Grey Knight armour is quite detailed (relative to other Space marine armours. I’ve got the Steel down (which is the majority of the model) and now it’s time to look at some of the detail, specifically the gold parts.
Looking at some Grey Knight art, gold appears on a lot of the model, specifically: i) the words stamped onto the armour ii) the shoulder pads of the Justicars (unit champions). As I’ve painted the steel parts in TMM I’m also going to paint the gold in TMM. To make it easy to see all the steps, I’ll show the technique on one piece (a shoulder pad).
Step One: the gold basecoat. I used a Vallejo Game Air gold colour for my shoulder pads but you need to do you. What I will say is that gold paints tend to either the warm brown area of the spectrum or the green area (Vallejo Metal Color Gold is in the green, for example). If your gold has green in it then the colours I describe here won’t work but use your imagination. I used two coats to get a decent smooth coverage:
(A quick note on thinning metallic paint…don’t use water if you can avoid it. Metallics need thinning just like any other paint (more so in some instances because they can be quite gloopy) but water doesn’t really work – it really impacts the consistency and effects coverage. I used Lahmian Medium to thin mine).
Step Two: Shading with brown. The next stage is to use a thinned down brown ink (I used Daler Rowney Burnt Umber) to shade the lower parts. I did two coats with the second coat focused on the bottom of the model.
Step Three: More shading. The last shading stage is to take some thinned purple ink (mine was Vallejo Game Ink Violet) and adding this right at the bottom of the gold area. Again, two coats here with the second coat focused right on the very bottom of the model.
Step Four: A highlight. So far so good but this step makes everything look fairly terrible. This is a highlight (I wet brushed although you could probably dry brush) of silver (I used Vallejo Metal Color Silver). It stands out horribly but don’t panic.
Step Five: Glazing. This is the final stage and, if you missed it earlier, you’ve got to take notice of thinning your gold paint with medium not water or this is going to go badly. This is a very, very thinned (almost glaze consistency) of your original gold colour. This goes over the silver and down into the top of the first brown ink layer to smooth out the transitions.
So there you have it – it’s a few steps so if you’re doing it on an entire army then it’ll be long but one unit (making two Kill Teams) feels like a good return on the investment of time. Comments and queries always welcome!