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.

Paint Stripping with Dettol

Through out the years I've tried many ways to strip the paint from figures and I always end up going back to Dettol. I've yet to see it damage plastic figures and the metal ones come out all shiny.

If you want to know more about what it actually does then head over to the 40k forums and read this thread. Basically the para-chloro-meta-xylenol, pine oil and soap work together and after a few hours of soaking it's ready to be cleaned off.

For this latest round of stripping I'd decided to get some terminators, marines and an eldar cleaned up to give me something else other than the ork to break the monotony of the IG painting.

Both the Terminator Captain and the Ultramarine Captain pretending to be a Dark Angel were never finished so barely have more than a couple of layers of paint on them. The marine at the back not only had the current layer of paint but he also had a layer of matt varnish and the original black Dark Angels paint under it. The Dark Reaper in the middle just had the normal paint layers with a thin layer of matt varnish. The mystery though was with the Grey Knight terminator. I was given it many years ago by a friend and despite there being only a couple of thin layers of paint he reckons he went a little over board with the varnish.

Using an old cleaned out sauce jar I poured enough Dettol in to just cover the models. If your careful and use a coffee filter to get rid of paint flecks you can usually reuse the Dettol a few times so don't worry if you think you are using too much. Using neat Dettol can be a little dodgy so use rubber gloves and some form of eye protection. Far better to be safe than sorry.

After four hours I lifted the models out to give them an initial scrub with an old toothbrush to get the largest bits of paint off. Usually when you do things like this your told to wash them in hot soapy water but as Dettol is a detergent you can just use that instead! 

Before Scrubbing

After Scrubbing

Use the toothbrush and give it a good scrub. In most cases you'll get almost all the paint off and any wee bits left can be taken off using a cocktail stick. I used a pin as all the figures I stripped were metal and I wouldn't scratch them and also because I was completely out of cocktail sticks. If your lucky then you'll have managed to get all the paint off and all you have to do is rinse them off and leave them out to dry. Those with varnish on them though had to go back in for a few more hours. It actually took eight hours to get the Grey Knight stripped!

With all the scrubbing going on the arms and backpacks fell off but it wasn't the Dettol that caused it. In fact I'm surprised the glue had kept them on this long as it was at least 15 years since they were last glued together!

Now all I need to do is reassemble them and get them primed ready for painting. I think I'll try something a little different from Dark Angels this time though. I also need to work out how to stop my hands from smelling of pine resin...

A Change Of Pace

For the last ten years my entire painting schedule revolved around Imperial Guard and Dark Angels. It was the same thing over and over again as I tried to get my rank and file troops painted. I didn't even stray from those just to break the monotony. It was hell. In fact it was that bad that it was one of the reasons I put down my paintbrush six years ago and didn't pick it back up until very recently. I swore it would be different this time though.

After painting the start of my latest Imperial Guard army I started to get jaded around about the 14th or 15th model so I started looking for something different to paint. As I've lost a lot of my figures during house moves I could actually only find one non-IG/SM figure. I'd completely forgotten about the Tau and kroot I've got sitting waiting to be painted but I'd found an unpainted Space Ork that actually had arms. I'd found a few old armless madboyz but I don't have any spare ork arms anywhere.

It's been about twenty years since I last painted ork skin so please bare with me on this one. Primed with Chaos Black and then the skin was base coated with Dark Angel Green. It was then highlighted with Snot Green and Goblin Green. It was then given a good wash of Agrax Earthshade. I went back over the highlights with Snot Green and Goblin Green to lighten it back up before giving it another wash of Agrax Earthshade but this time 50/50 between shade and water.

The trousers were based with Eshin Grey and highlighted with Codex Grey and Fortress Grey before a 50/50 wash of Agrax Earthshade. Further highlights of Codex and Fortress Grey were added. Eyes and nails were picked out with Blood Red and again washed with Agrax with another 'highlight' of Blood Red afterwards. The oil rag was treated the same but a little Sunburst Yellow was added to the red for a final highlight. Oil splodges were added with black ink. The leather and fur were painted with Snakebite Leather and highlighted with Desert Yellow with a wash of Agrax.

I've never been able to get metal just right so I basically threw some paint on to see how it looked. It was either based with Boltgun Metal, washed with black ink and the drybrushed with Boltgun Metal or the same was done using Tin Bitz with a light highlight of Shining gold after the drybrushing. That will need redone. At least on the backpack metals. I'd like to get some tattoos or woad on there and can't think where to put the clan symbols without running the risk of ruining the model.

I'll revisit this once I've worked out the finishing touches.