"How would you paint scale mail?" Topic

I have a Seleucid army waiting to be done, and so I was looking at pictures of Seleucid cataphracts by different painters.

Was wondering how the scale armor was done. Black undercoat, followed by drybrushing the scales with a metallic?

or a metallic basecoat, and a black wash to settle in the recesses?

ow would you do scale?

A mixture of either technique would work well.

It depends on the metal.
For bronze scales, I give an undercoat of GW Citadel Tin Bitz, or whatever they're calling it now. Then drybrush with bright bronze or brass. The equivalent Vallejo copycat color is Tinny Tin.

If you want steel or iron, then black undercoat and dry brush with "chainmail" steel or whatever you like.

Agree that either or both would work. Generally, the smaller the scale, the more I lean toward black undercoat.

For Bronze/copper/gold, I use a brown undercoat – it works better with the yellow metals (especially if they are not as full of pigment as they might be). You can then wash with really dark brown or black to bring out the scales.

I use craft paints, so have a number of different shades of "Gold" that can be used as the base and highlight.

For Silver/iron/steel I wash the are with black (I undercoat with white).

All of the above work.

I would use white undercoat, paint the metal colour, wash with Agrax Earthshade and drybrush the original metal colour.

Metallic colour (either steel or bronze) followed by appropriate wash (payne's grey for steel, sepia for bronze).
Some scale armour seems to have had alternate bronze and silvered bronze scales, which looks great but is a huge faff to paint.

As so many others have said, either method will give you a great outcome.

I think Robert probably makes the best observation that the smaller the figure scale, the more likely a black undercoat is going to work, or at least provide a simple and attractive painting solution.

Also depends on how many you need to do. All of the methods above work well enough, but I find that a basecoat and wash is faster than a dark undercoat and drybrush,

A late reply but another method for metal figures is to paint the chain mail areas black then very lightly run a file or blade over the raised areas to scrape off the paint and show the underlying metal.

I'm pretty well aligned with what Roderick Robertson wrote above.

This link is to a description for an elephant with scale armor but the process is the same for regular fish-scale armor.

link

Finished piece:

Give "P3" armour wash a try.

I'm a wee bit confused, are you talking "scale" armor or "mail" armor, I believe there is a differnce.