How To: Painting Tarnished Metal

If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed that I've given the blog a bit of a face lift. That old template just wasn't wide enough and I finally got a chance to mess around with the template designer. Being a graphic designer and someone who is used to working on websites, I have to say the new template designer is really slick. Hats off to Blogger as they did a great job. If you run your own blog here on Blogspot, give it a try as there is a lot of cool stuff you can do and it's really easy to use.

For this post, I wanted to do something different and actually work on the hobby side of things. I consider myself a very well rounded gamer. I like painting and converting just as much as I like playing the game or building scenery. I've been enjoying working on the Liber Sanguinis articles, but I wanted to branch out a bit and either do some painting or build some terrain.

A friend of mine from the DED 'ARD Gaming Club brought over one of the Space Marine statues from the Honoured Imperium set. It was unpainted and I bugged him to leave it at my house so I could paint it because I always wanted to give tarnished metal a try. He agreed and it's been sitting on my desk for a couple days. I wanted to paint, but I didn't want to get involved in trying to develop a color recipe and scheme for my entire army, so I decided to paint this statue and do a quick tutorial. Let's get on with it.

Step 1: Prime the model black. Normally I use cheap flat black spray paint I buy at Lowes for like $1 a can on scenery, but I went with the GW spray on this one. 

Step 2: Dry brush the entire model with Tin Bitz. Yes, I said Tin Bitz and damn was I excited too. In my 15 years of painting, I don't think I ever opened this color! This statue is pretty big, so I just stuck with the GW Large Dry Brush.

Step 3: Do another dry brush of Dwarf Bronze. Another color I don't think I've ever used. Never been a fan of smelly dwarves...

Step 4: At this point the model actually looks pretty good and if you go with a lighter hand on the Dwarf Bronze dry brush than I did above, you could leave it at that and call it a day. Dan said he wanted a weathered and tarnished look so let's tackle that.

For this, you need a bluish green wash. I'm sure you've seen pictures of weathered statues before. If not, do a Google Image search. I can't stress enough how reference is extremely important no matter what you are trying to paint or build. I used a mix of about 1 part Dark Angels Green to 2 parts Hawk Turquoise. I applied this liberally over the model and was even adding water directly on the statue to water it down more. You want this wash mostly in the deep recesses and don't worry if you over did it like I did below. We'll revisit that again.  

Step 5: The wash is a little heavy handed, but I can see leaving it like if you want your statue really worn out. I wanted oxidation in the deepest recesses only, so back to dry brushing we go. We are basically going to redo the steps we did before. Do another dry brush with Tin Bitz. Yay, Tin Bitz!

Step 6: Dry brush again with Dwarf Bronze.

Step 7: To finish off the metal, do a final dry brush of Shining Gold.

Step 8: For the final step, we need to finish the plinth which is just straight forward dry brushing. I painted the whole area black followed by dry brushing Adeptus Battlegrey and then Space Wolves Grey. For the skull, I painted it Bleached Bone followed by a Gryphonne Sepia Wash. Once the wash was dry, I applied some direct highlights with Bleached Bone.

Below are the final pics which you can click for a larger image. With about an hour of painting, you'll come away with a nicely painted scenery piece.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

Till next time,

–The Harrower