A Knight's Tale: Paint Scheming

Hi folks,

A few weeks ago, Squareoky Stewart from the 40K Google+ community contacted me, with some suggestions about an Imperial Knight house that would go well with my Iron Snakes. That House was Feardraken. There isn't much of an official background for House Feardraken, which suits my purposes just fine. The small amount that was written about them, suggested that they come from an ocean world and have previously been tasked with fighting sea monsters. If you know anything about the Iron Snakes, this mirrors their background pretty closely.

A Knight Errant of House Feardraken

The colour scheme has a lot of components that work well with the Iron Snakes; particularly the contrast between warm/cold metallics and white/blue. I will be painting verdigris effects on the warm metallics and shifting/swapping out the white components a bit, as I am not a big fan of that big chunk of white above the head. With these little changes I should be able to pass this Knight off as a Freeblade previously from House Feardraken, who is now crusading around the Reef Stars with the Iron Snakes. That sky blue colour is also very Greek!

Greece: 50 Shades of Blue

 I had a look for some other examples of the scheme and came across some work by JustinSoli on DeviantArt. His Knights are very well painted with some great weathering effects; go check them out!

A Knight Warden of House Feardraken, by Justin Soli

As a little test, I decided to paint my Knights head. I have chosen the most Greek looking helmet in the collection:

Next I taped it up and gave it a two-part undercoat of black and white: black for the metallic bottom part and white for the Lothern Blue on top:

Here it is with my modified Feardraken scheme:

Not bad for a first go! Now I just have to translate that onto the larger pieces and incorporate some white armour with dark blue free-hand work. Easy!...

I am still waiting on some parts to finish the Knight off, which have a fair distance to travel. I also have to get hold of some transfers to see if I can reduce the amount of free-hand I have to do. In the meantime, I'm going to start the leg construction, the base design (one of my favourite parts of the hobby!) and explore some more background. Squareoky Stewart has already spent a fair chunk of his own time fleshing out the background of House Feardraken, which he has been kindly supplying to me. I'm hoping to add even more in collaboration, as well as piece together some short stories that will bring it all to life.

See you across the table,

M4cr0