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Painting black is hard enough, but I have basically no idea how to go about applying battle damage and weathering to it. Most of my battle damage is done with the "paint on a darker colour and underline it" method, but of course you can't really do that with black. I think I'll have to go with metallic colours for my scrapes and dents instead.

I've taken a look around the internet and found a few things pertaining to scale modelling, but nothing related to tabletop wargaming directly. Does anyone have any links or, for that matter, any advice?

(anything on different methods of painting black to begin with would be helpful too, so far I've found this to be the most useful)

This is just done with a sponge and boltgun metal/lead belcher.

The snow is just white weathering pigment.

I have heard an idea that you can use red, or similar, to represent the primer showing rather than bare metal, and I think that might work for the technique you normally use (silver damage with red edge highlight to give the depth) but I don't fancy the idea myself, I think it would break up the black too much.

These might help:

http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/2011/02/dark-angels-black-color-scheme.html
http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/2010/12/painting-black-armour-learning-how.html
http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/2011/10/using-metallic-weathering-powder-on.html

Somehow I'd never seen that first From the Warp article... that's very useful. Cheers.

 A Kvlt Ghost wrote:
Somehow I'd never seen that first From the Warp article... that's very useful. Cheers.

No problem, man. Even though Ron is on a sabbatical right now, I would definitely check out what he has to offer on his blog... there is some seriously good stuff there.

I imagine that part of the problem you're having with weathering black is that you are actually using black as your primary black color. I tend to avoid both black and white for anything but the deepest recesses and the highest highlights. If you paint something "black" then you have nothing left for the recesses (or your scratches if you choose to use that technique).

Weathering is just weathering, though. Doesn't really matter too much what color you're starting with if you try to do more realistic weathering. Google the "Salt Technique" for chips and scratches - or just use a sponge as noted above.

I've recently been playing around with starting with light grey and then bringing my blacks down using successive black washes (Nuln oil or my own mix). You can see the results here: