Painting the Dung Beetle Knight (Patreon)

Pictured: Tom (The Old Master) and his young survivor friend

The Dung Beetle Knight is probably one of my favourite monsters in the entire game outside of The Tyrant (who I have written about at length in the past).  Recently, I had a little break to work on one of my own Dung Beetle Knights (I have 3 - L1/L2, L3 and Tom).  I thought I'd share the images (from my instagram) and expand a little on the process/reasons for doing things the way I have.

So the Dung Beetle Knight is something of an awkward piece to paint. While it is not as bad as some of the other models, it is certainly one that I think should be painted in pieces.  I go overboard and paint the model entirely in parts, but at the very least you should leave the arms and wings off if you want to do a decent job of painting the model.  They get in the way a LOT.

Here is the first image I shared.  I had painted the head entirely separately from the rest of the model and at this stage the shoulder pads/fur and head were mostly done.

What you can see here is the lack of a primer layer on this model.  This has confused a lot of people and has received more comments than anything else. But here's the secret, and it's something I learnt from Richard Gray (Patreon here), primer paints are no more special than normal paints, especially the Citadel 'Base' colour range which has a very high pigmentation level.  You can prime a model with whatever colour you want as long as you get good coverage.  In this case I chose to prime the model in sections because I knew I would wear the paint off the lower parts while painting the upper ones.  so there was no reason to put the paint on already, I'd rather have it on evenly when I was ready.

Here you can see the progress of just one area.  Now the "Green" you see on the carapace sections isn't in truth a green.  It's purples, teals, turquoises and a very pale green re-tinted with the use of glazes and inks.  The reason for doing this is to create the iridescent, layered look that you see in the pictures.  The reason the colours look the way they do is because they are oversaturated when I first paint them and then brought together.  The actual colours for the plating are:

Eldandil Violet  - Scale 75 

Arphen Jade  - Scale 75 

Surfer Orc Flesh  - Scale 75 

Autumn Green  - Scale 75 

Inktense Green - Scale 75

Waywatcher Green - Citadel Glaze

Druchi Violet - Citadel Shade

Carroburg Crimson - Citadel Shade 

Dark Sand - Vallejo Model Color (MC)

White Sand - Scale 75

You can also see that the edging of the plates has been segmented with lines.  I did this because when it was a solid colour it just wasn't looking right to my eyes.  Segmenting it with lines made the model far more interesting to look at and gave the model more texture.

It was painted a base colour of dark brown and then the lighter bands were the ones that were painted on. Colours used are:

Rhinox Hide - Citadel

Beige Red - Vallejo MC

Golden Skin - Scale 75

Dark Sand - Vallejo MC

White Sand - Scale 75

This uses some of the same colours as the main plating does, which cuts down on having to swap around on colours and also makes the model more cohesive in the pallet front.

The Wings I chose a very different pallet for because I wanted them to contrast (though I did use some of the same colours).  They were painted over multiple layers, constantly using striping and glazes to get the look you see.  The colours used are:

Fuchsia - Scale 75

Peanut Butter - Scale 75

Beige Red - VMC

Golden Skin - Scale 75

Dark Sand - VMC

White Sand - Scale 75

With washes of Reikland Flesh - Citadel to dampen the layers down and tie them together.

The Dots and Wing detailing were done with Rhinox Hide + Peanut Butter

Again, apart from the introduction of Fuchsia and Peanut Butter these are the same base colours as other parts of the model, they were just treated differently.

The Striping is done by simply drawing lines with the paint over and over from the base to the edge of each part of the wing, leaving the previous layers visible as much as possible (I recommend a 30% rule, as in you leave 30% of the previous layer visible when you paint a higher layer).

This process was repeated about 5-6 times in order to deepen the colours  and add multiple layers to the paint.  While this might seem like overkill, remember that light penetrates through paint layers and reflects back out, changing the appearance of the paints depending on what layers are below it.  This is why Black, Grey, White, Coloured and Zenithal Undercoats all result in very different looking final models - even if the colour scheme was intended to be the same.

The Juggernaut Blade was painted in a different look, but uses mostly the same shades as other parts of the model.  I used:

Beige Red

Autumn Green

White Sand

Rhinox Hide (Base colour)

For a lot of the work here, with glazes made from Inktense Green (watered down the ink.)

The additional colours added were for the bone part of the weapon and they were my old standards AL. C. Biege WWII (VMC) and Deck Tan (VMC).  Again the model was painted with a lot of 'striping'. 

You can also see that I decided to make the antenna on the end of the DBK have eyeballs.

This process was carried on over and over until the model was complete and it was time to do the base.  As you can see, my first iteration of the base didn't last.  I was not happy with it and threw the whole thing out shortly after this photo.  The final base ended up being a lot closer to what I envisioned.

The pallet used on the base is very similar to everything painted before, but with the addition of greys for the faces.  

And finally, here is the finished thing!

All in all the project took about 40 hours from start to finish (hard to be sure because it was done on the side while painting commissions) and if you are looking to paint a DBK yourself I recommend that you research the creature's inspirations.  Nature has amazing ideas for paint jobs in the various Dung Beetles, Rhino Beetles and Stag Beetles. While the Anime inspiration is clearly cribbed from Gyver.