I've seen several tutorials online for doing armor and I finally wanted to give it a try.
I thought that GW's Ironbreakers would be a good regiment to try out the technique.
Quite a few gamers use browns and grays as a basecoat for gold and silver armors. The brown provides warm shading for layers of gold on top of it, and gray provides cool shading for layers of silver on top of it.
After the basecoat, I do a glossy wash of black over the basecoat, which shades all the deepest recesses of the armor, before doing the highlighting.
The final effect is a nice, layered look where the armor really feels 3-dimensional and feels like it's separate pieces that make up the armor suit.
I really like this technique, I feel like it works better than the traditional layers of just metallics. I find that I can get better contrast if the basecoat is non-metallic.
Here's some pics showing the painting stages from non-metallic gray basecoat to the final armor effect:
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Here's some pics showing different views where I added some final gold detailing over the silver armor. I also did a similar thing with the weapons.
I drybushed some reddish gold over the whole axe blade area to highlight the curly emblems, and then went back and did a final, very light silver drybrush to the blade edge and overall outer edges of the axe blade. The final effect is that it looks like the golden emblems are kind of reflecting off the silver around it, kind of a glowing effect which really helps the model's detail "pop" at tabletop height!
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shows us his skelly skillz.
