Getting Ready for Sanguinary Guard: Painting Gold

As promised, I have made little headway in painting my Honor Guard since assembling them.  I did get them undercoated and basecoated in Blood Red and then washed with Devlan Mud, but that is where they remain for the time being.  I have been busy with some other projects though.  I kitbashed another Sanguinary Priest as well as a Chaplain who I think will remain jump pack-less since I currently have Astorath, Lemartes, and a Chaplain with jump pack to take care of my jumper re-roll needs.  I also purchased a new dreadnought kit and have partially assembled a Furioso with a Frag Cannon.  I planned to paint it but realized that I had lost my Blood Red, so I'm out of commission until I can get another one.

As I sat around wondering what I could do without Blood Red, I remembered that I have 5 Sanguinary  Guard assembled and unpainted.  I am not a huge fan of painting gold, however.  I don't think it covers very well and it never looks quite right to me.  I remembered having seen a few attempts by people to paint gold by using yellow washes over Mithril Silver and thought that sounded like it would be worth a try.  If nothing else, it would be insanely easy since washing creates shadows and highlights all at the same time.  I grabbed a test model and set about the task.

Step 1: Basecoat the entire model with Mithril Silver.  I used a big brush and this step took about 45 seconds.  In fact, throughout the whole process I probably spent 10 times more time waiting for paint and washes to dry than I did actually painting.

Step 2: Apply a heavy wash of Gryphonne Sepia.  Really just slather the stuff on there.  It's really important that you give the basecoat time to dry fully.  If there are small pools of undried paint on the model anywhere it's going to make a mess when you run your brush over it with the wash.

Step 3: Repeat step 2.  Really, just repeat step 2.  That's it.

Step 4: Repeat step 2.  Look, I'm not jerking you around here.  Just repeat step 2 and quit asking questions.  Whose blog is this, anyway?

Step 5: we are looking nice and golden now.  We are done with the washes now.  For our final step, give the whole model a good drybrushing of Shining Gold followed by a lighter drybrush of Mithril Silver for some final highlights.

Well, there you go.  That's it.  I think the mithril highlights show up better off camera, my poor photography skills aren't really capturing the full effect.  But you may decide the last step isn't even worth it anyway.  I though the model looked pretty good just after the washes.  For a tabletop standard mini, I can't imagine an easier process for painting a model of any color.  As I said at the beginning, I spent far more time waiting around for it to dry than I actually did painting the model.  Because of the nature of the painting, basecoating a solid color, washing and drybrushing, you can just grab the biggest brush you've got and go to town.  You could work up a full squad of gold marines in a night easily.  This definitely makes me wish my Blood Angels were gold instead of red.  At the very least it makes me want to trade my army in for a full Sang Guard army instead.

I've got a million squads going on simultaneously, it seems, so I have no idea what I'll be posting up next.  But something will get finished, I know that much!

Brandon