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Can anybody give me advice for painting power weapons that cool bluish shinny color?

It will be greatly appreciated, any links and pictures will also be great.

Thanks for your time.

There's different ways to paint power weapons. In the 5th Ed Marine codex for example many are simple painted metal.

However if you want the shiny blue/green/purple shimmer effect GK pioneered, there is a few ways.

The first and easiest is how I do it. Simply paint the blace metal and give it a thin, even wash of black to add shading. Once dry, glaze with your chosen colour, and I wholeheartedly recommend the GW glazes for it. If you need purple mix the blue and red. Make sure to paint in straight lines from the base to the tip of the blade and keep the paint even. Then cover it with a smooth layer of gloss varnish.

The more difficult method is to wetblend the paints. You will need at least 3 colours. Seeing as you want blue you'll need a light blue or white, a mid tone blue as your main colour and either very dark blue or black. Wetblend (look up tutorials) the dark colour at the base of one side of the blade and the light on the opposite side at the base. The middle of both sides of the blade should be your midtone and wetblend them into your dark and light colours respectively. For the top third of the blade you should have your dark colour on the side with the light bottom and vice versa. You can add more colours or more "stripes" if needed. Cover with gloss when finished.


An airbrush can help immensely when doing the latter and there are hundreds of tutorials about.

If you want lightning on the blade, use a mid tone grey (Vallejo Neutral Grey [Model Colour] is my choice) and draw a squiggly line from the base to where you want the lightning to end. Make sure its thin enough to not obscure your previous work but just thick enough to highlight. About a millimetre is good. Have little branches coming off the main bolt.
Next, highlight the centre with either a light grey or a 50:50 mix of your base grey and white. Using this colour you can have little tiny forks off your forks you made previously.
Next take pure white and with barely anything on the brush, highlight the lightning but not overly so. Then gloss.


If you want the lightning to be tinted the same colour as the blade use the respective glaze and then gloss.

Thanks so much, very informative .

What Deadshot said, or get some inks (P3 has some nice ones), and then paint the blade metallic, then cover with ink. Gives a nice glossy finish, and shades itself rather nicely. The effect itself is what I personally believe a power weapon should look like.

I was only looking this up today, so here's one of the better guides I found:

http://darkfuturegaming.blogspot.com.au/2009_12_06_archive.html