Contrast paint on vehicles?

[Galron]

Has anyone made decent  looking schemes on their vehicles using contrast paint for the basic hulls? Not talking about doing details but for the base scheme. I need to do quite a few vehicles but I would like them to look consistent and match my troopers. Or is it still just better to use normal paints that are close to the troopers in color?

 

If you have, how did it work out and did you do anything different than normal contrast use? (straight from the pot)

[Lord Marshal]

Contrast paint comes out with too many 'stains' for it to efficiently work on vehicles. Contrast doesn't work well on flat surfaces of which vehicles largely are. Can you use it? Sure, but it wouldn't look good. For absolute consistently, you could put it through an airbrush but then you'd lose the 'contrast' qualities, although given how much easier vehicles are to highlight it's not a huge issue if you're using it for that reason.

[Galron]

Kind of what I was thinking as well but it was worth a shot to see if anyone had figured out a useful method.

[Fajita Fan]

I'm going to try it with a huge flat brush but my GSC vehicles are going to look splotchy and messy intentionally.  I'll try to do it as clean as I can and then cover up splotches with scratches and rust.

[MegaVolt87]

If you look in my sig, I did the black on my IW sicarians with black templar contrast. Straight from the pot, do a thick coat, because it will just drip/ pool funny otherwise. The stain effect is only slightly different to normal black, and that's even with a leadbelcher base. When you look at another vehicle with just black at standing height, tabletop level they look the same. Contrast also takes ages to dry properly, so overall slower as well than other paints/inks. The problem with the contrast and all GW inks, once you hit that 50% mark the paint is different and then again if you are thinning it, so you won't have the same finish, unless you are using fresh pots. eg top half pot/thinned for predators, bottom half/thinned for rhino's. They will match each other respectively, but not overall without further work like battle damage or weathering.

 

Contrast is serviceable for color blocking, but can be slower when dealing with larger panels + ares, due to drips/pooling issues and longer drying times.  I would recommend the vallejo range of paints for any type of tank or vehicle instead IMO. If you know how to do things in traditional methods, your experience makes the longer techniques actually faster. Working on a timeframe, the contrast actually slowed me down while doing this years ETL while only giving a similar finish. Contrast as a beginner product is very misleading, as it can give as poor results to the novice as the "classic" method GW says the OG way to paint is. However if you are airbrushing, I think you will have much better success for colour blocking straight contrast. Airbrush seems the way to go from my research for SM + CSM stuff if you are set on contrast. 

[Evil Eye]

Whilst it won't do the "Contrast thing" through an airbrush, the good thing about airbrushing it is it's still richly pigmented but somewhat translucent, which makes it a perfect candidate for using over pre-shading as translucency is key for that (as I found out to my annoyance when I lost all my pre-shading to overly opaque paint on my Chaos Sentinel). So my advice would be to pre-shade your vehicles and then airbrush the Contrast on.

[Kain Mor]

I definitely 3rd the idea of using an Airbrush, you get some really beautiful results with contrast that are smooth and rich.