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Hi All,

I need help. As the topic suggests, I'm looking to paint metallic dark blue armour. My SM army is painted dark blue with green. For a few models I want to try and fancy it up with some metallic dark blue or shiny dark blue-I know that this will be some effort, which is why I'm not implementing it army wide, I'm thinking it might just be artificer armour and termies.

Advice? I'm working with Citadel paints. I've tried inks/washes over metals, which makes for some decent power weapons, but I'm not convinced it works for armour as I tend to end up with the silver still being a dominant feature.

Failing that, if anyone has any cool looking effects based around dark blue, I'm all ears

Try one of the glaze paints, as they give a more even coverage than a wash (i think guilliman blue is a glaze).

Also, you can look for glaze medium at your hobby store, vallejo makes a good one, just put a few drops of blue in it, then put over your metallic.

You might try a gunmetal with a tamiya clear blue over it.

Try mixing a blue paint with your base metal colour. Use that as your basecoat.

You can shade with a deep purple-black or black-brown, and highlight by adding white to the base colour (or mixing a light blue with the base metal colour).

Whenever this question comes up I always suggest just buying a blue metallic paint from the likes of Tamiya or Gunze, I think Testors Model Master Acrylics range also has one, but I've always struggled to find them in Australia.

That is by far the easiest way to get a nice vibrant blue metallic.

Beyond that you can try blue clears over a silver base, which is basically how get a pearlescent blue, again I think both Tamiya make a clear, as do others. I've never tried it with GW's glazes, clears are usually much thicker than GW's glazes.

gohkm wrote:
Try mixing a blue paint with your base metal colour.

Mixing regular paint with a metallic spreads out the metal flecks, so the end result is much less metallic than going the glaze or coloured metallic paint route.

One thing I love to do is to take Leadbelcher and shade with Drakenhof Nightshade, looks awesome.

Vallejo ModelColor Gunmetal Blue (70.800) is the answer if you don't want to go NMM route.

 TseGuevara wrote:
Vallejo ModelColor Gunmetal Blue (70.800) is the answer if you don't want to go NMM route.

Isn't that more a dark grey-blue than a dark blue?

Here's some random Necrons painted with Gunze's blue metallic and then washed blue, I would recommend using a glossy blue acrylic ink rather than a GW wash though because the GW wash has a matte finish which doesn't look very nice on coloured metallics, I had to go back over with a gloss varnish.