In our first instalment, we went through undercoating, and the first few basecoats required to paint a basic footsoldier. Note that we aren't looking for massively high quality and complicated, we are looking for a quick and simple way to paint some figures that look cool. My purpose was to re-teach myself how to paint after a break, but it is also useful for making lots of similar models for the core of your army.
Part 3: Main Coat
The final coat of the main armour and clothes needs to look good. In particular, make sure you water down your paints a little bit (with clean water) so that the paint will go on easily and won't dry out half way through the process.
Move carefully over the model, painting over the "dark" colours only where light would naturally fall given the pose of the model. for example, I leave out the insides of the legs, the bottom of the arms, and the areas under/to the side of the backpack on the space marine pictured.
Note that in these photos the accessories have caught up; some Dark Angels Green/Snot Green for the frag grenade and some nice Bestial Brown for the leather. The bone has an additional layer of Bubonic Brown as a final highlight.
At this point, the model looks OK. We need to be careful not to smudge onto the nicely shaded main areas of armour/clothes.
Part 4: Metallics
Metallics comes in two phases, although both are pictured together. First, you must go over all the areas you want to be metallic or black, and paint over the black basecoat with a thin (watered down) layer of black. This will give them a nice gloss, like the rest of the model, and provide a suitable surface for metallic drybrushing.
Next, you take your desired metal colour. I prefer Chainmail, as Mithril Silver is a bit too bright for the 41st millenium, and Boltgun Metal just looks a bit too dank and boring; but you choice of colour should be determined by the overall look of your army. You can always make a metallic colour look a little bit darker, but adding a drop of black, but the reverse is not true with white!
Don't add any water to the paint initially, but take a blob on a nice big brush and run the brush up and down your palette, until most of the paint that was on it is spread thinly on the palette, and your brush looks dry. Then run it over all grilled/uneven metal surfaces lightly, just allowing the shine onto the raised bits of the metal surface, leaving black in the recesses. Try and go "against the grain" of the roughness, as this will reduce the probability of accidentally doing too much.
You can top your brush back up by wiping it over the palette where you left the paint spread back out, don't waste another blob. Here is the result of such a technique on the Chaos Marine:
Next, with a smaller brush, use the metallics as you would normally to fill in proper details; large shiny surfaces and so on. On the Chaos Marine I used Shining Gold for this task, as it makes them look a bit more gothic and archaic than standard Space Marines, but again the choice of colour depends on the job in hand.
Tip: for studs of metal on a non-metallic surface, use the smallest brush you have but don't approach laterally as usual. Point your brush perpendicularly to the palette when picking up the paint; so as to get a larger spread of bristles, and use the brush similarly perpendicularly to the studded surface, just touching it on top of the stud. This avoids accidentally drawing a line going through them, which can take a while to fix again afterwards without painting over the stud too!
Part 5: Basing
You want to pick a good basing scheme for your whole army and stick to it, so this section may be irrelevant to you.
I tried to base this model in a classic 40K fashion, i.e. with grass flock, however I don't like the look of bases that are painted flat green and then flocked. I prefer to do something muddier, in this case Bestial Brown, as the basecoat going all the way down the sides of the base, and then PVA only about 80% of the base (leaving out the very edges, and the places near the model's feet.) I also wildly prefer static grass to standard flock, although I have been known to use sand/gravel with a similar base colour. I think it makes the terrain look a bit more marshy, and a bit less like the armies are battling across a well mown cricket pitch.
Below is the based, finished model. It is by no means perfect, and my messy approach leaves much to be desired around the edges, but it is a usable figure in a large army, and thus a useful way of brushing up on your painting skills (ahaha...)
That's all for now, I hope you'll return for my future painting guides (which might be a bit more adventurous...)
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