Painting black armor

[CainTheHunter]

Question for everybody: I stick with light dry brushing for highlights, because I'm totally unable to do proper highlighting with the tip of a fine brush. How do you paint constant-width-regular lines for your highlights ? How much paint on the brush, how thick the paint is, etc etc. Recently I tried and failed to highlight blood red with blazing orange: either it's dirty, irregular, too thick, or it's simply invisible. :)

 

Can you give me advices ?

 

 

I drybrush all my marines with tank brush, seriously. I start with a bit of paint and then wipe it against my hand - I've found that it is the best way to do, because You feel the pressure and actually see how much paint is left. When there is almost nothing left I start first touches on the mini (usually on pauldrons or backpack if its glues), if it's good - I go for other parts. I also mix it with washing during the highlights - especially around the collar, knee-pads and feet.

[Ookami_81]

OK thanks everybody for the answers !

[Brother Valerius]

The short answer is you don't. You either work with a thin, pretty transparent colour and build it up gradually to where you want it, or you can highlight thick, then retouch with your base colour or an intermediate to neaten it up.

 

Indeed. I do this for both highlighting and freehand, because I can't actually paint small, crisp lines like that. I do the best I can, which is still too thick, and then I carefully paint on more of the base color (starting from a bit further away than I think I really need to get, to allow for my lack of precision with a brush, and gradually getting closer until I've achieved the effect I want). I imagine that there are those who have great control over their brush and don't need to do this, but I don't have that skill. It still looks good, though. WIP pictures aside, no one will know when you're done how many mistakes you made in the painting. They'll just see the end result, and think how awesome you are. :)

[Verythrax Draconis]

I feel like I owe and update to you guys on this.

 

The fact is that I finally (yesterday) really - REALLY - decided which color scheme to do with my army. I'll be doing a Dark Eagles marines army.

 

I decided this not really because of my difficulty on getting a satisfactory black - the advice and tutorials you guys should me were really promising and I'm pretty positive that with some more tries I'll handle it ok. My main gripe was doing and army without decals or molded shoulder pads, since free hands really is out of my league right now. The chapters that have this kind of support from GW/FW doesn't really appeal to me right now, and in my country (Brazil) is nearly impossible to get those free decal sheets printed. And to make an Iron Hands army like I really envision would cost and arm and a leg in bionic kits, extra kits and lots of (commissioned) conversions and freehanding. So the IH idea will be a pet project for the future. Now I plan to use the tons of marines I already have and paint them myself to have them game-ready, and learn a lot about painting in the process :)

 

So how I got the Dark Eagles idea? I found a local site that sells decals of the brazilian army/air force symbols for military models, and I started to consider the idea of making a theme army in hommage to our WWII veterans - a olive green chapter, with our southern cross army logo as chapter logo. It would be very simple to paint and very effective - completely non-codex, but far from being handsome marines or Hello Kitty sisters.

 

By coincidence, I had ordered sometime ago the PoD version of Insignium Astartes from BL. I started to browse through it, trying to find a chapter scheme that I could pull out with the vanilla SM decals, or some other interesting idea. I considered doing a Silver Skulls using the commander skull decal, or Red Hunters, free-handing an =I= on the skull. Then I found the Dark Eagles, that:

 

- appealed directly to the olive green idea I had before, but in a real GW codex chapter;

- the chapter logo is the white wing available in the SM decal sheet, so no problems using that;

- liked the idea of doing them with details in dull silver/chainmail and bone (despite I didn't liked the kind of green showed in the Lexicanum mini, I prefer the darker tone of the IA);

- and it's a "blank" chapter, wth no story, just waiting to me to make it my own ^_^

 

(I plan on doing the 4th company, so I'll leave the shoulder trim green as well - I prefer PA like this, like when they do BAs without the black trim. And I'll not do the chest eagle yellow;gold, but silver or green, like the mini at the lexicanum)

 

Now I'm just waiting my olive green paint to arrive to start working on them. A fellow White Scar player will help me supplying the decal sheets he have (since he just used the WS logos from them).

 

Surely I'll post pictures of them ;) I'm actually halfway on painting a full 10-man squad of Iron Fists, that will be confined to my Macragge box (dunno if I'll ever be able to freehand the logo on them, tough)

 

And don't sweat, I'll need to get back to the "painting black" saga sooner or later anyway, cause I'll be doing a DeathWatch and LotD squads to my army somewhere in the future ;) Thanks everybody for the help!