Hi all, some help and advice from the hive mind please. I’m about to start painting the Dusk starter box. But I can’t decide on a paint scheme. So if anyone would care to share their models here I’d love to have a look.
I’m currently considering:
Plan A: I bought some different shades of metallic speed paints, and my original plan was to do a grey/silver/gold scheme, mostly to get them painted quickly. Fairly dark, and along the lines of what I have seen elsewhere.
Plan B: I’ve always fancied a Tau army, but don’t care that much for the system. So I thought I could scratch that itch by painting the Dusk army predominantly white, with orange weapons or fabrics, and blue gems.
Plan C: looking at the models there are a lot of metal panels on the top of surfaces, so as C but with quite a lot of dark silver panels on top. Perhaps purple instead of orange?
Any thoughts before I try out on a Dreadguard slayer (where I’m at a loss as to what colour the copious hair should be!)?
I definitely get the sense that Dusk was intented to be painted in shades of metallic, with a little bit of thematic weathering added in, which is great, because those kinds of paint schemes are easy to implement well and quickly. One of the few armies I’ve ever gotten completely painted on the table is Convergence, for exactly this reason. IMO this was a great choice, because dusk is essentially replacing Retribution, which is an army I’ve almost never seen painted well. That traditional white and glow scheme is just hard to pull off well, especially for an entire army. That’s why I’d be wary of the white Tau’esque scheme.
Have you had a chance to play around with Speedpaint metallics yet? I find that they come off blotchy when brushed over larger flat areas like the Dusk jacks have, unless you’re planning on airbrushing? Were you going to do these slap chop style over a zenithal prime? If you’re just planning on brushing it on, I’d recommend you use them as a first metallic coat over black on the jacks. They work great in this role. Then I use an equivalent regular metallic paint for a second coat over the larger surfaces, followed by the traditional shade wash and edge highlights. Looks great.
I’ve also been thinking about how much fun it would be to add some rust, oxidation and weathering to Dusk jacks, because I assume the unliving aren’t great at taking care of their stuff
I haven’t really used the speed Metallics yet, and the Aztec gold underwhelmed me over slapchop. Perhaps I’ll try over black as you suggest. You said normal metallic over the speed-metallic, do you mean as a highlight?
I went for NMM and black, with a cold accent colour for the glowy bits, I wanted a warm base to top it off…
I’m pretty happy with it overall
A rusted look with white chipping off and grime streaking would work nicely too, I did that for my Necrons (I won’t pop a picture here) but that could be great with an orange glow effect.
More like a layer than a highlight. I do the highlight last. I’ve found that when painting a metallic acrylic paint like P3 Cold Steel over a broad area, it’s best to do a very thinned down coat first, to get into all of the recesses, followed by a second coat over the more raised areas. I “damp brush” the second coat, like just a step away from dry brushing. Speedpaints make for a good first metallic layer.
The non-metallic metal scheme is gorgeous, but must take more work to get table ready. Just saying.
It depends. Sure, NMM is not a speed-painting technique by any means, but it’s basically just shading and highlighting with an eye for light directions. Depending on how you shade/highlight your metallics, NMM may not be significantly slower.
As can be seen from Mohrg’s model, NMM doesn’t need to be super-smoothly blended (and in some cases, should not be super-smoothly blended), and it still looks good on the tabletop.
I still prefer true-metallic metals on tabletop models - not because of painting speed but because they’re less likely to look awful in awkward lighting conditions, whereas NMM tends to look “right” only when the ambient lighting doesn’t contradict the painted reflections.
It isn’t the fastest technique, but I’m way faster than when I started using it. Personally I dislike using metallics, you spend the time highlighting other colours from a certain light point, then metallics reflect ambient light from another direction and it makes the rest of the model look wrong. Plus I use a wet pallet which doesn’t like metallic paints either. But the challenge for the Dusk is to make them my prettiest army, I like to push myself with each new force. After this it is a comic book style project, then back to black and white Grymkin with osl.
