Iron Painter 1: Ironclad

[morsla]

aeliel is up in Blackwood this weekend, giving food (and love, and attention) to two attention-starved‡ dogs while her parents are on holidays. I spent most of the day out at Battle Bunker teaching some new people how to play Warmachine, and then got home and remembered about a painting competition entry that I needed to send off. Unfortunately, the laptop that talks to my card reader is currently in Blackwood...

Many thanks to miss_rynn for letting me borrow her computer to download some photos. Also, happy stealth-birthday to bishi_wannabe (for the remaining five minutes!). I like living in bike-riding distance of people, as it's nice being able to drop in on people at super-short notice :)

WargamerAU has just started an Iron Painter competition: pairs of competitors, each given two weeks to paint something to match a fairly vague theme. The theme for Round 1 is Weather / Whether, which had me stumped to begin with. My entry was done in a bit of a rush... assembled on Thursday, and painted on Friday.

I decided to paint a model that I bought during last year's Bushfire Appeal auction. It's a Cygnaran Ironclad, which I didn't bother putting into paint stripper - I just painted straight over the old colours. I also bought some soft pastels (Raw Umber, Burned Umber, Raw Sienna) from Riot! art supplies, and decided to interpret the theme as meaning "weathering" - the dust, mud, oil and rust that machinery develops when left exposed to the elements.

Pastels are very easy to use. I painted some water-based matte varnish onto the figure, then dunked the brush into a pile of powdered pigment, and dusted it straight into the wet varnish. Repeat that a couple of times (until the area is dry), and then you have a dusty-looking surface that won't rub clean as soon as it touches something.

Here's my entry:



‡ That's if you listen to the dogs. Humans might tell you that the animals have had regular meals and visitors for the last week, but the dogs are convinced that they've been abandoned forever by their owners...

Comments

[morsla.livejournal.com]

I spent five years stripping corrosion from metal plates at CSIRO :) Looking at pictures of rusty objects is also handy.

I think the main trick is to look at the model and work out what each part would do, and what it would be made out of. Once they stop being random bits of texture, you get a much better idea of how they'd be affected by use and weather.

Steel stays fairly bright, and would be used for pistons as it has a better tensile strength than iron. Moving parts generally get coated in oil, too, which helps to prevent them from rusting. You can mix up "oil" from blue ink, brown ink and gloss varnish.

Iron rusts like nothing else. It's cheap though, and would make up most of the large plates. A coat of paint protects the surface, but rust starts in two places: where the paint has scraped off (look for joints, exposed surfaces and high-use areas), and where water would sit in pools. Rusty water leaves streaks as it runs off. The runoff is also acidic, and causes corrosion further down... You can mix up "rust" from orange-brown paints or pastel powder, and a drop of glaze medium. It needs to look uneven though, so stipple on some brighter orange once the first layer is dry.

Brass and bronze are alloys and generally doesn't corrode much - they might go dull, or might develop a faint patina from the copper in it. I usually dull it down with dark browns and black, mixed with a bit of glaze medium.

If there's copper on the model, it'll either be very bright and polished, or starting to develop that blue-green patina. You can use turquoise paint and glaze medium to mix it up, but you need to be subtle or it starts looking too bright when compared to the rest of the figure.