One of the coolest parts of the GK armour is the right hand shoulder pad – they each carry the personal heraldry of the Knight himself. The colour schemes and designs are very simple – red and white blocks with swords or tear drops or skulls. Spoiler alert, my freehand is in its infancy and I’m not looking to win a slayer sword with these so they’re nothing mind blowing but I’ll show you my steps so you can see the process. Making yours better than mine won’t be hard – just take more time with each step.
Step 1 – Basecoating the pads with white. Painting red over white is much easier than painting white over red so I started with a white undercoat. Turns out that painting white over the steel is difficult too. I sued P3 Morrow White and it took ~7 coats to get anything remotely smooth.
Step 2 – Masking up. The great thing about the solid blocks of colour is that you can mask them up (I’ve got some very narrow masking tape which is ideal for this but a hobby knife and some regular masking tape will probably work). I just did some pretty standard stuff – halves, quarters, a circle (I did this with blu tac).
Step 3 – Painting the red. Two coats of GW Khorne Red (I really like GW red paints, they cover very well and are really smooth, especially Khorne and Mephiston reds) and the masking tape comes off.
Step 4 – Corrections and highlights. All masking tapes leak. So the next step is to use the red and white paints to correct the lines as much as possible. Where the masking tape wasn’t straight and the line is bendy I added some ‘teeth,’ to the line to try and distract from that. On the extreme close ups there are still some areas of roughness on the edges but this disappears from a distance. Once this was all done I did some line highlighting with Wild Rider Red (Citadel).
Step 5 – Adding the heraldry. If you’re looking for a freehand tutorial, I suggest you find Richard Gray on Youtube / Patreon. All I did was draw some straight lines for swords and circles with a pointy hat for tear drops.
So all that’s left for these now is to tidy up the rims where they’ve been over painted and to paint the moulded details.