Painting Rakwas – Mich Cie

Welcome back to the second of our Rakwas blogs! On Tuesday, we showcased four incredible versions of the new Rakwas model from Mantic Digital, all painted by members of our community.

You can purchase the Rakwas STL from the Mantic Digital store here.

Today, we have a guest blog from one of those talented painters, Mich Cie, who was kind enough to share more details on how he achieved his stunning results. He also shared pictures of his Z'akke Champions Company, painted in the same style. Wonderful stuff!

Anyway, over to you, Mich.

How I Painted Rakwas

Mich: When painting such a massive model, I usually try to assess which elements are essential to the look of the miniature and which will be background. Where more time should be spent and where it can be saved. Of course, you can paint every single detail, but when it comes to gaming models, the approach is different than when painting for competitions, or for the display case.

I painted the entire model in three separate parts: the base, the lizard, and the rider. Such a heavy model is difficult to paint in one piece without damaging the paint on the already painted parts. I protected the joints during painting with PVC glue.

Since I've been really into painting with Army Painter Speedpaints lately (I won a set of them at the last Brush With Death!), I applied a white base coat to the model. I usually use a zenithal, but this time I knew that a lot of light colours wouldn't show up well on a black base coat, so I stuck with white.

A large part of the model is the enormous horns. I knew I would paint the beast's skin orange, similar to the Lancer Raptors from Champions, so I decided to make the horns dark. I started with Noble Skin Speedpaint 2.0, which I used to paint all the horns. With such a large model, a drybrush is always your best friend, so I used this technique to highlight the pieces, using Dragon Fang (how aptly named), Skeleton Legion, and Vampire Fang - the entire triadic colour scheme from the Two Thin Coats range of paints.

I also highlighted a few of the more important horns with a brush, using Vampire Fang (usually when I accidentally scraped paint off them while holding the figure). Natural horns have quite smooth colour transitions, so I achieved a similar effect quickly and easily, without much precision, using a drybrush.

The brown and orange I used for the skin are analogous colours, so I needed something to boost the contrast so the model wouldn't look dull. I decided against blue, which is a complementary colour to orange, and opted for green and purple. The triadic colour scheme, where green and purple accents contrast with each other.

I recommend using a colour wheel to everyone. It's a great tool that provides a lot of confidence that the colours you choose will make sense.

The technique of painting the flames with a cool green colour is interesting.

The rider has three torches, smaller than the one Z’akke has, so I decided to simplify the paint scheme. I painted the entire flame with Scurvy Green from Vallejo Game Color, then applied white oil paint to the recesses near the fire source, and then touched up with white ink. I applied several coats of fluorescent green paint over the entire piece, followed by a touch of white/ice yellow lightening near the fire source. Then, I darkened the tips of the flames with a drybrush using the base colour – Scurvy Green. The furthest sections of the flames I painted with off-black/coal black/anthracite. In this case, the Death Reaper from Two Thin Coats.

What requires the least work, however, and is responsible for a significant portion of the effect, is the base. Therefore, I tried to capture the character of an army living near lava. The entire rock is airbrushed to give the impression that it's illuminated and heated by the lava flowing below.

One day I'll get a better airbrush; for now, I'm using a $10 one, and I can tell you it's a perfectly adequate painting tool. If anyone's hesitant to try it, as someone who recently started using this tool, I can tell you there's nothing to be afraid of.

Thanks very much to Mich for walking us through his painting process. The Rakwas miniature is available to buy now as an STL on the Mantic Digital store here. We're looking forward to seeing more amazing paint jobs once the model is out there in the wild. Be sure to share your pictures with us!