writes:
I've embarked on yet another wargaming crusade, and for some reason am setting myself up for the usual public humiliation as I report on my (no doubt pitifully slow) future progress. 
My first experience of Warhammer 40,000 probably scarred me for life. We were both newbies to the game, but my opponent had invested in some nice, shiny Terminators (and yes, they were very shiny - excellent paint jobs!), while I was using the Ork army fresh from the boxed set from those days. My poor Orks were slaughtered where they stood, and didn't even put a dent into those darned Terminators.... I wasn't enthused about playing 40K after that.
Over the years since then, I kept flirting with getting into Warhammer 40,000 in a serious way, I collected this and that, I painted the odd model, but somehow I just wasn't able to get invested into the game. (Yes, I know, that's an interesting word to use...)
But for some strange reason, I picked up the relatively new Grey Knights codex, and something in it "spoke to me," and I made the decision to field a small force and play a few games.
I usually start with rank-and-file, but this time decided I would be able to keep up my enthusiasm better if I had a character model to inspire me - so I picked up Castellan Crowe (in metal) as my initial leader. (No, I didn't go for Draigo... using him in every battle seems a bit silly, given the background!)
The model comes in three parts - body, sword-and-hands, and backpack/banner. The backpack/banner piece was a bit twisted, and I didn't see a way to straighten it out, so left it as-is. The sword-and-hands have a peg-and-socket joint on one arm, but the other end is a flat connection at the wrist - and it never lined up quite right for me.
I knew off the bat that I wanted my Grey Knights to actually have a grey paint scheme, despite all that white armor shown in the new codex. (Obviously, the Imperium has filled that codex with deliberate misinformation!) My initial idea was to go with basic grey, with secondary colors of white and dark navy blue. However, as I painted the figure, I was drawn into the concept of making the Knights look battleworn rather than showroom-clean (which goes nicely with the fluff that they're a tiny elite serving the immense Imperium), so the secondary color became simply black. (Which I thought gave them a sort of Nazi SS gravitas, which is also fitting given the good guys/bad guys dichotomy in their background.)
My basic technique was to paint the figure dark grey, drybrush with a medium grey, and wash with black ink - something simple enough I could apply to all the figures to follow.
I was originally going to depict the sword as being a white ceramic blade (with golden lettering), but then remembered that Crowe's sword is supposed to be Demonic, so converted it at the last minute to red with some orange edge highlighting.
The back banner was intended to be white with yellow flames and the red sword, but an ink wash went whacky on me and gave everything a greyish cast... and I said, "Looks battleworn - I'll take it!" and left it that way.
Most of the paints used were from Renaissance Ink's line, which are almost a gel-type paint with good coverage. The sword got its red baptism from an old bottle of Tamiya translucent red, designed for red lights on cars. The gold was a craft-type paint; the black was Coat D'arms (a great line of paints, which in another life were the official Games Workshop paints).
I painted the figure parts separately, and glued them together afterward. I would have pinned the sword in place, but my pin vise has gone into hiding... so just glued it instead.
For the base, I used black sand to represent the dust of Titan (HQ for the Grey Knights). (The rock on the base is cast as part of the figure.)
I was a bit nervous painting up a character model, as you always want them to turn out great. It's such a busy model, though, that I think it would be hard to ruin it. Here's how mine turned out:
The cape gave me a lot of trouble. I was going to have a white cape initially, then a battleworn white cape, and finally decided a grey cape looked best. I went through many cycles of highlight and wash before I got it to an acceptable state.
My next step is to come up with a leader for the opposing side...