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Hi all,

Im looking for a quick way to paint iron hands for space marines, but have no idea how to acheive this.

I usually paint stuff that has a lot of details and making it easy. Although space marines do have a lot of detail there is a lot of smooth panels and to make it worse is ive gone for a black scheme. This makes me worry a lot!

Everyone i spoke to said it will take forever to do and isnt easy.

I wanted the iron hands to ally up with ad mech as its quite fluffy.

Im not looking for a pro painted style but more like i havent just dry brushed it. Although i dont want to spend weeks to paint a squad.

Please help guys.

Greetings!

I've found that painting black can be a challenge, but it isn't impossible to do well while still maintaining some good detail and not taking a ton of time either.

First, let me give you an example of one of my deathwatch marines to illustrate the technique.



This is a WIP picture of my now finished Librarian in terminator armor.

As you can see, I've gone in and dry-brushed a nice blue-grey shade. Any grey will work, honestly, but I found a blue-grey gave the armor a nice blued/cold effect that I really liked. If you go with other colors/tints to your drybrush it'll give the black a variety of shades. The more neutral greys will give the black a deeper, less cold feeling, depending on how light or heavy you want the highlights to look.

here's another example on some regular power armor:



My technique is simple. I dry brushed the grey shade over the hard edges, paying special attention to places there was a 90 degree corner. I then went back and anywhere there was a smooth panel (knee pad, the upper leg, and lower leg for example) I used a fine detail brush and 'filled in' those areas with black if I got some paint on that panel/space while dry brushing, leaving a nice thin line of grey along the edges. I then went back and used the edge of my brush to edge highlight a few very specific points with the same blue-grey shade, such as the 90 degree angles, so they were brightest.

This gives a nice depth to the black and doesn't take an exorbitant amount of time. You can use a second, brighter shade of grey as the second edge highlight to really make the hard edges stand out nicely as well. Try a few different colors and see what works/looks best to you.

Hopefully this was somewhat helpful. and if you have any questions feel free to ask.

Take it easy for now.

-Red__Thirst-

strigoi wrote:

Im not looking for a pro painted style but more like i havent just dry brushed it.

Yeah, get drybrushing!
As Red_Thirst has shown rather nicely it is perfectly possible to get decent results with drybrushing.
It's all about having good technique and colour selection.

For my black miniatures, I start with a primer coat of Vallejo black Surface Primer. My first base coat is a dark German Grey (It's not quite black, but it is very dark). I do edge highlighting with progressively lighter greys or blue-greys if I want a "cool" black. When I'm done with the highlighting, I brush on a couple of layers of a black ink glaze. This darkens everything down so the dark grey looks almost black and there is real depth to the color. The highlights also get toned down so they are not so stark.