Vehicle Painting Guides?

[CyderPirate]

Hey guys/gals,

 

Does anyone know of any good guides to painting vehicles without an airbrush? 

 

I've been struggling to come up with a scheme that's not completely boring (they're currently just codex grey :s ), and they seem to turn out either flat or messy.

 

[Emicus]

GW official's 'How to paint Cadian Camo' by the esteemed and revered Ducan Jones.

​If you want other colours, same technique applies.

​If you want 'modern digital camo' use masking tape to make the square edges and LET FULLY DRY, tape again, paint, repeat ad-nauseum.

​edit: Bonus battle-damage & weathering

[WarriorFish]

Or you could always ask us ;) What are you looking to achieve, other than something more interesting?

[CyderPirate]

Cheers, Emicus, those look really helpfull.

So I've got vehicles that either look like this (yawn)

Or really messy like this

From those guides it looks like I've been to liberal with my washes - just putting a bit in the recesses didn't seem to do much at the time, but maybe I should've let it dry firs.

What I'd like to try is a camo pattern of some kind, or to add some weathering/mud on the tracks, it looks that's actually a lot easier than I was expecting.

My attempts at copying camo designs in the past have been pretty crap, so I was looking for a more detailed guide on that, although any suggestions are welcome - especially on the colour/pattern front. :D

[WarriorFish]

Weathering can be quite easy depending on how serious you want to be. For camouflage it's all about colours first, get them right and the rest tends to follow. There are various styles of pattern from stripes, wavy lines (Cadian) to digital blocks and more! What takes your fancy?

 

For colours you have a grey base, so black/white/grey would work best for an urban scheme (maybe a blue). If you can experiment with a photo editor on your pictures to try out different things :)

[Goonbandito]

Your 2nd pic is a bit blurry, so its' hard to really tell, but that doesn't look too bad to me.  It gives the vehicles a really 'dirty' look, which fits well with the Guard aesthetic.  Leave the shiny, fancy high-tech stuff to the filthy Eldar or Tau - the Guard relies on proper brute force.  There's nothing clean about that.  It's dirty, loud, smelly and messy - but it gets the job done.

 

If you are looking for neater shading effects though, just get a detail brush and paint the wash into the crevices, along joins in armour and around rivets.  It's pretty straight forward, and it will really bring out the detail without leaving 'smudges' of wash across the flat surfaces.  Putting dirt/mud on is as simple as getting a bit of foam (like the kind of foam you would find as padding in your carry cases), dabbing into some brown paint and then patting it off on a piece of tissue like you would do if you were dry brushing.  Then just dab it onto the model.  Follow it up with the same technique using a metallic silver, but done more sparingly, to represent the paint being worn back to show the metal underneath.

 

 

Here's another video from GW where Duncan shows how to paint a Morkanaut.  Aside from showing an easy way to paint Yellow (!!), as well as going about shading and high-lighting all those flat surfaces, at about the 11:15 he goes through how to show some weathering techniques.