So, I thought I'd do a tutorial on how you an achieve a pretty good tabletop standard with minimal effort that uses black and white spraypaint and washes to do the highlighting work for you. Its a quick way to get stuff looking decent so you can spend the rest of the time making them boss, or drinking beer
For the tutorial ill be painting 2 of these imperial fists up to tabletop, but ill make the language generic so it can be adapted to whatever youre painting.
To begin with youll need to break down your colours. The colours are laid down from lightest to darkest so seperate each colour into 3 parts: highlight, midtone and shade. More often than not your highlight colour will be white but sometimes bleached bone or some other equivalent off-white tint colour will work depending on what youre going for. The midtone should be whatever colour youre painting but with some of the highlight mixed in to tone down the saturation (unless youre painting metallics which are fine out of the pot). And finally the shade should be your desired colour in full saturation, straight out of the pot, but with a bit of a slightly darker, more saturated colour mixed in. For instance I'm painting yellow mans so my shade is iyanden darksun foundation yellow with a tiny bit of orange mixed in (for the extra kick).
You will also need some form of black ink.. or dark ink of some variety. Im using P3 Armour Wash because its browny black.
1. Undercoat
This is a pretty important stage as it establishes where all the highlights are gonna be. I use white knights for this but any flat black and white sprays will do. Airbrushing will also work if you got one
First just undercoat the model black and let it dry. Then lightly and from a fair distance (around 40-50cm, it varies) carefully spray white around the model at a 45 degree sorta angle. Get an even coat so all the parts except the very deepest cracks have a greyish shade. Let this dry. Then take the white again and spray directly down on the model so the white falls on the most raised parts and creates a sense of light.
It should look something like this
2. Basecoating
Pick whatever the lightest version of your colour is and mix it 50/50 with water to a wash consistency and give the desired area an even coat. The lighter areas should shine through this transparent layer, if it doesnt your mix is too thick and needs mo water
Then take your midtone colour and make a similarly transparent 50/50 mix and apply it over the general panels, leaving only the edges and most raised areas untouched.
Then in the darkest areas carefully paint in your shade colour. I dont usually make this a wash like the other layers, but it can be good if you need to make a bland section more colourful.
3. Shading
Get some dark ink and mix it with a little chaos black so its a runny opaque mix. Then take your finest, tiniest brush and apply it to all the cracks and darkest parts of the model. Also, make a mix that is 50/50 water so its quite transparent and apply it to all the crap you want to look dark and dirty (metallics usually)
4. Cleanup
Use either the shade or a mix with white added depending on what fits best to clean up all the inevitable screwups
Ill chuck up a detailing tutorial maybe next week when i finish these dudes off
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