Painting: Beasts of Chaos Banners

With my Beasts due to take to the field in a couple of days for the first time in a year I thought I'd hold myself to a promise I made when I last fielded them.

I'm perfectly comfortable painting minis, but the idea of doing banners fills my heart with mortification and dread. Flat surfaces terrify me.

So much so that in the 20+ years I've been doing this I've only painted one banner before. All other banners have just been "flat colours" waiting for me to put something on them.

I promised myself last time that my armies would not take to the field in this state again.

Now I'm no brush artist but I am trying to get the hang of using an airbrush so I thought I'd try a simple stencilled design.

I started by masking the model itself - everything above and below the banner-proper.

I then roughly tore strips of masking tape and applied one at the bottom of the banner to represent "the ground" in my little landscape. Other strips were applied starting with one, rough-edge "down" (remember these were just torn off) at the very top of the banner. This left a gap of uncovered banner about 1.5cm "tall" between the two rough edges of my tape. The next was applied overlapping the first but with the rough edge lying closer to the "ground". Another was applied over that, closer to the ground and so on until I had just a thin strip of uncovered banner.

I sprayed a very light layer of white paint onto the uncovered banner, then removed the top strip of tape and sprayed again. This deepened the white on the first layer and started a second layer of white. I removed the next strip and sprayed again, deepening the white on the first and second layers and starting a third and so on.

When all that was done I stuck a new bit of tape onto my cutting mat, cut out a tree silhouette and then applied that to the model and sprayed black.

And here's the result:

It's simple, quick and looks a lot better than the red-brown rectangle that was there before, I think. I'm happy enough with it anyway.