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Hello dakkanites. I've had some soft and squishy human sci-fi miniatures in the past, and now the new IG codex is luring me with its wily ways. I have not actually forked out money for IG plastics yet, but I did strip down an old metal miniature from Ral Partha and slap some paint on it to try and hammer out a paint scheme before I get the plastics. I was trying to capture the same look as the UNSC Marines had in Halo: Combat Evolved (The first Halo game) because I thought the rusted-metal-carapace look was well done.

Do you think I captured this look well enough? Suggestions on improving it? Suggestions on converting the paint scheme into a full IG army (I.e. a way to speedpaint this onto IG infantry, tank schemes, etc.)?
Thanks in advance-
FP135


Automatically Appended Next Post:
The method used:

Pewter grey primer
Tin Bitz basecoat to all metal armor pieces (helmet, kneepads, elbow pads, shoulder pads)
Black basecoat to visor, headcam, and weapon.
Blood Red visor lens
Vallejo Game Color "Earth" to boots, gloves, kit.
Vallejo Game Color "Gunmetal" to all metal, including helmet, kneepads, weapon, elbowpads, canteen, book bracing, and shoulderpads.
Vallejo Game Color "Khaki" to boots, gloves, kit
Vallejo Game Color "Elf Flesh" / Vallejo Game Color "Khaki" mix for face and neck
GW Badab Black wash, heavy over majority of model.
Light grey (Country Grey by Applebarrel) highlight on uniform
Vallejo Game Color "Elf Flesh" highlight on facial features

And that is as far as I have gotten so far. Obviously, this technique will take a VERY long time to do on any IG army of substantial size, so how can I cut some steps out of it and still achieve the same effect?

It looks good, if a little drab.
You might want to consider beefing up some of the colours lightly so they are a tiny bit more distinguishable at table-top distance, but it's hard to comment because your photo has a pretty big colour shift (open your curves palette in photoshop/gimp, select green and drop it way down).

To simplify your steps, I'd do the following:

Black primer

Heavy drybrush the whole model in silver of your choice, then hit the whole model with a metal wash (I like GW Devlan Mud but any cool brown serves the same purpose) and then a light Drybrush of silver for the highlights.

Basecoat the fatigues in your greys (you could reduce this to one colour for the whole lot to be even quicker), then paint the boots and kit khaki

Wash the fatigues and kit in a watered black wash and highlight if necessary

Paint/wash the skin

Paint/highlight the visor

I'd personally do it like this because your sample model looks like it would be faster to do paint the fatigues around the metal than the other way around, and by breaking it up into these steps makes it a bit easier for batch painting, and the messy stuff like drybrushing needs to be done first.

Yeah, the model does kinda blur together at table-top distance. Hopefully the IG models will fare better, having more uniform and less kit, with some carapace (cadian shock troops anyway). I think I will emphasize the difference between the gray fatigues and the carapace. A sepia wash on the metal bits might look better? If not, Devlan Miracle may be on my shopping list. Luckily the cadians don't have visors so that already cuts out a step. If I get enough money, I plan on buying pig iron kolony militia heads for them but I don't know how financially feasible that is at the moment, considering the cost of our plastic crack.

BTW, sorry for the sloppy pic attached above. I've re-attached the edited pic.

A little sepia might help, if you also choosing a slightly cooler shade of grey to help differentiate the warm tone that will provide