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So I'm painting a Commissar at the moment and he has a lot of gold on him. Most is metal- sword handle, buttons, tacky skull decor etc. But he also has some gold fabric material in the form of outrageous shoulder epaulettes and the imperial eagle stitched to his giant cap.

I've painted plenty of gold metal and have the following recipe which is pretty much the GW method- Dwarf bronze undercoat, agrax earthshade wash, shing gold layer, burnished gold highlight, and mithryl silver fine highlight. This works fine and indeed gives a nice metallic sheen!

But on this Commissar the two golds should really be different, right? The golden fabric should probably should not as shiny (but still shiny!) as the metal and but richer and yellower. So far I've got a dwarf bronze undercoat and the brown wash down.

Maybe I could hit it with a sepia wash at the end, or perhaps mix some yellow in with the mithryl silver highlight.... Any good ideas on how to proceed, Dakka?

Stick with a yellow/brown. Metallic on fabric almost always looks wrong at this sort of scale.

i reccomend yellows, a light dusting of gold over it, as the braids do have sheen to them, and then a wash. I'm thinking what you want is for it to look matte unless the light catches it, and then it sheens...

Or mix in a little bit of pearlescent or metallic acrylic (from art stores) into your yellows.

Thanks all! Good advice.

I've painted over them with a dark yellow basecoat and will do some experimenting tonight. I'm thinking a flesh colour wash, aim to darken it down to a more browny colour and then higlight up to a shine- It's going to be tough to make it look like real rather than just cartoony yellow, but I guess this is a learning curve for me!

 Azazelx wrote:
Or mix in a little bit of pearlescent or metallic acrylic (from art stores) into your yellows.

I've got some vallejo metallic medium kicking around that I've never uesd- this had crossed my mind. I'll not overdo it but I might mix a tad into the final highlight or something.

I'll let you know how it goes!

For fabric I can imagine a NMM approach would yield better results. I used a combination of Bestial Brown basecoat, layered with Vomit Brown and Elf Flesh, although obviously you'll have to find the equivalent in the new paint range, the results are very good when applied correctly.

Right, I've given this a go now and I have to say I think I've nailed it... at least for my first try! Well chuffed.

For the record: In the end I used something along the lines of a lysander yellow basecoat, washed with ogryn flesh, the nearthshade, then the flesh again. Then mixed snakebite leather/bleached bone layers and highlights, getting progressively lighter until pure bleached bone. Then the flesh wash again, and re-highlight bleached bone very carefully. Finally very fine highlights of pure white where the light would catch really finished it off. Phew!

I'll be sure to post pics of it when I'm done, but I've got some way to go until the model is finished yet.