Testing Color Changing Paint / Necron Kill Team Build

The first thing I have to say is holy layers Batman!  They were not lying about needing 3 to 4 layers to make the color come out.  With an airbrush this is easy, all you need to do is blow air on to the model while it drys and then apply more paint.  With a regular brush on the other hand this takes a bit.

In addition I used a wet pallet for applying the brush on paint and I am not sure this was the best choice.  The paint is formulated so it can go straight into an airbrush without thinner, so on a pallet it is already very watered down.  So the process here was airbrush on the green, and then bring back everything I didn’t want to be green to black followed by brushing on the gold and bronze where I wanted it.

Warning Physics Content!!!! So some might ask why not go over the green with the color I wanted or why do you have to start with black.  The simple answer is this is a transparent paint with metal flakes in it.  If you painted this paint on to a transparency and shined a light behind it you would see nothing or just a hint of the color you painted on.  Most metallic paints are a pigment of the color in question or one close to it with metal flakes in it to increase the amount of light reflected, which makes it shiny.  Metal is shiny for the same reason it is conductive, there are a bunch of free electrons which also reflect light.

For this paint to work you need to be able to see the metal flakes at different angles and through more or less of the rest of the paint.  What the rest of the paint is doing is acting like a prism and bending the light so it appears as a different color.  As you view the paint through more and less of the other part of the paint you see different colors.  So as with all prisms they need the light to be able to pass through it for it to work.

So it comes down to that there are relatively few metal chips in this paint to reflect the light.  This is not a problem if the background behind it is black, since the only light being reflected is the light bouncing off the chips and we see the color.  On the other hand if there is a color behind the previous one other than black, it will come through as the light it reflects will overpower the light this paint reflects, since it will reflect more photons.  So that is why you saw the pearling effect when they painted it on the white spoon, the prism was working fine, but the white was overpowering the relatively small amount of blue metal flakes reflecting light.

So for future experiment, try different types of grey backgrounds.  I know the metallic paints they put on cars is similar to this stuff, and they use grey as a primer not black.  I assume a grey will lighten up the color without overpowering it like white would.  End physics lesson…WAKE UP!!!!

Colors used:

• Green Stuff World – 1609 Emeral Getaway
• Green Stuff World – 1606 Burning Gold
• Green Stuff World – 1558 Nebula Copper
• The Army Painter – WP1101 Matt Black

Next up washing and highlighting.

Gratuitous Green Stuff World tutorial, my preparatory viewing.