Painting Progress: Swooping Hawk

coolminiornot

So I started working on painting my Swooping hawks I've always wanted to have the wings rainbow kind of like the above pic from coolminiornot.  I ended up just gluing the wings on as all my drill bits couldn't seem to drill into the model very well and magnets weren't strong enough when they were small enough to be hidden.

I have Howling Banshees coming out my ears from all my second hand bulk purchases, so I used one of them as a test for the body colour. I was going for a bone, kinda angelic colour.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

One of my friends recommended starting with Dark grey then a lighter grey followed by Bleached bone(Ushabti Bone). I then tried Seraphim sepia over all the bone, then applied bleached bone onto the Armour plates and some more Seraphim sepia onto the model to give the under lying layer a darker colour. I then applied a bit of sharp edge hi-lighting and painted the helmet with Ceramite white leaving the visor dark. 

I then started on the wings by painting the feathers black then I lined up all the colours I wanted to use. With the 9 colours all lined up I started doing ether one or two feathers each colour starting with Kantor blue at the bottom and ending with screamer Purple at the top.

The gun didn't quite seem separate so I painted it Abaddon black then applied a slight gray drybrush.

To finish off the wings I applied Drakenhof Nightshade to bind the wings a bit and then I just finished off the base with a dry brush of codex grey and then painted the base tiles White and Red. I used Khorne red as a base and blood red as the hi-light and for the white I used space wolves grey(Administratum Grey) as a base for the white.

So far I've only got one hawk complete and the other 5 at the Ushabti Bone/Seraphim wash stage. I'm still working on saving steps as I think I can get the same look if I change the order of the final hilighting. As in whether to apply the Serephim sepia twice or to do it once and then edge hi-light and then apply it again after.    

I can see I might in future have some problems with how fragile these models are. I dropped one while building them and the base broke off at the bottom of the feet. I am going to have to treat these models extremely gently.

What do you guys think? And how are your painting challenges going?