Eye of the OGRE

I finally got a chance to get an OGRE painted this week! 



That's a nearly completed OGRE.  I'm using the same technique I started with in a previous post, but decided to kick it up a notch.  In my post about the Afrika Corps Camo I talked about using a wash to help pick out the details.  While I mentioned that I thought it looked better without, I really wanted to pick out the details and I kept coming back to using a wash and painting over again.  So I decided to go big or go home.  Here's the idea that I was working off of.



I started with a basecoat of Bone White (Vallejo 72034) and a wash of GW's old Grphonne Sepia wash.  I feel like it the OGRE just rolled through a soy sauce factory when I look at it.



Now comes the hard part.  When I talk about going over a wash again with the base coat I'm talking about painting all but the most recessed areas.  Those areas will be darker, and thus become the shadows.

 

While you might think that it wouldn't have a noticeable effect it actually does quite a lot to add definition overall to the model.  One thing I encountered while painting over the wash was the consistency of my Bone White.  It was very thin, and when I painted it on you could see the brush strokes.  Usually this is my cue to thin out the paint, but even when thinned you could still see the brush strokes.  One thing I've found that will help overcome this is to paint multiple coats in order to get a smoother overall finish.  Not the prettiest thing, and certainly time consuming, but it works.



I ran up to my FLGS to pick up some similar shades from different lines.  I tried out Citadel (Games Workshop) Screaming Skull, which was just as thin as my Bone White but slightly brighter.  I also tried out Skeleton Bone from The Army Painter Warpaints.  This had the perfect consistency, but the shade was dark enough that it was closer to the washed out color.  I'll have other uses for both of these in the future I'm sure.

Now that the difficult part was taken care of I had to add the tiger stripes.  Using Vallejo's Parasite Brown (Vallejo 72042) I tried to paint the lines with enough variation so that it wouldn't look consistent.



The practice model I had done had more breaks in the lines, but my friend asked if I could make the stripes go all the way across.  This was easy to do, and in some ways a little nicer since I could start from one end and just keep painting stripes towards the others.  The troublesome part is the large raised pillar towards the front and the cannon barrels that extend out.  I painted a swirling pattern of stripes on these since painting the stripes on top of them in pattern with the rest of the OGRE would just look silly.





I had a special request from my friend to make sure the Warheads are red.  So I did a quick spot of dark red, red, and mixed in some reddish-orange with my red to get a peach color that got applied to the tip.




As an added touch I added the Combine insignia to the front.



I'm getting better at freehand, but I could still use more practice.

The final request I received from my friend after showing him the final pictures was to make the Sensor Dome (that ball at the very top) a silvery color.  A quick splash of chainmail, and the Mk. V was ready to roll off the assembly line and onto the field of battle!