Every once in a while, a friend asks me for help painting and gets a lot more than they had bargained for. This time, we will explore freehanding a celtic knot symbol on a Space Marine shoulder pad with three levels; krieger basic, ally of the imperium, and primarch (also known as easier, medium, and hard).
We begin with a reference image.
The most important part of doing freehand patterns on your models is knowing what they need to look like ahead of time.
The first paint comes in the form of three dots, placing the three intersections that will soon follow. You can use whatever colors you like, these are going to be ProAcryl Blue for now.
The Basic
Next, place three more dots at the extreme ends of the arcs. This defines the edges of our piece, and gives our hands and eyes something to aim for.
IMPORTANT NOTE: you can do this step with a soft leaded mechanical pencil, and still be able to erase if you are careful. Avoid hard lead pencils. They will scratch the paint.
Carefully arc the top point down to the middle, using the dots we have placed already as guides.
Do the same thing with the other two “triangles”.
You may notice that the bottom right one of mine isn’t as nicely rounded as the others. This happens, and can be somewhat corrected for later.
Finally, connect the three central dots with gently arced lines. By doing these separately from the outside lengths, we give our hands and eyes the ability to focus on only one task (connecting two dots) rather than multiple (connect multiple dots with a fluid line that makes sense between all three).
Using the same color as your base armor color, carefully separate the lines you have painted so that it forms the classic overlapping weave. You can go back and forth with this step, making the edges as thin or thick as you like.
With that, you are done with the basic! You have a nicely formed very small celtic knot.
The same principles used here can be applied to almost any geometric design. Take the design, mark the end points of the design, and then connect them.
The Intermediate
For the intermediate step, we are going to highlight and shade the design so that it really pops. I’ve chosen to use ProAcryl Turquoise and some Bright Green as my highlights, but my scheme is pretty insane and most paint combinations don’t need multiple highlights. I’m using Kimera Pthalo Blue (red shade) for the glazed shade later.
Pick out the places where the lines overlap each other, as well as the “upper” surfaces with a 50/50 mix of your highlight and base coat color. You will not need to blend these – the surface is tiny and sharper contrast will look nice at this scale.
Take the pure highlight color and go up another layer, keeping this portion inside of the original highlight area so that it merges nicely. You might notice I’ve taken this time to correct the bottom right leg of the knot and make it rounder in appearance.
Optionally, take your third highlight color, and put that in an even smaller area here.
Finally, take your dark shading color and glaze it into the areas that go underneath the other portions of the knot. With that, the intermediate version of the knot is complete!
The Extreme
Time to make our knot really stand out. This is only one of the many different options available to make a freehanded design stand out.
I’ve chosen Kimera Magenta as my background color here (it’s in the scheme already, so I know it looks nice together), and painted a careful border around the shape and inside the shape to make it stand out from the grey background.
Next, I’ve added some white to the magenta and painted the insides of the knot to make them more defined.
Another dot of white added to the mix, and I’ve made some extreme “highlights”.
Finally, to bring this all to gether, I have glazed the inside area with a few thin glazes of the pure magenta, making it gem-like in appearance to match the rest of the scheme.
Naturally, after doing this to one of my Bladeguard, the others without existing shoulder decoration got jealous, and so I had to paint them up all pretty as well. Here’s the group shot.
Hopefully this was a clear, hassle free tutorial to follow. If you’ve tried this yourself, I’d love to see the results!
Thanks for reading, we will see you next time.
