Month 2 - Imperial Knight #1 pt 4

(or Here goes nothing!!)

Just a quick test shot of the leg plates blue-tac'd onto the painted leg.  Techniques after the break!

  The legs were primered in Army Painter Black and then had a fairly large amount of Army Painter Gunmental drybrushed onto them.  The important take-away from me using this technique was to get an even amount of the Gunmetal on the surfaces that I wanted to reflect the color of the wash I would apply next.  Where this became a bit difficult to envision, was the need to get more of the drybrushed paint onto the larger assemblies on the back of the Knight's legs.  If I didn't do this, then only the highest, most detailed points would take the wash color.  I had to balance this against just basecoating the entire model in Gunmetal, but that would have taken away the depth created in the drybrushing, and I would have had to add it back via a dark wash on top of the color wash!  It is all a tradeoff, here is what that first drybrush coat looked like.

After the drybrush coat dried, I hit it with a fairly liberal amount of Army Painter Blue Wash, which when allowed to dry looked like this:

Unlike my Inquisitor where I put several coats of blue wash on in order to darken the tone of the material, here I stopped after the first wash.  The intent was to make it look like an unusual, energized metal, something different than the usual Imperial Knight silver-and-gold frame.  

Here is both steps of the technique side-by-side:

From there it was a few coats of Antique Copper on the sides and backs of the armor plates, along with entirely too many coats of Minitaire Lagoon Blue for the base color of the plate.  I won't be subdividing these plates with two colors, as I'm reserving the open space for decals.

Now to add the recess wash, once I decide if I want a harsher Dark Tone from Army Painter, or if I just want the muddy Strong Tone to define the edge of the plates.  That along with hitting the edges of the "blue" leg with Army Painter Plate Mail for highlights won't take too long, or so I hope!  So now I'm off to get the other leg done as I'm running up against the deadline!