Chaos Warhound Titan - WIP "All is Rust"

After finishing off the interior of the Chaos Warhound, back in October, I restarted my research on paint schemes for Traitor Titan Legions. It quickly became apparent that there's really not that much detailed information to be had on the subject. None of the colour schemes I did find appealed to me. Forge World's red Chaos Titan Legion scheme is just too similar to my Word Bearers, and a several of the other were just too... I don't know... Not what I was looking for.

In the end I went back to Forge World, and their other Chaos Titan scheme. The old faded look seemed appropriate for a war machine several thousand years old, but I also saw an opportunity there to be able to play around with oil washes (again) and pigments and weathering powders. To that end Ørn and I went on a field trip to Small Size Hobbyland in Strømmen (north-east of Oslo) one Saturday morning. They have a pretty large range of both MIG, Vallejo and AK Interactive products, we both came away with healthy amounts of loot.

After assembling the body and head I pulled out the airbrush and gave the model a couple of light coats of Vallejo matt varnish. I then masked off the interior and applied another coat of Chaos Black primer. Satisfied that I now had a base coat that would stand up to handling, I used a large soft brush to drybrush the entire model. First a pretty heavy coating of Citadel's Warplock Bronze and then a lighter coat of Leadbelcher, focussing on surface details like battle damage, Chaos symbols and the edges of the armour plates.

The observant reader will note that these are the same first steps that I use on my Word Bearers. I did toy around with just inking the Warhound, perhaps just using a different colour, but I decided against it because it would be a shame to just take 'more of the same' approach with a model that'll be the centrepiece of my collection for quite some time.

I gathered the AK Interactive washes and weathering powders I had bought in anticipation of my (still) upcoming Traitor Guard project as well as my oil paints and turpentine. Since then I've been playing around and experimenting a lot with mixtures and effects... I've gotten to a point where I think I'm happy with how it looks now. Unfortunately, it's gotten a bit too cold outside to be able to take the titan outside and give it a couple of coatings of varnish. (It's a few degrees below 0°C.) I'll either have to find somewhere relatively close, or... find some other solution I'd better not write about here, in case She-who-comes-first happens to read the blog in secret. (Yeah, right!)

So, there it is. I still hope to have the Warhound finished in time for my birthday party in January, but I'm not comfortable with using masking tape on the model without protecting the paint-job as it stands now.

In the mean time, it turns out I still have lots of unbuilt plastic miniatures lying around...