I am currently using an 8 man unit of Bane Knights in my Cryx army and when it came time to paint them, I decided that the Army of the Dead paint style from Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings seemed to fit with their Ghostly nature and the green Cryx furnaces on the ‘jacks. I didn’t want to do the whole model in the green like the Army of the Dead but I liked the idea.
I wanted to get these guys on the table, and look decent while out there. I generally take a faster painting approach to most of the models in my army and save my detailed painting for either individual models or models which I buy for the sole purpose of painting. While some of the techniques might not get Grandmaster quality results, they should look pretty good on the table and be easy and pretty quick to do.
After painting up a test model(always a good idea), it was officially ready to go. As I painted the unit, I took pictures at each step so I could create this step-by-step guide.
Here’s the final result(click for more and closer images)
Start with a black primer of your choice.
Step 1 – Ghostly Green ‘Cloth’
I decided that the ‘cloth’ area of the knights was not actually cloth, but ectoplasam, or whatever. This would give me the green ghost effect without doing the whole model this way. If that was the look you were going for, do step 1 for the whole model and ignore the rest. I also decided that the glowing effect should be coming from inside the armor. Therefor, there would be a brighter color toward the top, under the armor and get darker farther away. This decision will effect how I go about highlighting.
Start with a drybrush of Codex Gray over the entire area. Don’t worry about getting paint on the other areas, we’ll go fix that later.
Since we’re lightening up the upper part of the area, now go ahead and do an overbrush of Codex Gray on about the top half of the area.
Now drybrush the upper half of the area with Fortress Gray and spread some small drybrushing to the bottom half. We’re trying to build up the color toward the top and introduce some randomness to the spread of the color.
As we did with the Codex, overbrush the top quarter of the area with the Fortress Gray.
Finally for the graytones, drybrush the top quarter of the area with Skull White and spread some sporadic drybrushing down a little bit.
Last we add the color. We mix up a wash or of Dark Angels Green. The mix should contain a mix of Paint:Water:PVA Glue at about 3:9:1. Add the PVA glue to increase the surface tension of the water and cause the wash to pool in the recesses and help with the gradient effect. If you want less of a white color showing in the end, replace the PVA glue with dish soap. The purpose of the dish soap is to break the surface tension of the water and allow it to properly coat the model like a paint but more translucent.
Then, after the wash dries, go back and touch up the armor areas that got paint on them with black.
Step 2 – Gold Armor
Like the images I’ve seen from Privateer Press, I’ve painted some of the armor areas gold and some silver. Since the gold holds some of the more intricate details I decide to do those first.
Start by basecoating the gold areas with Tin Bitz
Next, heavily drybrush the gold areas with Dwarven Bronze.
Now lightly drybrush the areas with Shining Gold
Finally, we wash the areas with Devlan Mud. Putting a wash over a drybrush will really help to bring together the messiness of the drybrushing and actually ends up looking really good.
Soon I’ll come back with Part 2 where I’ll go over the silver colored armor and the bone.