Sunday 10 June 2012

Pumping Iron

So I'm finally back into serious painting after being occupied mainly by playing Diablo 3. I'm currently working on a larger batch of Minas Tirith Warriors and Knights - all plastic.
I started with putting together the mounts. I was worried that I might have a hard time working with that but the nice thing is that they're actually numbered on the inside so you can't really make a mistake here. The sculpts are pretty nice but horses from the LotR range look good in general. After putting together the halves it was just a matter of working over them with some LGS and they were ready for priming. I'm not going to glue the Knights to the backs of the mounts as painting them separately will be much easier. Also, it'll be much easier to transport them.
I used Platemail Metal primer from Army Painter on the Warriors. I used the same basecoat for the previous heavily armored minis from Minas Tirith army and it worked well. Following the basecoating, I prepared the bases and was ready to work on the armors. The first step was to tone the armor plated down and fill the recesses with black color. I used good old Badab Black on previous occasion. This time I wanted to play around with other black washes that I have. Here are the results after one coat of Black wash:


The washes I used were (from the left): GW Badab Black, Army Painter Dark Tone, Vallejo Black Shade and P3 Armor Wash. Badab Black and Dark Tone had a pretty similar effect, while Vallejo Black Shade was more opaque, I don't really know how to describe it but it had a sort of smoky look to it. Quite predictably, P3 armor wash looked different as it had a more glossy, darker look.
In the pic below you can see the same minis after a second wash.


Sorry I messed up the order here but you can see the effects I described more clearly here as they became more pronounced. The Vallejo wash is a tad grayish. At this point I think I'll wither go with Badab Black/Dark Tone or P3 Armor Wash as it is darker and highlights the details better. The glossy effect will disappear after applying matt varnish anyway. I'll make up my mind after working with metallic paints over these. And for that I'll definitely stick to Army Painter paints.


3 comments:

  1. I like that smoky look, gonna have to try that one out :)

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  2. Hmm, perhaps this is a stupid question, but did you first give them some sort of really light black prime and then a just as thin spray of metal primer? It's just that the metal doesn't look as thick as I might expect... or was it two really light "showers" of metallic spray?

    Anyways, thanks for the walkthrough here, I am trying to find better primers and solutions that speed things up, and this helps. I have had serious problem with Armypainter on metal figures - the primer chips off by just a small wind blowing thru the room. On plastics, Army Painter's great. Have you had the same problem?

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  3. In my experience, AP has always worked great on both metal and plastic models. I've used the metallic primer on my previous Minas Tirith models and it worked well too. For those, I used only the metallic basecoat.

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