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So after painting the Space Marines from the Recruit starter box (which are also the Assault Intercessors and the Lieutenant from Indomitus, which is really what I'm slowly gearing up for here), I finally tackled the Necrons. I came up with this really simple to do paint scheme here that's basically a bunch of Vallejo Metal Color paints with Citadel washes and some drybrushing.



Now I'm pretty happy with how these guys look, but there is one glaring problem - the guns are painted Abaddon Black, i.e. a matt color, but the Metal Varnish topcoat (and no, I'm not flexible about topcoating everything) makes them look glossy and they end up looking like licorice. It's not that obvious in these pictures, but take my word for it, it's terrible. So basically, if I go with this recipe, I'll have to paint the weapons Gunmetal because there's no way around the fact that everything's going to be shiny. Or I don't topcoat, but like I said - nope.

Now while I was working on these, I came across this tutorial by Trovarion, and I decided to try this method because I've been a bit bored with things and I really liked the result.




This turned out to be really fun, but also time consuming. The biggest problem, though, is that... uh, I like this much better than the metallic ones.



The only problem here, other than the fact that I overdid it a little with the white highlights, is that the glow effect on the gun looks better on the warriors, but that's an easy fix - I did it over a white base on the warriors, but not here because I was kinda-sorta following Trovarion's lead (not entirely, though), and it didn't really work that well. So I can just change that and I'm golden.

Of course now that leaves me with the problem that I'll eventually have to paint at the very least the 20 Warriors from the Indomitus box this way, and that's, uh, going to take a while. I'm thinking maybe I can come up with a simplified version of Trovarion's crosshatching and modulation method, relying more on drybrushing, that will look reasonably similar for the Warriors and then just do the larger models properly.

Have you considered after applying the metal varnish topcoat, to go back and paint over the black guns with medium or matt varnish to knock back the sheen?

Aash wrote:
Have you considered after applying the metal varnish topcoat, to go back and paint over the black guns with medium or matt varnish to knock back the sheen?

I tried that with Tamiya Matt Clear which is a pretty intense matt varnish, and it really didn't do much, probably because the surface from the Metal Varnish is so slick. Although I did give up after one or two applications, maybe it would have just taken five or more. It would work better with an airbrush, but the masking involved would be insanely time consuming.

So basically, I think it would be fine for a few individual models, but as a recipe for painting an entire army, it's just too much of a pain. The other option I considered was just painting the black parts after everything else and not topcoating them, but that would mean making exactly zero mistakes.