Arise, Serpentor, Arise!

Hello my friends. Long time no see, right? I offer the usual excuses of busy work schedules and hectic home life keeping me from my humble blog.

As ever, my hobby interests have shifted around a fair bit since I last posted. However, for the past few weeks Halo: Fleet Battles has come back to the fore in a big way. I've been trying to perfect a way to paint the sizable numbers of Covenant vessels I have from the Reach boxset, the Core and Large Upgrade boxes, and recently the RCS, ADP, and Flight Token boxes. In addition, having taken another look at the Swords of Sanghelios ships from earlier on this blog, I was unhappy with their final look and have since stripped them with a Super Clean bath. I am pleased with how inspirational they seemed to be in their time, with a few images of other player's minis and even a Youtube painting tutorial that present as influenced by the color placements of mine.

For the basic Covenant metallic purple, I've been having some mixed results. Starting with a spray prime of Army Painter Alien Purple, I've given a light drybrush of Warcolours Metallic Violet. After a wash of GW Druchii Purple, I give an even lighter drybrush of a bright silver, and finish with another, lighter wash of Druchii. Some ships, particularly the resin ones with all their fine detail, look great with just that. Others, like the original boxset plastics, not so much thanks to the abundance of smooth, rounded curves and flat surfaces. Drybrushing may not be the way to go with these, but after having some excellent results with the technique on the UNSC (and still not owning an airbrush!), this is my first choice to avoid prodigious amounts of panelling and simplifying highlighting.

I know. With God as my witness, I will invest in a respectable lighting set-up for my next major effort. They won't be the prettiest Covenant ships on the Internet, but they look pretty good at arm's length and have just the right subdued metallic sheen to them. Obviously, some light-sourcing still needs doing. It's quick enough, produces reasonably consistent results, and looks acceptable to my particular eye, so there we go.

To try and break-up some of that purple, I wanted to add a contrasting color or two.

Too much Halo 5 Warzone and staring too long at glorious "Temple" variant Ghosts, Banshees, and Wraiths inspired this piece.

Fluff-wise, this ship is meant to portray a venerable RCS cruiser, mothership of an order of Sangheili Zealots that have been called upon to fight the Flood numerous times over the history of the Covenant ("What if the Infection defiles the relic?"). Still a WiP, though, as some lighting still needs to be added.

On a completely different note, some Halo Wars 2 campaign has given me the strangest appreciation for the colors red, grey, and steel. :-D

While I took some liberties with this scheme, it was done to better represent (stereotypical, even) the Banished faction vs. the Enduring Conviction, which I feel we never got a good enough look at in-game to discern her details beyond a vaguely steely hull and substantial red-orange lighting. Just consider this CCS one of the older ships in the fleet, with plenty of time for a repaint while being refitted. In game-play terms, I'm thinking of a modest battlegroup of Banished entering play late in the game using the reserves rule to represent some opportunistic raiding by Atriox and his boys and targeting everybody at random. Finer points of this to be hammered out in the near future. The current plan is for only a few hundred points of Banished ships vs a full-sized fleet, but that can always change.

I promise you here and now more regular updates to be had, especially when I do something about my shameful lighting/camera set-up.