Arcane Ruins painting

If you've spent any amount of time painting in hot, humid weather without air conditioning, you may have noticed an interesting phenomenon- the paint starts acting a lot less like paint, and a lot more like glue until you thin the heck out of it, and then it dries super quickly on the palette. Frustrating, no? I was in the mood to paint yesterday, but rather than ruining a perfectly good model, I took the opportunity to work on a piece of terrain that had been kicking around in the bins for a bit.
The Citadel Arcane Ruins are a great utility piece. Super simple to build and paint, and they stack so well, you don't really have to glue anything unless you have something very specific in mind. My set is currently all loose pillars, as I like the flexibility of just setting them up to suit the game, especially with the True Line of Sight rules in 40K.
The first step was a quick blast with the spraygun, coating them with Charadon Granite. I really, really, really like this color for terrain. It's got a ton of subtle tones in it that you can bring out with different color highlights, and it warms things up nicely from black primer so a drybrush doesn't look too stark.

After the spray coat dried, they got a heavy overbrush of Adeptus Battlegrey. Another good utility color, it does suffer from a similar problem to Codex Grey- if you give a model a solid coat of it, it looks kinda like you didn't paint it at all. Problematic.

The solution to the grey problem also helps tie the piece into my desert themed board a little bit. Bleached Bone, while almost completely replaced in my painting by Dheneb Stone, is really good for a toning drybrush, as it's very translucent. Just a light drybrush, occasionally running a thumb or my palm over flat surfaces to wipe up any excess to avoid brushstrokes, and it's all done.

And the whole thing, with Valten for scale:

Also, be careful about the seams on the sides of the pillars, or you'll be like me, and notice just how bad they show up under bright light just as you post pictures on the Internet for everyone to mock you for...