Painting: Grey Knigts

Lately I have been working fiendishly on my Grey Knights army.  This will be the army that I will be playing at WargamesCon this July.  I don't feel that it is a broken codex or that my list is particularly devestating, but all in all I like it.  But you didn't come here to listen about that, you came to get some pics of my painting. So, fine!

UNDERCOAT:

So, lets start at the beginning... I always base coat my models in a Black spray paint.  The particular Black spray paint I use for base coating is $.99 and I get it from Lowes.  My friends give me no end of crap for using such a cheap base coat (mostly because it is also sticky).  Anyhow, I like it so they can take their expensive base coat and....(you get the idea).

Cheater!

BASECOAT: (the big secret to painting metallics!)

Ok, so once that undercoat is done I go in and do my base coat.  I have tried an airbrush, and that works really well... But if you can't get an airbrush use Tamiya Spray.  It is fairly inexpensive (compared to an airbrush) and you get a really good finish and even coating of the metallic. I find that I only have to do one base coat and then touch it up with a big brush if I happened to miss something.

WASH:

Once the base coat is nice and dry, go in with Badab Black and wash the recesses of the armor and the areas you want shading in.  I do not wash the entire model, as it creates a lot more work in the next stages (and makes wash #2 much harder).  The areas to pick out are: Shoulder pad between the ridge and pad, the Knees, Armor joints, the back pack has a lot of areas that need a wash. etc.

WASH 2:

On the table

After picking out all the recesses on the armor with black I go back in for wash #2.  This wash is Asurmen Blue and it is HEAVILY watered down.  I put it on the areas of the armor that are going to get a lot of light. Make sure it is properly watered down or else the armor won't look like it has a 'hint,' of blue...it will look 'blue'

BUILD IT UP:

Once the washes are completely dry I go in and start building up the silver... Don't ruin the nice wash you just did, but this is where you can touch up spots that dried weird.  I go from Boltgun- Chain mail - Mithril Silver.  On big areas I will put in a Chain mail/mithril silver (50:50) to help blend the change... Mithril silver shuould only be on the extreme edges.

In daylight

DETAILS:

Ill break this down by sections:

Red:
Casing on Storm Bolters, Parts of Shoulder Pad heraldry, Purity Seals, Book (not the pages)
To do My red I start out with Macherite Red, then go to 50/50 Macherite and Blood Red, then to straight blood red.  I then give it a light wash and do the extreme highlights in Blazing Orange.

White:
Shoulder Pads.  The white starts out as Astronomicon Grey and I then put several layers of Skull White (watered down) until all I see is a nice pure white. I paint the whole pad and when it is dry I paint the Red on-top of the white.

Paper:

Shoulder Pad Detail

This one is fairly simple, Just take a deep brown like scorched brown and put it on the purity seal paper, the scroll work and the books, then come in and hit the same areas with Bleached bone.  Finally give it a careful wash of Gryphon Sepia.  To do the writing water down some chaos black just a little and go in very carefully or if your lazy then use a micron .05 pen.

Eyes:
Start with Ice blue on the whole eye lens, wash in Asurmen blue, go back in and do just the middle section of the lens in ice blue, then one dot of white in the center of the ice blue.  Dry brush ice blue on the ridges of the helmet for the OSL effect.

Power weapon detail

Power weapons:

This one is really long, and I will do a separate post entirely on how to do it... I personally do about 6-9 steps to paint mine, but I really like it so...

Conclusion:

Well, that is about it for now.  IF there is enough interest I will do more specific tutorials on the different parts of the model.  Mostly I did this because a lot of people (myself included) struggle with painting metallics cleanly.  I hope this helps and feel free to post links in the comments to your work, even if it isn't GK.

As always, Comments are highly encouraged!


Duke

The 1st Squad done. (No bases)