"Thousand Sons done with Contrast Paints" Topic

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

This method would work even better if you skipped the priming process & used a good enamel gold spraypaint. Like Testors gold. I paint my World Eaters in Testors gold spraypaint sans primer (the spraypaint doubles as a primer in this case). Testors gold is not absolutely glossy, but has a very fine "tooth" (almost a satin-y finish), & is more importantly very thin. Contrast paints were not around back then but I based in Red Gore (now Khorne Red I think?), slightly thinned. The gold showed through sublty in some cases. And the gold trim looked great because I used an enamel metallic (enamel metallics tend to look better than acrylics IMHO). It really sped up the painting process & something similar might work here too…

Damon.

I did use gold spray paint to prime them.

A couple of gents at the local store found that some primers work better than others for Contrast paints. Primers with a "smooth" finish apparently didn't work as well as those with a bit more texture.

The official GW primer intended for contrast paints seemed the best.

That's just the local scuttlebutt. I bought some, but haven't tried them yet.

Thanks for photographing and posting your results.

I've also heard that the primer affects the results _heavily_.

Apparently contrasts are made to really work with GW primers.

I might be totally wrong on this but IIRC as matte result as possible with the primer is a must.

Perhaps even gold undercoat would've worked better if you had varnished it very matte before applying contrasts?

Contrast paints work the best with highly detailed models. Models with a lot of smooth surfaces (like Space Marines) do not do so well with the contrast paints. Also, you have to use GW primers for the best results. I've been experimenting across different models. My Star Wars Legion Death Troopers did very well with the contrast paints but my 20mm modern insurgents in parkas did not do so well.

I think they worked really well on these space marines with non-GW primer. I got the exact result I was looking for in about a tenth of the time it was taking me to do it with various washes.

Another comment on reddit said they were basically designed to do space marines.

I had heard that you want a smooth primer, opposite of comment above about having one with texture. Don't remember where, though, so not very reliable.

Hoping airbrush primer will work.

andy

I've had great luck using AP Skeletal Bone and AP Desert Yellow primers with the contrast paints.

Which colors over the AP primers?

Here are the guys all finished and based:

I should have another box of MK IV armour guys to pick up at the store tomorrow. They will make the other ones that go along with this to do a squad of 10 and then the other five will go with the Occult blades squad that I have to round that out to ten.

As an aside I had my girlfriend's daughter paint some 6mm Alpha Legion guys for me. She's never painted anything other than 15mm horses before. It took her about an hour and she finished 4 land raiders, 4 rhinos and 60 marines with Contrast paints.

Here is a Shadowsword. This was done only with contrast paints and a metal non-contrast paint, plus weathering powders. I'm not sure how long it took to paint, but just a few minutes here and there.

I might go a little heavier on the weathering, but we'll see how it looks on the table top.

I did it over a gold undercoat. I've had the model lying around for years, probably close to 20 years if not more, so it was a pretty prime candidate for experiment.

I did put a wash of Agrax Earthshade over the metal in some areas too and used averland sunset for the lights, but other than that, and the metal, all contrast paints.

I'm pleased with how it turned out. They worked really well over the big flat areas of the tank.

If I had to do it over again I would have used a bigger brush and made my strokes of paint go in the same direction. I can't imagine that I put more than an hour and a half into this thing.

And here are some pics of a civilian casualty pile for our Prospero games.

Sure makes nice pools of blood!

The pools of blood are not contrast paint. They are Blood for the Blood God. The blue on the paints, the green on the shorts and the yellow on the dress are contrast paints.

Here are some pics of my first Castellax-Achea.

I have two of these guys and they had been sitting around since Christmas assembled but without any love. I decided to change that when the Contrast paints came out and they worked so well on my other Thousand Sons.

The red color scheme is awesome, love the translucent effect of putting it over the gold.