"For All the Marbles" - Grimaldus' Servitors - Part 1 - Painting Marble

Along with the Banner of Fallen Crusaders 

and the Sceptre of Anointing, 

the Remnant was taken by Reclusiarch Grimaldus, 

from the ruins of Temple of the Emperor Ascendent 

during the Third War of Armageddon.

- Lexicanum

Hello, and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

TGIF! Another Friday, another brief respite from the greater goings on of the world to focus on painting tiny dudes...or tiny masonry as the case may be!

Last week I painted the legendary Grimaldus, and today we're starting in on his "friends". Grimaldus, the High Reclusiarch of the Black Templars is followed around by 3 poor unfortunate Cenobyte Servitors - folks who've had their brains lobotomized, their minds wiped and instilled with a singular purpose...to carry Grimmy's tchotchkes.

Next week we'll look at how I painted the servitors in general, but today I want to focus in on how I painted the marble effect on The Remnant of the Fallen Temple.

I had seen others accomplish a pretty convincing marble effect using baby wipes, so I wanted to give it a try. I found this very useful and succinct Youtube video (by Cat or Rabbit Scale Model Studio) and adapted the colours to those I had. 

This technique is surprisingly simple for the effect you can achieve. Starting from a black undercoat, I grabbed the all-important baby wipe. As a dad of 3 kids, 5 years and under, this part of the technique was well within my grasp. 

This next bit was probably the trickiest part of the whole technique; you want to tease the wipe apart and wrap it around the model in such a way that you're leaving some gaps but not too big gaps. The gaps will be the white areas on the finished model and the fibres of the wipes create the nice organic shapes you're going for. 

A trick I saw to help the wipe adhere to the model a little better is to first spray it with matte spray. 

I then went for an off-white, I used the Vallejo Surface Primer that I happened to have, but Grey Seer or Corax White would work. I chose an off-white so that for the highlighting step I could bust out a pure white. 

With the off-white sprayed on, I then removed the wipe. It turned out really bloody well!

I actually touched up a couple of areas by brushing on the Surface Primer before painting on Kimera's The White (any pure white will do) for edge highlights and to add a few extra veins to the marble. 

The final optional step was to coat the stone in a gloss varnish - well-kept marble is often shiny after all. 

And that's it! With paint on the rest of the model, the effect really stands out nicely. Now I need to find models with more rocky bits to marblize!

Thanks for joining me on this (very rainy) Friday! I'll see you next week on The Art of Caesura!

Watching: The Traitors (UK, season 2)

Next Week:

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