Episode 03 - Painting Weapons & Armour

The next stage when moving from the “inside” outwards is generally the armour. For the armour on the Typhon Warrior I have chosen to paint it gold. From a historical point of view, Ancient Egypt was in the “Bronze Age” where the majority of weapons & armour were made from bronze. However, this is fantasy so I’ve gone for a gold colour.

Throughout this episode you will notice that I change brush sizes a bit. When I first started painted I was told by an experienced painter that I should use a bigger brush than necessary as it will help teach me brush control. What it did teach me was that painting was frustrating and it was hard to get the paint in the right areas. ? After a bit of sage advice form an art teacher, I started choosing a brush sizes that suited the area I was painting. Therefore, when doing large areas I will often use a Size “1” or “0” brush and for fine work a Size “000”. For the vast majority of my work I will use the “000”, so I’ll often have 2 or 3 of them on hand. I also only use “Red Sable” brushes as they hold the paint better. After trialling a few brush brands I have found that “Francheville Red Sable” brushes offer a brush that lasts a decent amount of time, without costing the earth.

I paint all my metallic’s using the same basic “recipe”, but, I vary the final look by using washes. For gold I use a base coat of GW’s “Tin Bitz”. This gets painted over all the gold areas, making sure it goes into all the recesses, completely covering the black undercoat. Next I use Derivan Mini’s Light Gold”. This is painted on all the raised areas, making sure the “Tin Bitz” is left in the recesses. For “newer” armour I would want complete coverage at this stage, so a second coat may be required. But, because I want the armour to look ancient, I not worried about complete coverage at this stage. If there is fine edging detail on the gold, I will often not paint it at this stage. I have found that the finer the detail, the greater the steps between your layer stages are required to make the detail stand out. Plus, it often gets completely covered by the final highlight stage anyway. Remember, we are painting for an army, not a painting competition! The final highlight is done using 2 parts “Light Gold” with 1 part “Silver”. Only the highest points are painted at this stage. As this colour is part of my “standard” method I have mixed up a larger quantity into on old paint pot. This helps to not only to speed up the painting process but ensures a consistent look to the gold colour.

That’s the basic gold done. Now to give it an ancient look I wash the whole area with GW’s “Thraka Green” wash. I use it straight from the pot. If you notice any pooling of the wash, clean it up with a brush to avoid large green areas, the purpose of the wash is only to tinge the gold green not make it green. It’s worth noting that the application of brown or purple washes after the gold has been layered on, will give it completely different looks. It’s certainly worthwhile experimenting with colours at the test mini stage.

Next I moved onto the weapons. For my Tomb Kings army I wanted all the weapons and shields to look like they have been made from scorpion shells and stingers. To achieve this I did two things. First, I used scimitars and kopesh’s for the Skeleton Warriors and Tomb Guard (with a bit of imagination they look like they could have been made from scorpion stingers…really). Second, all the weapons and shields were painted in the same colours as the scorpions. Little things like this really help to tie the army together visually.

I chose a dark green colour for the scorpions / weapons. One of the problems with an army of skeleton warriors, is its very hard to make it eye catching. I tried to achieve this though extreme highlighting of the green. The first step is to apply GW’s “Orkhide Shade” to about 50 – 75% of the area being painted green. Then Derivan Mini’s “Sherwood Green” is applied to about 50% of this area. Finally, Derivan Minis Celtic Green is used as an extreme highlight. An extreme highlight is a highlight that is several shades lighter than the previous layer. It is often only applied to hard edges on prominent features of a model. In this case Celtic Green has only applied sparingly to tips of weapons, shield edges and other spiky bits.

At this point, the model is pretty much ready for the table top. It has been based and has the 3 minimum colours on the model. It has also used highlighting and washes to bring out the detail. In most tournaments I have been too, this will give you the full total of painting points achievable by all gamers, if applied across the whole army (Always check the player’s pack of all tournaments that you attend so you don’t get any nasty surprises at the tournament). For those extra painting points, you’ll need to continue on with the following stages……

Cheers,

Adam