Forces of the Adepta Sororitas march on the battlefield with guns blazing. Few orders are more striking than the Blood Rose!
Bright red armies are some of my favorites to paint. All you need are a few simple tricks to make them striking and eliminate all the complexity usually associated with painting red.
Adepta Sororitas Bloody Rose
The Bloody Rose chapter offer us an opportunity to tweak our classic red power look for something a little bit more striking and simpler. Perfect to get your adepta sororitas army ready to play in no time.
Red
Our red starts on a black primer, as that is the color we will keep for the shadows. Using Mephiston Red and an airbrush, start layering the red from the top down.
This will leave plenty of black in lower parts of each armor plate, and build a big contrast next to the bright Mephiston Red.
Next we do the same thing with Evil Sunz Scarlet, but much lighter and only on some specific plates we want to bring to light.
The last step for the red on our adepta sororitas is to edge highlight with Evil Sunz. This final highlight will help create a clean and crisp finish.
Black
There is some debate whether the cloaks on Bloody Roses adepta sororitas should be black or white, as there are pictures and art pieces with either.*
From an artistic point of view, if you have a dark red, do cloaks white. Our red is pretty light and bright, so we paint the cloaks in black.
Unlike the Our Martyred Lady sister, we don’t want to make the black stand out too much. The goal is to keep the red the main focus of the model.
Over a black base coat, highlight with Dark Reaper. If you are too heavy-handed with the Dark Reaper, or if it’s too blue-ish for you, shade with Nuln Oil. This will make sure it looks black and not off-black.
White
Hair and the fleur de lys details we want to paint white. If you are looking for a quick paint job, I’m a big fan of doing the hair and accessories in a white base coat and adding the Apothecary White contrast to it. Over the red, it’s easy to cover in two thin coats at most, and you don’t waste much time.
In our example, we plainted white the classic way, starting on a base coat of Mechanicus Standard Grey, and highlighting with Ulthuan Grey first. Then, with a final very light highlight of pure white to make sure these details are crispy clean.
Silver
In order to keep the scheme simple, we kept all metallics to silver, but feel free to splice in some gold if you fancy. But that is by no means necessary.
Because we wanted to keep the red contrasting the rest of the model, our Leadbelcher base coat was shaded with two coats of Nuln Oil.
Extra details
The skin was painted in a similar fashion as our Sacred Rose sister, and we used Moot Green and Flash Gitz Yellow for the bionic eye and other glowing bits.
The green is really clashing with the red, so it might not have been the greatest choice for this piece, where purple or dark blue would be more fitting.
Base
Because our model is so bright, a darker base will look better. We went with a pretty basic grey base, but brown would’ve done the trick as well.
*The interesting thing is you can simply switch what’s white and whats black on the model, keep the same techniques for both, and you are good either way.