Ohh! We’re halfway there…

Well, this has taken a bit longer than expected. My effort had to be directed to fend off the forces of Nurgle for a while.

Onto the painting then! This is not a ‘how to’ guide, I paint far too randomly for that, but more an insight into how I was taught to paint minis back in the 90’s, but with the benefit of better covering paint now (I can get a smooth yellow with less than 10 layers? Luxury!)

We have already undercoated the minis when we finished the basing going for a white. I’m not a paint purist, choose the company you prefer.

The areas to be metal get filled out with a pure black, then painted or dry brushed gun metal (there is a lot of chainmail style ‘mesh armour’ on older Eldar models). 

After that, we go over all of the main armour with the same pure black, this gives you your main colour and cleans up the metal overbrush.

‘But Rufus, you magnificent moustachioed master of the mystic, why not just do a spray undercoat of black if that’s the main colour?’

Well young apprentice, the reason is twofold. First, after doing the metal, you need to repaint the black, but a black undercoat spray and black acrylic paint never look the same when dry, so starting from white, you know when you have a proper coverage of your painted black.

Second, there’s going to be yellow on here. And yellow paint can be… difficult to paint over black, so to keep the layers down, we base white. Make sense? No? Well, it was the 90’s, we had very little choice. Ask any older painter about trying to use ‘bad moon yellow’ over anything.

It gets a bit disheartening at this point, looking like a lump of black, white and silver, and you will wonder if it’s worth it, but trust the process.

See how good that yellow looks? Not even used any washes yet. All shoulder and knees yellow, all helmets red, and just to add a pop, any chunky weapon areas given the secondary colours too, this is where you see it come together.

Last stage here, helmet eye lenses, bare skin, grenades, belts, ammo canisters and hair. All done in basic colours, just blocked in for the moment. You could paint the base rims black here and play these on the table and make any tin-boy weep with jealousy.

But we aren’t stopping here, oh no, next, we go for shading and highlighting, and I have a plan for that black armour.