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In light of the rumoured Harlequin release coming up I was wondering if people have advice for painting the patterns that you find on them?

I want to get the finecast models to start off with, but am super intimidated with painting them..

I'd like to do it with my airbrush, so if anyone has advice for how I could stencil them or another way, that would be great.

You're best off hand painting. Stencilling properly is far harder and more time consuming, to the point of being practically impossibl.

Take a look at my dark eldar, im doing a harlequin theme myself and im hand painting them, its time consuming but im satisfied with the results. I tried taping them, stenciling and those just turned out to be a complete hastle.

Wow. I'm impressed!

When painting in checker patterns and such, I like to paint (or use a micron pen if you can afford one) a grid over the base coat first to establish where I'll be painting and to get the rough dimensions right, so that I don't have to start all over again if it seems especially warped or crooked. Then, I just fill in the boxes and then clean up the lines.

Another trick to get hand-painted patterns to appear straight is to do highlights in as straight lines as you can get, parallel to the edge of the design.

It might not be the best way of describing it, but I hope that this helps

I painted my base coat red, then I painted the blue diamonds and then did a black lines to outline the diamonds to give them a straight look.