I have been trying to achieve this effect for a long time. It took me to accidentally create the effect, and then to painstakingly reconstruct, carefully choosing colors to remove saturation to be able to articulate what I was trying to achieve.
Paints Used:
- Undercoat Black
- Basecoat pink
- Zenethal highlight white ink
- Imperial fists contrast paint
- Black Templar contrast paint
- Rhinox hide/Leadbelcher stipple
- Thinned Agrax Earthshade scratches
- Fireslayer flesh contrast paint for shade
- Screaming Skull glazes
The big one was using screaming skull glazes. Because of It’s lack of saturation, when layered on top of other highly saturated colors, it makes the areas covered by it look bleached almost by wear.
Prior to this, I had experimented with gloss/satin/matte varnishes for Tau armor to give that high tech plastic feel. This same feel can be augmented by using the removal of saturation for wear. The black undercoat helps too, giving the shadows a friendly ally to blend with.
The hard part is not going overboard with the new idea.
The second coat of screaming skull was thicker for the actual scratches, which gave me exactly what I was looking for where the turret rotates against the chassis.
Because of these abrupt changes in saturation, the army is very striking when on the tabletop.
I feel personally that 30k marines and tanks are very valid to play and use in 40k. It is very hard to argue that a 30k Demios pattern rhino or predator isn’t a 40k tank too, and to me the Leviathan dreadnought mini is easily as good as the 40k ones.
I have already painted a leviathan dreadnought without altering the saturation values in high wear areas. This may need to be revisited it now 🙂
I’m looking forward to trying out the Heresy game just to see how different rulesets feel. I really dislike the 40k rule of being able to shoot behind yourself without penalty. I believe this is different in Heresy.
Please let me know any thoughts.
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