Inking the Soul Grinder's Torso

Soul grinders are one of those unique painting challenges that combine aspects of tank painting together with fleshy parts. The approaches to both tanks and flesh can be quite different, depending upon the artist. With my soul grinder, I have tried to do it in one single style that combines together how I work on tanks and flesh at the same time.

The first step was the undercoat the entire model in chaos black. For a tank and for creatures, this gives a dark palette with which to work and should hide any unpainted (or missed!) bit in dark colours and make them go unnoticed - at least on the table top. I then went over some of the more metallic appearing parts of the model using a dry brush of silver paint.

I had a tough time trying to come up with a colour scheme for the soul grinder. Originally, I was thinking about going down the Nurgle path: greens and muted browns that are suggestive of both corrosion and decay. This might have been an easy option given my previous experience with painting Death Guard! I then thought that I wanted something else for my soul grinder and started to think about blues and purples (perhaps Slaanesh or Tzeentch?). Both colours are neat to work with and forgiving (especially blue). However, in the end, I opted for reds. Not quite as forgiving as blue, but respectable! Although red immediately suggests Khorne, I think it suits a "fresh" soul grinder who has just come out of the "hot" forge.

Hence I basecoated the fleshy parts in mechrite red, along with some of the metal plates (i.e. the front of the legs). After letting the base coat dry off, I then mixed up an ink / wash to apply to the red portions. The mix consisted of a few parts of black to a few less parts of brown / chestnut, with a little bit of water to dilute the mixture down to the right consistency level. The ink was then applied over all of the red parts to ensure that it got in to every recessed nook and cranny on the soul grinder.

The pictures in this post show the soul grinder at this stage. The ink has dried off and I'm left with something that already appears to have plenty of depth to it. The nest steps will be slowly highlighting the raised fleshy parts up a few tones in colour to give it a more life-like quality. Then, I'll press on with the more tank-like portions of the miniature.