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Ok, I am by no means an inexperienced painter, and I am constantly improving my techniques. I use a lot of gold/brass, as I just think it makes things look cool. And my gold effects are good, but I'm hoping for some tips to take it to the next level.

This is my current technique:
First a tin bitz or shining gold basecoat (depending on what I'm going for)
wash with devlin or gryphon (again, depending on what I'm going for)
highlight back up with shining
highlight with burnished
highlight with mithril
paint over the mithril with burnished again to tone it down.

The main problem I have (and I notice it in MANY pictures I see others do online) is that the gold ends up a little...grainy. You can get a VERY smooth look with bolt metal/chainmail/mithril, but shining/burnished never looks as good.

GM's pics, and a few I see online, have a very smooth metalic look to them that I would like to emulate. I'm thinking it might be the citadel paints, or perhaps my paints are old (though I don't think so. But it gets hard to keep track of). I hear good things about vallejo (or whatever it is called) metallics. Would that solve it?

Finally, any good tips for improving my technique? Thanks in advanced.

Can we see what it looks like from the technique used so far?

Gah. Yea, that would make sense. Ok, give me till Thursday and I'll ask again.

Using a wash of gryphonne sepia then highlighting it with burnished again will give you good results to.
You can do this in layers until you find the color tone you whant it to have, it will get slightly darker with each wash of sepia.

Have you considered just mixing the Mitril Silver and Burnished Gold together on your pallate, and then highlighting with that?

I actually do a thin wash of leviathan purple over the gold and it adds a lot. The gryphonne sepia makes it lustrous and then the purple gives some depth. Then a quick drybrush or highlight of mithril silver and you're done.