Painting Thousand Sons with Contrast paints.

[Pictors Studio]

First of all the thing I was most excited about with these new paints was seeing if they would work to get that metallic look on Thousand Sons and Alpha Legion quickly.

I've been doing it with a mix of Angron red and carroburg crimson but it was taking a long time to build up the coat, many, many layers.

Would contrasts do this quickly and get me to doing the rest of the model?

If so I could move on to doing some bigger Thousand Sons vehicles and probably start an Alpha Legion force.

So here are the results.

I assembled 5 MK IV armour space marines, sans their heads as they are still on their way from Forge World, last night while watching Catch-22.

I got them primed this morning.  I sprayed them black first and then did a coat of gold over them.

They looked like this:



Then I did the Contrast colour Blood Angels Red to see if that would work.

It seemed to be working as I started on the shoulder pads.



I finished the first one in less than two minutes. 




Now to see if the black would do the guns.



Over a gold undercoat it would not, at least not to a level I found acceptable.  So it was back to the normal method of painting them all black.

I think I could have done it over silver or even gray and achieved a desirable result, but it didn't seem quicker to do the painting of the weapon in silver or gray and then putting the contrast paint on vs. painting it black and then highlighting it from there.  So I decided on the latter.

Next up was finishing the rest of the guys though.



This took a total of about 12 minutes, including trying the black on the guns and one pouch. 


Then we did the rest of the details in regular paints.







This was, by far, the longest part of the process and took about an hour to paint the rest of the details in and touch up areas where something got on the basecoat.  Fortunately that last part was easy in that you could just paint over the black with gold and then put the contrast back over it.

If they had their heads on it would have taken slightly longer and I did use the black contrast paint to do the exposed machinery on the front side of their back packs.

Not bad and it will certainly speed up how quickly I can do Thousand Sons models going forward.

My next experiment is going to be with a tank or a squad of primaris Alpha Legion guys.

I've also tried the paints out on some other things.  For historicals I did it on some figures that I had already painted black so had to paint parts of them gray or bone to try the paints out.  Wasn't impressed there as it still needed to be highlighted to reach my usual standards and wasn't faster at all.  Still it wasn't the suggested method so I'll try again with something else, probably some ECW guys.

I also tried them on the D&D pre-primed Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures.  The paint did not go over the primer there very well at all and pooled and didn't cover so that was a no-go.  I did it on my Glotkin, painted in Rakarth flesh, and it was a great wash/coloring. 

So mixed results so far on other things but I'm dead chuffed about the results on the Thousand Sons. 

[Pictors Studio]

And here are the finished models.





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Hopefully the set of MKIV guys I ordered will be at the store tomorrow when I go in and then I'll get the other half of this squad done and give my Occult blades their other five models too. 

[Pictors Studio]

Here is a Shadowsword I did for the lads to advance behind.



It is pretty much all contrast paints over a gold undercoat with a metal and weather powder.  I used Agrax on some of the metal parts and the contrast on others.  Overall I'd guess I have about an hour and a half in on this thing total.  2 hours on the outside.







I like how it came out and look forward to getting it on the table.  That probably won't happen until the end of the month.

Now I can probably field my Leman Russ figure on the side of the Space Wolves without it being too one-sided. 



Also here is a civilian casualty pile.




This was done with some contrast paints but mostly regular paints. 


It was mostly designed to be used in our Prospero games but will probably see service in Infinity games too eventually.

[tomrommel1]

nice indeed seems to speed up painting indeed

[Pictors Studio]

There are a lot of things the paints make a lot faster.  When I was doing that red over gold before it was taking forever. 

There are other things that the contrast paints do that other paints don't.  They are a pretty neat tool. 

[Pictors Studio]

Here is the first of my Castellax-Achea automata done with Contrast paints. 



The model was sprayed black, dry brushed gun metal and then I put a wash on it.  The armour was then painted gold and the contrast applied over that.  The whole thing probably took me about 45 minutes including the decals, but not the basing.



I have another one to do, it is still at the stage where I'm painting the gold on the armour, which I did at the same time as this one but the squirt of gold ran out and I haven't got back to it.

After these guys are a squad of the occult sniper guys and then 5 more swordsmen and the other 5 tactical guys from the squad above. 

[Ultravanillasmurf]

Nice work.

Very speedy.