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It occurred to me that I've tended to paint armour pretty much the same way since the 80s (black undercoat, layers of brighter silver drybrushed on, probably a black wash at some point). But mail, at least, shouldn't really look the same as plate. Most of the time with the real stuff, you can see through it, since it's mostly made of holes.

Take a look at this pic --



You can clearly see the difference in the garments worn under the armour where his pale tunic meets the brown legwear. Look at the arms too -- you can see the darker areas of fabric on his right arm, probably darkened from oil on the armour (left side of the pic) leading to areas of shadow.

Anyone got any tips for painting this stuff at 28mm scale, or should I just not worry about it?


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My thought as to how it might work, incidentally, is to basecoat in the desired 'under colour', then dry-brush in black, then do the usual layers of silver dry-brush, and at some point do a light wash in something sepia-ish to darken the 'under colour' at the edges of the holes in the mail...

Maybe try a lighter metallic pigment with a watered-down brown wash. In my opinion it doesn't really matter, 28mm is small enough that you get away with the illusion of armor layered on top of cloth.

1) Is that you?
2) At the scale we see it i dont think the under color will matter that much

BUT i think you could mix a little bit of sepia or brown into the black wash after you do the metallic. might come out nice.

1) Definitely not! He is younger and prettier than me. I look more like an old, fierce Viking than a young pretty one. Or just like an old lazy punk, actually.

2) Yeah I think something like that might be the way forward... I may need to experiment.

You could do it by varying the base colour (more or less brown in the dark grey for the mail). But for most rank and file this would add two more colours which take effort to see, so I wouldn't bother.

I think a different wash used in the area where the garment shows through would work quite well- either that or you could try base coating the area a different colour and dry brushing over- even a mix of the two techniques. Like you said-experiment until you find a result you're pleased with.

I just had an idea... For the natural viking look with a linnen tunic.

1. Prime with white (as a base for the clothing)
2. Drybrush very lightly with black (as a base for the mail, black gives a better shine to the metallics)
3. Drybrush lightly with metallic of your choice (don't work it too hard so to not obscure the primer completely)
4. Wash with a sepia or similar (to make the white primer take the undershirt tone)
5. Drybrush very lightly with the same metallic in some places to give some interesting texture.

This should work but I have never tried it.

Granander, that could work nicely I think.

And you could add another couple of layers of sepia wash to show a darker coloured undergarment (e.g. to show where tunic ends and trews begin, in that pic).