Fire Angels: How doing a fully metallic army breaks your spirit and how alclad saved me from alcoholism

The title is a little dramatic, but to be honest i found myself eagerly painting up wolves and looking at my templars thinking "i could paint you up all nice and shiny like" because the silver dudes with their silver ways only ever seemed to evoke a "meh" from passers by and my efforts to paint them were getting lazier and lazier at the expense of quality.

So with a new job.. less dedicated hobby time and a knowledge that the current marine dex is either mediocre or boring (and sometimes both) i was finding my hobby time to be directed at other stuff.. Now seeing as i have a whole bloody companies worth of marines waiting for the Fire Angel treatment this was a really bad position to be in, but the effort the painting took (prime, spray, zenith spray, gloss, wash, gloss.. for just the silver with no highlights) wasn't worth the end result after id slacked off..

Now i've spoken briefly about Mark Bedford and his Astral Claws.. for the few of you who dont recognise the name hes one of the head honchos at forgeworld.. I asked him how he'd painted them after getting vague answers from the fw web team at gamesday and sat on the recipe for a fair while waiting for a time when i A: had all the stuff i needed to try it and B: felt the need to do some fire angel stuff.

now this wall of text may seem like over indulgence but im just painting a picture of where im coming from..

in my search for the best method to obtain the results i wanted for the silver armour of my dudes ive explored damn near everything.. every combo of gw paints, the vmc metallics, revells aquacolour metallics, the vma metals, oil washes, every type of varnish and their effects on metallic paints and in the end i found out that i should have just bloody well listened to Mr Bedford.. stupid ass guy who does it for a living!

so i bought me some "dark aluminium" alclad because dark makes it sound cooler and because my dudes were ment to be all aluminium looking according to my brain.. I also got me some Rubb n Buff which sounds more sexual than id like.. especially when you're asking some old dear in an art shop.

So the experimenting went as such... gloss black primer, alclad, wash, drybrush with sexualised metal crap... look at results and go "Ah fuck.. i'm gonna need to order more of this stuff"

ill be uploading some more pictures of stuff thats been sprayed with the liquid miracle that is alclad soon.. but for now i need to go shopping.