How to paint black vehicles? (Ravenwing land speeder)

[HandsWithLegs]

I'm really struggling with how to paint a black armored vehicle. The advice I've gotten so far has been more confusing then helpful. What I have been told so far was to not use pure black and white, which doesn't make sense to me as I'm trying to paint black armor. I have an airbrush I can use, although I am inexperienced with it. Is there any good tutorials or advice you can point me towards or pass along?

[Gederas]

I'm really struggling with how to paint a black armored vehicle. The advice I've gotten so far has been more confusing then helpful. What I have been told so far was to not use pure black and white, which doesn't make sense to me as I'm trying to paint black armor. I have an airbrush I can use, although I am inexperienced with it. Is there any good tutorials or advice you can point me towards or pass along?

When people say "don't use pure black/white" they mean don't use it solely as the primary colour. With black however, you can. Basing the vehicle in black, then building up highlights with darker, non-black colours, allows your eye to read it as black, even if it's not completely black.

 

GW has a tutorial for painting a Deathwatch Corvus Blackstar using that method:

[HandsWithLegs]

By non-black colors do people generally mean other colors like very dark blues, greens, or browns, or just lighter and lighter grays?

 

Also, thanks for sharing the video. It looks super useful

[Gederas]

By non-black colors do people generally mean other colors like very dark blues, greens, or browns, or just lighter and lighter grays?

 

Also, thanks for sharing the video. It looks super useful

Basically they mean you can't shade black, as it's already the darkest colour you can possibly get. So you go with dark, near-black colours to make your brain think the armour is entirely black.

 

I prefer using the same colours as Deathwatch (Abaddon Black > Dark Reaper [highlight] > Fenrisian Grey [second highlight]) for any black armour as it gives it a nice, subtle colouration and highlight.

[Arkhanist]

Here's a decent explanation of why you do a 'near black' as your base colour, rather than pure black. In short, real objects are rarely pure matt black, it's a hard colour to make and it reflects some light anyway; so you pick a black blue, or a black brown, or black green depending upon the 'feel' you want it to have; brown tint for natural blacks, cooler blue blacks for armour, green black for chaos/monsters is a reasonable rule.

 

If you want to try airbrushing black armour, I've found this a good method.

 

 

And for the doing it all with edge highlighting approach, I like this guide, though you don't have to take it as far as he does - the more extreme the edge highlights, the glossier the final look.

[HandsWithLegs]

Thank you all for the advice. I'll probably try to do it with a mix of airbrush and edge and the slight blue hue sounds like it would work fairly well. Once I get some progress done I'll try to remember to update this thread with how its working out for me

[Imren]

If I were you I'd add some dust effects in the recesses instead of a shade, that adds some contrast and detail and looks good, a land speeder kicks up a lot of dust when flying over a warzone, so some brown/khaki dust in the recesses looks cool and breaks up the black in a natural way.

 

So I suggest:

1. Airbrush basecoat with black
2. Airbrush highlights with either grey tones (Vallejo german grey or GW Eshin grey) or a blue/teal tone (P3 coal black or GW Incubi darkness).
3. Do your edge highlighting with paintbrush, for this you use the same colours as you used in the previous step, you can mix in a wee bit of white in the mix if you want stronger "GW-style" edge highlighting.
4. Airbrush gloss varnish  all over thinned 1:1 with airbrush thinner.
5. Dilute burnt umber oil paint (or van Dyke brown oil paint for a darker brown tone) in white spirit and do pin wash (use a syntethic brush for this, it will ruin your Kolinsky hair brushes) into the recesses.
6. using white spirit and the brush clean up the any pooling/excess of the pin wash.
7. This is a good time to do your decal work since the surfaces are gloss varnished, so do your decals now.
8. Paint all the other details.
9. Seal in the model with a mix of 1 part gloss varnish and 3 parts matt varnish, this varnish mixture you dilute 1:1 with airbrush thinner and then airbrush it all over with 2-3 thin coats, mask off the clear flyer base if you use that so you won't have any frosting effects on it.

[HandsWithLegs]

 

If I were you I'd add some dust effects in the recesses instead of a shade, that adds some contrast and detail and looks good, a land speeder kicks up a lot of dust when flying over a warzone, so some brown/khaki dust in the recesses looks cool and breaks up the black in a natural way.

 

So I suggest:

1. Airbrush basecoat with black
2. Airbrush highlights with either grey tones (Vallejo german grey or GW Eshin grey) or a blue/teal tone (P3 coal black or GW Incubi darkness).
3. Do your edge highlighting with paintbrush, for this you use the same colours as you used in the previous step, you can mix in a wee bit of white in the mix if you want stronger "GW-style" edge highlighting.
4. Airbrush gloss varnish  all over thinned 1:1 with airbrush thinner.
5. Dilute burnt umber oil paint (or van Dyke brown oil paint for a darker brown tone) in white spirit and do pin wash (use a syntethic brush for this, it will ruin your Kolinsky hair brushes) into the recesses.
6. using white spirit and the brush clean up the any pooling/excess of the pin wash.
7. This is a good time to do your decal work since the surfaces are gloss varnished, so do your decals now.
8. Paint all the other details.
9. Seal in the model with a mix of 1 part gloss varnish and 3 parts matt varnish, this varnish mixture you dilute 1:1 with airbrush thinner and then airbrush it all over with 2-3 thin coats, mask off the clear flyer base if you use that so you won't have any frosting effects on it.

 

That sounds really close to what I'm looking for! I'm not familiar with what a pin wash or white spirit are, as I haven't really explored much outside of acrylics. If it's not too much trouble could you help me understand how that step works?

[Marshal Vespasian]

Since I just did that the other day for the first time:

 

The gloss varnish makes for a really smooth surface on your model, so the paint will basicly flood into recesses by capillary Action. Thats a pin wash.

Normally you would have to go and trace all the thin panel lines and what have you with a thin brush and agrax or something like that. But oil washes are really thin and take a long time to dry, so you can just Touch them to what you want washed and they will flow in (due to the gloss varnish, doesnt work with matte or satin). Any excess can be taken off.

 

For an oil wash you take regular artists oil paint (a tube is like 5 bucks and lasts a few millenia) and mix it with something called white spirits or mineral spirits or odourless thinner. I desperately need to go odourless as the Mineral spirits I used for my last Set of washes were incredibly stinky,the headache inducing Kind.

 

The varnishing before washing is critical for two reasons: a) it makes it All flow easier, if you go gloss. B) you protect your acrylic paints from being attacked by the thinner.

 

Its also a great way to do metals as it gives a subtle tint to the whole surface and preserves the sheen of metal. have a look at vince venturella doing it here:

 

Addendum:

You could try to zenithal your seeder before painting it and then going really thin and light on the Black. This can give some slight transitions, which will be demasked a bit by the matte varnish. These can again get lost by heavy Application of weathering powders.

[Imren]

Hehe, just got "ninjaed" by Marshal Vespian with his good explanation.

 

The pre-highlighting Marshal is talking about is also a good idea to do the highlighting and its easier to adjust how much highlight you want the black surface to have. Also it makes applying a colour tint to the highlights easier. The process I follow is this:

 

1. Prime black.
2. Airbrush with white your panel and edge highlighting with a smooth gradient (I recommend Tamiya acrylics for this, they speckle way less and go on smoother than most other airbrush paints).
3. Apply a thin colour tint layer over the white (P3 coal black for teal/turqoise or perhaps purples or greens).
4. Using Tamiya X20A thinner, thin down Tamiya flat black (2 parts thiner and 1 part black) and apply thinly over the entire model, make sure each sweep with airbrush is dried before you sweep again to prevent pooling over the highlights. This step is the one that you use to finetune your highlight and tone it down to your taste so that it approaches/fades over to black but still leaves the tint as per your taste.
5. If you want to stress the edge highlights as per the GW-paint style then take your tint colour (P3 coal black or whatever) and do your edge highlighting with it with gradually mixing in white into the colour if you want some extreme highlighting.
6. Use the tint colour and a fine tipped sable brush and make scratches on the armour. for flyers/skimmers focus on the area where you climb in the cockpit and on the fuselage and wings in the direction of the wind (meaning make the scratches from the front to the aft of the aircraft). For some depth and 3D effects on teh scrates do a another small line under the main scratch line with a lighter tone of the tint colour.

[Marshal Vespasian]

I have been trying to do my Black as a Mix of 1:1 daler rowney paynes grey ink and vallejo Black ink thinned in a 2:3 ratio with Flow improver.

I ran however into issues with speckling and pooling which might be due to impatience in not letting it dry completely. I think I have to reoeat the process a few times in order to get it right.

But I did suceed in getting a nice gradienten going on the model in some places.

 

Out of interest: why do you recommend putting some gloss varnish into your matte varnish? I have been varnishing matte with Flow improver

[MegaVolt87]

I would imagine mixing matte and gloss varnish hits an effect between the two. Some shine, not overwhelmingly so. 

[Imren]

I have been trying to do my Black as a Mix of 1:1 daler rowney paynes grey ink and vallejo Black ink thinned in a 2:3 ratio with Flow improver.

I ran however into issues with speckling and pooling which might be due to impatience in not letting it dry completely. I think I have to reoeat the process a few times in order to get it right.

But I did suceed in getting a nice gradienten going on the model in some places.

 

Out of interest: why do you recommend putting some gloss varnish into your matte varnish? I have been varnishing matte with Flow improver

 

 

I do it because I prefer that home-brew to the off-the-shelf satin varnishes, so I do:

• For models were metallics are prevalent colours: mix gloss varnish and matt varnish to a 3:1 ration before thinning. This dulls down the metallic sheen less than regular satin varnishes.
• For models were non-metallics are the prevalent colour: mix gloss varnish and matt varnish to a 1:3 ration before thinning.

 

I add just one or two drops of flow improver in the cup afte rthe mixing.

[Marshal Vespasian]

I mask off the metallic areas with silly putty and shoot slightly diluted ak interactive ultra matte, as I love what it does to black and reds, which are my primary colours.

 

Slight Word of warning: silly putty likes to take pigments with it, when you remove it from the model. So do your pigments on metal afterwards.

[Stix]

How would you like it to look? Are you going for 'Eavy Metal clean edge highlight style or maybe more "realistic" look? How do you paint rest of your army?

[HandsWithLegs]

How would you like it to look? Are you going for 'Eavy Metal clean edge highlight style or maybe more "realistic" look? How do you paint rest of your army?

The rest of my army sticks pretty close to the main GW style. That's what I'm most familiar with and found easiest to learn, and I'm really crap at blending and stuff. That being said, I want to use this as an opportunity to improve my skills a bit and make the models look really nice