Khorne Blood Slaughterer and a little rust tutorial

We all have one of those, I 'm sure you do. I'm not specifically talking about a Khorne Blood Slaughterer but I'm talking about that one model most people find shitty (and which we partly find shitty too) but that we love for some obscure reason...
I'd like to think there's no shame in loving those because as long as it makes us happy and annoys no one, then it just makes the world a better place.
Well the model above just happens to be one of those. I must have discovered it in a WD a loooong time ago and I was immediately shocked by the concept.

Let's start with what doesn't work in this model to end on a postitive note shall we ?

The balance : I'm an engineer. It's neither a source of shame nor pride but it's what I do for a living and I quite like it because it fits with my need for cold hard logic (the poetic part of things come in other forms). 

Why am I explaining all that ? Well just look at the picture above and it might look as appalling to you as it does to me. I know Khorne engineers must be focusing on weapons and all but the very balance of the build looks stupid, most of the mass is in front of the axle of the front wheel. It's like the designer meant for the machine to fall all the time to enrage it even more or to force it to always move forward in order to keep balance.

The design : From the picture above you can see there's no piston or suspension for the main wheels, meaning every shock must shake the whole engine every time, the slightest gravel under the wheel must be felt by the demon in command (another good way to enrage it furthermore). The joints at the shoulders don't seem to have been made for anything else than rotation (though I've given an angle to mine for more dynamism).

The sculpting : Now on top of this the sculpting is not excatly top-notch let's face it. It's a rough scratch build with joints between pieces very easy to spot on the model (I didn't even try to fix those in all honesty) and the sculpted parts aren't exactly top of the art.

Now I've said all the bad things I think of it, I'd liketo come to the main point : I love it.

I love it because it's just a shameless attempt at making a cool and fun model. Sure it looks like the enraged crossbreed between a lawn mower and a wheelchair and sure it does look like it wouldn't be of any use in battle and would very easily be incapacitated in actual combat (a stick through the wheels comes to mind), but it's saying loudly and clearly what it means : FRENZIED BLOOD ROBOT.

The original studio paint job drives the nail a little deeper with an orgy of bright red and green to make sure everyone notices it on the field !

You can see I've opted for a fairly different approach painting wise to match with my renegades.

While I was at it, I took the time to make a little tutorial about how I paint rust since it's a technique I've used quite a lot lately. It's a very simple and rapid one but I quite fancy the look of it so for now it is my go to recipe for rusted steel/iron.

Here are the main paints I use, you can of course opt for others, it's just a rough idea of what you need.
The first couple on the left is to make the base wih warplock bronze and a dark brown to form the base then another couple of either lighter brown. The second couple is just here to provid echoice, I only use one but select it depending on the look I want, the deeper one will be used if the model is meant to have flashy colours while the brighter one will be used if the model is to be generally dark (I always work on contrasts). For this model I opted for the brighter one.

Then you have a pot of Agrax eathshade (don't think I have to present that one to anyone) and to finish, my beloved cadmium red (easily in my all time top 3 paints) and a clear orange.

Apart from the base coat applied with a normal brush, all the steps will be done with the worst brush I have at hand. We all have some like this :

First step is easy, just basecoat all the rusted parts in Warplock Bronze :

Now here comes the technical part. take your dark brown and your shitty brush and just keep enough paint in it to leave traces like below by stippling

Now you can stipple all the metallic parts with that, make sure to be as sloapy as you can be, this has to be random and loose, any neat application will ruin the effect really. Here are some shots of what it should look after that (click to enlarge) :

Now take your next brown and repeat the exact same process but a little more ligtly and try to cober a little less areas (see the lighter traces left by the brighter brown) :

You should get around something like this :

Now just open your pot of agrax earthshade (or equivalent) and apply it loosely all around, just make sure you don't drown any area (it could leave annoying white marks) and that it covers all the areas :

Now you're done, you're only 2 steps away from completion ! Just stipple again with cadmium red (or any equivalent dark orange), with lighter touches and less coverage. The cool thing with this technique is that it's fairly easy to dose how rusted you want things to be) 

Last step is to provide a very few and light touches of very bright orange to mak tings pop. Once again, you can dose how you like it, I do think it's better without too much of it but that's just me. When you're done you have your base for fully rusted steel/iron !

These parts will be tidied a bit afterwards with black lining between th ejoints and some mithril silver highlights here and there to reveal the sane steel where rust has been chipped off :

After that I only had to push highlights on the black parts to use the same technique used on my renegades and my assassin (tutorial here).

With teh final wash of black, I only had a few details to pick and mettallics to finish :

All in all this was a fairly easy and rapid paint job. I didn't really try to polish it too much. I only tried to replicate some red OSL in the recesses to give it an inner fire and try (to my level) something like what Don Hans achieved with brio on his late chaos squats :

CHECK DON HANS IF YOU DON'T ALREADY

So here's a couple of group shots along some of the heavy guys of the army so far :

And with his flock of marines ! (I realise I need to paint my khorne renegades ASAP now...

So here we are, I hope you managed to like a few things despite the length and model implied ;)
Can't say what's gonna come next for I don't know myself but I've been doing a lot of modelling lately (hence the decreased number of painted models). Some good shall come out of it ;).