Lord Commander Eidolon - Post 'propainted' Touchups for a friend

Evening guys,

It's not often I get to paint miniatures that aren't mine and as rare as it is, this is different again.. Touchups/rework!

A friend of mine and one of the blokes in my group is getting his Emperors Children army commission painted, he had a pretty massive Iron Hands 40k force but has since made the switch to 30k and sold up with the old stuff. He wanted to get the best job done on his Forge World models which I can totally understand so he went out to get the army commission painted a few bits at a time.

He tried 2 companies, one - Lil Legend Studio to work on his BaC Tactical Marines and another studio from the states to work on Eidolon. Myles work from LL Studio is fucking gorgeous as pretty much anyone can attest and having seen it here in the flesh, it's definitely worth your $$ if you wanted to go that way. The other studio though.. kinda reminds me of the 'Pro painted' you can sometimes see on ebay..

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, LL Studio Tac Sergeant, 'other' Eidolon

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, LL Studio Tac Sergeant, 'other' Eidolon

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, LL Studio Tac Sergeant, 'other' Eidolon

After a few months of buggering around even trying to get the Eidolon model back from the studio, it wasn't what he was expecting. You'd normally be happy enough with some differences in colour and techniques used to achieve a paint job you would want to pay for, but poor old Eidolon wasn't shown a lot of love.

The airbrushing was sloppy with a lot of splatter and some fingerprints visible. The metallics were inconsistently applied, some trims done, others missed, overpainting on to the purple of the armour and no shading to add depth. The armour itself was airbrushed only so there aren't any pin washes or line highlights to add more contrast to the model, a bunch of stuff was just missed painting altogether too like grenades and some sections of trim. Oh and the base! More of a Death Guard green than a Sallies green that he actually wanted, so that needed some work too.

Anyway, next to the 3 tactical squads from LL, it looked pretty sub-par.

I offered to touch it up for him and try to get the metallics looking similar while applying some of the missed techniques to the model and clean up some of the mess, I wasn't going to do a full strip and repaint so it's not as good as I could do from scratch, but it looks a lot better than it did and can at least hang with the LL boys and not look too bad now.

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, post touch ups, lots more contrast, extra levels on the metallics, cleaner!

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, post touch ups, lots more contrast, extra levels on the metallics, cleaner!

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, post touch ups, lots more contrast, extra levels on the metallics, cleaner!

Excuse the phone shots and the fingers, post touch ups, lots more contrast, extra levels on the metallics, cleaner!

Basically I went around and finished off all the missed spots with the appropriate metallics, I applied a nuln wash to everything metallic to give it some separation from the purple and some shading, I then brough the metallics back up 2 levels for some more shine. The purple armour got a few spots cleaned up, pin washed with nuln oil and then line highlighted with a light purple mix. The white I tried to clean up a bit but it was mostly left alone as I would have needed to break the model down to start again, I did repaint the hair though with grey-white wet blending. The black trims were repainted and line highlights of grey. The base was re-done with a brighter green on the hull, sponge chipped, streaked with grime, grey weathering pigments applied then flat cleared.

And post rework:

Anyway, might not look like much but a fair bit went into it, it's worth taking your time to pick the right guy I guess if you want to put your hard earned into commission painting for your force!