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I have a necron c'tan model that I'm going to try painting to look like colored, glossy metal. What I want to do is just stain the unprimed metal with an acrylic ink such as Liquitex to give it sort of a shiny living metal sheen, and then cover that in a gloss varnish protective coating. Is there any reason this wouldn't hold up under normal play? Would the varnish not be enough?

Well, I hate to be a negative Nancy... but I don't think that would look good at all. Not to mention, I think it would rub off pretty easy.

Went ahead and put a few thinned layers of ink down on it. Not quite dry yet but should retain the sheen.


Hopefully it stays the same, but not sure how the varnish will affect it. I'm prolly going to ink the ribbon things with something black or purple and make them darker just to differentiate between cloth and skin. Definitely like how it made the crystals look.

Not going to lie

that looks cool.

Ether way though seal it with satin? or gloss varnish should make it relatively sturdy and if not who cares, its metal and you can strip it fast

You could always paint the cloth with a primer and paint it how ever you want. That inked skin looks really cool btw

It looks so cool that I'm worried the ink will scratch off.

Did you consider painting it a metallic colour with the normal priming method, and then inking?
Depending on the ink (dye or pigment based?) it can be prone to bleeding through layers, so be wary of that, it will need to be sealed with some good varnish, ideally lacquer I guess. If its over the top of paintwork it will also require an intercoat clear between the acrylics and inks.
With the way youve done it (looks cool btw) you might run into issues where you can rub it away through usage as theres no primer here. But if you give it a few nice thin coats of lacquer and then whatever finish you actually were after it should be reasonable. Use matte varnish after the lacquer if you want to carry on working other paints over the top, you cant really go in and sand the whole mini because of its scale most likely, so matt varnish will probably give you the best adhesion results without a real pita job of trying to sand it up again to provide tooth.

edit; 'Liquitex Ink!' sounds like the one you've used, which is pigment based (incredibly concentrated and impressively fine pigment tbh), I use them with Liquitex mediums to make washes.
They airbrush straight out of the bottle rather well, i have painted several custom guitars using them through my airbrush, My advice is let it dry... and then let it dry some more. and when you do the clear coat, go really lightly, let it dry well and go really lightly again. If you go too heavy too soon the ink will bleed and run into the clear. If your patient they do dry to a very strong finish all by themselves and can be quite difficult to scratch off things that got some on by accident (also un prepped surfaces)

Yeah it's Liquitex acrylic ink. I've used it before on plastic and it definitely takes awhile to dry completely. With the way I slopped a bunch of layers on parts of this guy, I'm gonna wait til tomorrow to try and seal it with varnish. Did a few more layers and got the cloth parts pretty dark, any more work will be done after it gets sealed.

And yes, I've managed to get several spots of it on clothing before, and nope. That stuff ain't ever coming out.