Adventures in Airbrushing

As this project has gone on, I’ve talked about the benefits of airbrushing when painting your minis, and simple tricks can get you great effects really quickly, making your existing painting style faster and easier.

This time, I want to talk about metallic finishes, and show something that you can’t do without an airbrush. Like many at the moment, I’m painting a Warlord Titan for adepticus titanicus. I had one of the second or third edition epic ones back when they were new, the boxy  styled one, so this is a bit of nostalgia for me, although these new ones are incredibly impressive models.

I’m painting this one in all metallic paints, and I am using a brand called Alclad. These are lacquer paints, they can’t be brush painted as they are far too thin for that, airbrush only. What they do is give you a realistic metal finish unlike anything you can get with a brush, Starting with a gloss black primer to get the shine I want, I layered a magnesium colour, highlighted it with an aluminium colour, and then added shade and worn effects at the end of the guns and other places with a colour called jet exhaust. here’s a gallery of the model in those stages. I am just painting the frame at the moment, and the legs torso and arms are still all separate (I’ve fitted magnets in the arm sockets do you can add or remove them easily).

Its hard to capture it with a camera, but the effect is of real metal, it glints and shines in the light and looks really good. The gold colour is the part of the armour carapace that is included in the main body part. I have painted all the separate armour pieces in the same gold color, using a copper colour to shade them. I will be recolouring these using transparent shades to give a metallic effect right over the model. Will update as soon as I have that done.