Land Raider Crusader - Part 3 - The Paint

The Land Raider Crusader is a superlative assault tank. 

Its bulk enables it to crush enemy defences, 

and its prodigious firepower cuts their defenders to ribbons. 

With an enhanced transport capacity, 

once it has stormed enemy defences, 

Space Marines pour from its hatches

to slaughter those foes who remain.

- Space Marine Index, Games Workshop

Welcome back, one and all, to another Friday on The Art of Caesura!

But it is not just any other Friday. Today is my last day of work in Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland, where I have been working for almost two years. I have really come to feel like I have a formed a connection with many of the people there. And while I will be moving on to an exciting (and monumental) opportunity elsewhere, it is not without mixed feelings. 

In just two days, my wife, 2 kids (aged almost 4 and almost 2) and I will be making the 24-hour journey over to Vancouver Island, Canada to stay for a few weeks for my brother's wedding. I'm honoured to be his best man and I'm really looking forward to the occasion. 

So, lots of exciting times lay ahead, including in our immediate future - when we get to gaze at my Land Raider Crusader really coming together. 

***

Two weeks ago I talked about my re-discovery of this gem and some of my past escapades with this tank, while last week we turned our attention towards fixing up and re-building this massive tank after years of mighty...storage!

This week I'm going to show you my workflow of the entire painting process. All-in-all, the painting process took me about a month, but we'll try to cram it all into this week's one post! 

I used the same general painting method that I use for my standard marines - which you can find detailed here. So I started by spraying the whole thing black with a rattle can. I then forwent the satin varnish and just dropped very diluted Doombull Brown into all of the crevices, kinda like a reverse panel-lining. That brought us up to the photo above, from where we started below. 

It was so exciting to see it now looking so coherent. Gone was the bare grey of the extra bits that I had added after painting it the first time and the Green Stuff. It all looked like one model. At last. 

Given the size of the model, each step took ages, but I just got into the flow of things and it was not unenjoyable. 

Next it was time to dab many of the edges with Stegadon Scale Green. 

And then Skavenblight Dinge.

I also started adding in battle damage at this point. 

The edges and battle damage were lifted lighter with Dawnstone.

The picture below is taken at the same stage, but with a different level of exposure - making it more true to how it actually looks (more black than blue). 

I think my black recipe actually scaled quite well. The warm dirt in the crevices and the cold dings and scratches really add some visual interest to the large flat surfaces. 

Now, time to lighten things up. I painted several panels with Steel Legion Drab. 

And then stippled on diluted Rakarth Flesh to give a bit of texture to the surface. 

The final highlight was with Grey Seer. I used this to add scratches to the lighter panels. 

Oooo-Weeee! We're getting there. What's black and white and red all over? The next stage of the painting process!

I painted all of the weapon casings with The Red by Kimera.

I then coated these red areas with Contrast Flesh Tearers Red. In the picture above, the bolters on the right column of the Hurricane Bolter sponson have received this contrast coat while those on the left have not. You can see that this step gives some beautiful depth and saturation to the red (The Red). 

I did the whole "hold it at arms length and squint your eyes" trick to check my values and I felt that a few areas could do with a little "pop". So, I re-painted the "cameras" on top of the sponsons and the multi-melta shield my lighter off-white colour. 

I had kept the heads detached from the crewmen to paint them separately. My God, would it have been fiddly trying to paint them while holding the tank!

I think the heads turned out super cool. I especially like the "Captain Canada" one with the white faceplate. It was fun painting some Black Templars red. In my mind, the Land Raider Crusader is such an important relic that they only let Techmarines handle it. I think there is something about that in the lore, but I couldn't find specifics of the ranks of the crew folk of a Land Raider on Lexicanum. 

With the heads completed, I painted all of the metal bits and attached the decals (for tips on how to do so, check out this post). 

Looking pretty fine, if I do say so myself!

The metal and decals marked the completion of the "main bits" so now it was time to lavish a bit of attention on some of the details. 

I painted the lights first white...

...And then Aethermatic Blue. I was of two minds whether I would give the area in front of the light a little blast of OSL through the airbrush, but ultimately opted against it (mostly because I had a baby sleeping in the room that the compressor's in!).

Having just painted all the treads metal, I re-covered them with Astrogranite for extra texture, I also added it to the tops of the exhaust stacks - I really globbed it on this time. 

I painted over the texture paint on the treads with Kimera's Red Oxide. 

Below are some pictures of the top, which was pretty much finished at this point!

All that remained was to consider some free-hand text on the many scrolls that adorn this tank. I searched everywhere for decals that would fit, but to no avail. I really didn't want to mess things up at this stage and my free-hand text is not the very best. 

I decided just to go for it! On the scroll (heavily obscured by the other ornamentation on the very front top ramp door I wrote "Id Est". I had to think of something that would fit the small areas of scroll on either side of the Maltese Cross. I wanted it to be kind of Latinate to fit into the whole "high Gothic" of the Adeptus Astartes. Id Est is Latin for "That Is", which I thought sounded kind of foreboding and domineering. It's also where our abbreviation "I.E." comes from

On one of the side panels I wrote "Templars". This is not a subtle Space Marine Chapter! To actually do the font, I basically just wrote the letters in caps and then added another vertical line to each stem. It worked surprisingly well. 

On the other side panel, I wrote "Rage". I thought it was fun to draw the connection to the World Eaters (heresy, I know) as two sides of a rage-fueled, close combat coin. But don't worry, Black Templars are the good guys! Honest!

The last scroll (plaque, in this case) is the least legible. It is on the lower left of the engine, and says "Deus" (God, in Latin) but with the connection to the literary phrase Deus ex machina 'god from the machine'. Unfortunately it looks more like "Denis". Tremble before this god-machine of the Emperor, The Land Raider Crusader, "Denis".

The very final step was to poke a bunch of pigment powder into all the nooks and crannies around the lower half of the tank. 

I also drilled small holes in each side of the front hatch and inserted a paperclip into the top part, the friction of which holds the door closed. So it's still openable, which is nice to be able to see the inside of my original paint job. 

Wow! This was truly an epic undertaking. As I mentioned, this painting process took me about a month of painting a little bit each evening. 

Tune in next week for some atmospheric shots of this behemoth. 

Reading: Lessons - Ian McEwan

Watching: Old - M. Night Shyamalan

Next Week:

Sweet Thunder...