Death Company step-by-step Part 1

OK, so I LOVE Death Company. When I played a little of 40k when I was a nipper I had some Chaos, but always fancied a righteous army of the Imperium. Blood Angels were the ever tempting choice due to their ferocity and bloodlust, especially the crazed Death Company.
Now I'm collecting/painting again, I've decided to go towards the DC in my Blood Angels, with the aim of a pure DC force.

I figued I'd share how I painted them. The first 6 in my post below were almost finished, and I've started some more and will have them all done at the same time.

This is my personal way I've figured out how to paint, using undercoats, washes, glazes, layering and drybrushing. It's a lot of techniques, but done systematically, this is about 5 hours worth (with a few distractions as I usually have a tv show on in the background! 24 at the mo!)

My day job involves digital painting as a concept artist, so I utilize lots of techniques and theories that I use in photoshop in my mini painting. Such as using washes like overlay layers and drybrush like screens/light layers.

 After undercoating in black, I undercoat my main colours with a citadel base paint. This is because it gives you more control over the layers of pure colour in smoothness and temperature. The bases allow you to paint nicer layers on top.
All white things like skulls and parchments go Cathlan Brown
Guns and crosses go Mechrite/Mephiston red
Wings Ultramarines/Macragge blue

These are just simple colours but make life SO much easier when doing brighter colours than if I was to paint on the black.

 Next the red gets washed with Badab Black (nuln oil may well work). This obviously washes into the cracks and gives us nice shadows again. Unfortunately it also darkens the highlights, so I do another coat of base red over the top, being careful to keep the new shading
The face gets a coat of Cadian flesh. I'm going for an enraged look, so ruddy tones to show blood boiling and anger look best to me. if you were doing a dark elf for example though, you might want a blue undercoat to keep a pallid, eerie tone.
I paint Calgar blue over the wings, leaving a touch of the layer beneath showing in the recesses.
The brown areas get a coat of bleached bone or 2 (look how much easier that goes on than over black?! You'd need about 5 coats!)

Next, the wings get highlighted with pure white. Because of basing it on blue and working up, it's really easy just to highlight this in one coat and get a nice off white white.
The parchment gets a wash of Devlan mud to work the tone some more. Because I won't have painted the Bleached Bone into every recess, there is still Calthan Brown lurking there. The wash darkens all of them in one swoop. I find it's quite fun, and gets good results to mix techniques and push surfaces back and forth in values like this, paint light, wash darker, drybrush/layer a bit lighter again.

The reason I haven't touched on the black armour yet (and I will!) is because, with all those different colours going on, I'm making a bit of a mess on the black so it'll be easier at the end once I've tidied up the black. Plus it really finishes the model off nicely-you suddenly go 'ooh!' 
Usually you'd do the large areas first, especially if they're underneath everything else as they're likely to be messiest. In this case though, as most the colour is there, it's easier to just be careful with the layering later under all the highlighted coloured accessories.

I reckon I have a couple more hours on these so I'm not going to attempt them tonight. I'll post the rest soon as I can and get some nice proper photos sorted.

Jenx