Swirly colors

 

For your viewing pleasure, today I present some bases for my Battlefleet Gothic ships. These were one of my projects during our paint day at Pegasus Games, and I’ve gotta say, they’re super fun to do. The deep space starfield effect was achieved with an old but still relatively stiff large brush that I dipped in the paint and just flicked onto the bases. White gets the heaviest coverage obviously, but there are also two shades each of red, blue, and yellow. I then went back in with black and touched up any areas where the paint formed a line splatter rather than a dot (originally I tried using an old toothbrush to flick the paint on, but it resulted in too many lines vs dots). Finally, a detail brush was used to add in larger white stars dotted around at random. The nebulae were achieved with a sort of blotting, stippling, drybrushy effect that I’m not sure how to properly describe, but each one only took about 5-6 colors advancing in a standard highlight progression of darker to lighter. While experimenting I found it very important to end by mixing your final color with white to get a very light shade; this really makes the final product pop!

Now I just need to go back and add heading lines to the bases, as BFG is a game where the facing of your ships is super important, and a getting an angle wrong by just a few degrees can be the difference between victory and defeat. Oh, and I suppose eventually adding some ships to the bases might help too…