Painting White - The Trials and Tribulations

This blog isn't about showing off. It's about recording what I do, how I do it and how i can improve as well as everything else. With that in mind I thought I'd share my troubles with painting white armour.

Failed bone white 2nd from the left

With having started a Dark Angels army long before they decided to start changing the colours on me I was sort of pushed into painting part of my army white. Eventually I got fed up trying to paint bone white and decided that if I could get to keep some of my troops black then my first company troops would be WHITE white rather than a colour that no one seemed to be able to replicate at the time. I still never managed to get it to a standard that I was happy painting my army to however.

Over the years I've tried everything from painting it white with a wash of chestnut ink, painting it white with a wash of black ink, painting it black and then painting the white over it and finally painting it white and washing the recesses with a dark wash and then repainting it white from there. So far the later one is winning.

Left : First ever attempt at white armour  Right : Latest attempt at white armour

The latest attempts have came about because I found a handy walk-through on From the Warp for painting White Scars armour. Unfortunately I don't have any of the Secret Weapon paints and washes so I had to improvise. I managed to get a little matt medium from the art shop next to our old shop and mixed up a wash that wasn't black but seemed to replicate the colour from the tutorial. It wasn't the same exactly but it was something to work with.

By this point I'd ran out of mk7 marines to test it on and the old mk6 models just don't have the detail to make it work properly I don't think so I moved over to Tau at this point. The detail is slightly finer but the theory should be the same. I tried it with the home made wash and it just didn't look right. I was either accidentally painting over the recesses and struggling to 'repair' them or it just wasn't dark enough to make it look like shading. A lot of that has to do with the Tau armour shape though I think.

I eventually managed to paint the one above but for that it was primed with white and them a couple more layers of thin skull white on the armour and abbadon black on the undersuit. The recesses where then washed with a thinned down black ink and the white built back up. The black was give a quick highlight with grey and washed again in watered down black ink to blend it a little. I was forever fixing recesses that had been painted white though. I was very tempted just to get a technical pen out and line it once I was finished to fix the mistakes but as it turns out the pens I have are too thick for the detail on this model.

With a calm, neat hand and lots of patience I can see this working for Tau but I think on Space Marines the white paint is just going to end up looking thick and lumpy due to the size of the model. I don't want to even start thinking how many layers of paint there are on there! I should also say that this way isn't even shading. It's effectively just lining the joints which isn't really the effect I'm going for.

I think what i need to do is source some Secret Weapon washes and give that a try.