PAINTING: Metal on Brass

First things first. The eagle-eyed amongst you may have already noticed that I have posted up my third and final game of The Gauntlet Tournament on my battle reports blog. If you haven't already read the report you can do so here. A tournament round up will follow.

I've been slow to flag this up, and indeed to add to this blog, because my time is so short. I am in the middle of working eleven consecutive days, I've just come off the back of seven nights out from eight and I'm also recovering from a heavy cold. But hey, I've accrued loads of overtime, Newcastle United won two games back to back, the Last Shadow Puppets were superb, my niece had a great birthday (as did my girlfriend's dad and Cheryl) and I'm feeling much better, thanks for asking.

In my last blog post I was wondering whether to paint my Brass Scorpion or my Warriors of Chaos army. I plumped for the Brass Scorpion as it's already built and undercoated and the WoC army isn't due out until the 19th November.

Or so I thought.

I went into Games Workshop to pick up the Lemartes figure I had ordered for the Gauntlet Tournament (you know, the one I went to two weeks ago) and discovered that the WoC was released on the 2nd.

And it was completely sold out in the store.

So I couldn't buy it.

Pants.

So, like Bamber Gascoigne, I've started so I'll finish.

The Brass Scorpion is a huge model so I didn't know quite where to start. I had planned to fully paint each limb in turn and then finish the body but I accidentally put too much Boltgun Metal on my palette. Okay, so now I'm painting each colour over the whole model before moving onto the next colour.

Here's how the whole model currently looks.

Brass Scorpion/Praying Mantis stalk tank

I used a Citadel large brush to paint on the initial coat of Boltgun Metal. This was really far too large for some of the details I had to pick out but I sacrificed accuracy for the sake of speed. I figured I could tighten things up using the new GW washes.

Claw with wash and highlight

As you can see on the pics above and below the Badab Black has really added a lot of depth to the metallics. I have disabused myself of one misconception though; Games Workshop thinks it is almost impossible to put too much wash on a model - it is. I used the large brush to apply the wash and fairly slathered it on the metallics. On most things it didn't matter because the surrounding areas were black so the excess is invisible but on some of the larger metallic areas, like the claws, the wash has pooled like the old inks used to.

Unlike the old inks it has dried to a matte finish so I should be able to tidy them up easily. Either that or disguise them with some rust washes.

Scorpion Cannon

Because the metallics cover such an area of the model I decided to go back and highlight them with a mixture of Chainmail and Boltgun Metal. I wasn't going for anything too subtle here, but since painting my Blood Angels I have noticed how extreme highlights can bring a model to life.

It's far from my most accomplished work but I think the results so far are acceptable. I'm therefore drawing a line under the silvery metal and moving on to the brass/gold metal next.