Finishing painting jobs (sort of)

I have finally organised myself enough to sit down and finish off the Blood Angel biker helmets. Yeah I know, seriously poor effort on my part but with all the Rugby and new rules/codex to go through (not to mention actual work!) I just haven't felt in the mood to sit down and get it done until now.

Before you mention it I realise I have lots more to finish on them...

Painting the helmets of these models has been a bit of a git as it's one of those jobs that I don't do regularly enough to remember the exact technique so almost all of my Assault Marine units end up with slightly different tones of yellow. In fact this is true of most of the models I have painted for this army as it isn't like my guard where I painted them all in one go but has grown over nearly twenty years (such a scary thought). With this in mind I have taken to keeping a record of how I paint the different types of colours for each army I paint and thought I'd share/pad out this post with the processes of doing the yellow.

I just know that the spikes on the helmet are going to chip the moment I think I'm finished with this model.

 Maybe it is because when I first started out with painting miniatures Yellow and White were such a pain to paint or maybe it is just that it's a colour that rarely gets used in the colour schemes of my other armies, but I get areal lick out of painting Assault Marine helmets. Here is how I do it:

1 - Black undercoat
2 - Macharius Solar Orange OGW (Old GW paint) or Jokaero Organe NGW (New GW paint) base coat thinned down
3 - Orange Fire Val (Vallajo paint) thinned base coat
4 - Orange Fire & Gold Yellow Val 1:1 thinned, multiple coats to build colour
5 - Gold Yellow thinned, multiple coats to blend with previous colour
6 - Gold Yellow & Sun Yellow Val 1:1 thinned 
7 - Sun Yellow thinned
8 - 2 thinned coats of Casandora Yellow shade NGW around 50% water focusing on the recesses
9 - Sun Yellow thinned (almost like a wash) to re highlight edges and fix overly washed areas
10 - Sun Yellow & Dead White Val 1:1 thinned focusing on the very faintest highlights

I know this will seem excessive in the light os GW's new paint ranges making it a three stage process to paint almost any colour but I have never really jumped on the extreme highlight technique now favoured by the Hobby masses. 

The variety in Marine helmets now mean it is far less tedious to paint up a whole squad.

I'm hoping to now zip through the other colours left (bone, white and gold) but I'd be lying if I said I had any less complicated processes for these colours. Next month is going to be Nurgle month and I've been working on ideas for how to get these done in less than six steps!