned out:









Yes, I know Doctor Worm is on the wrong base. I'm working on it. ~_~











A large part of the reason that I was willing to do this at all was that I've been very intimidated at the prospect of using my airbrush for anything other than terrain since I got it 2+ years ago, and practicing on an army that belongs to a bad person who doesn't deserve nice things gave me the freedom to fail if things came to that. And despite some bumps along the way, the exercise yielded the desired effect-- 600pts of models later, I'm much more confident with the airbrush than I was eight months ago, and am now comfortable planning to airbrush armies that I actually care about (read: mine).

Oh, and as an added bonus: the army came with a fancy scenic carry tray, because that was something else I've been musing about and wanted an excuse to try out.





The tray has a pull-out drawer for tokens and dice, because I am just the best, you guys. You don't even know.

If you want to read a bunch of my sad moping, or see how I built the tray, or just look at 50+ pictures of the models, I guess you can go to my blog. I don't recommend it, though.

Anyway, this was a very educational project, and I quite like the end result, and I'm super pumped to never paint another model in this scheme, ever again.

The End