Once you just give in and accept that line highlighting a Land Raider is time consuming and a bit tedious, you'll do a btter job.
I covered building it in this post here. Now it's onto painting.
When it came around to painting, the gold plates on the top were the very last things I painted on the model. The tank itself has been line highlighted with lots of little elements picked out in gold to tie it all together, but the plates were the deal closer.
The purple areas needed a few coats to get the coverage nice and smooth. When I started this project, I went out and found the exact color purple that my Client wanted. I wasn't going to mix it everytime I needed to paint something. A wash in the corners and a highlight along the edge made it fit with the other tank and blend in with the rest of the army.
The metal areas (aside from the tracks) are done in silver and then washed to give them that dirty, grimy look. I paint the engine exhausts to look completely soot stained.
I did some weathering along the bottom, but it's only a light drybrush of the color I use on the edges of infantry bases in the army. I find it helps bring out some of the detail near the bottom of the tank and make it fit visually with all of the models mounted on actual bases.
But back to the gold plates...
The first thing I did was clean them off. By that, I mean I scraped off whatever paint managed to get on them while I was working on the rest of the model. The plasticard has a shiny surface so it came off fairly easily using my fingernail and light pressure.
Gold paint is funny, it's not like using a foundation paint where the coverage is complete in the first pass. I decided that I needed to "prime" the plasticard to do two things... first get rid of the shine and second, get a consistent color down that the gold paint would adhere to better.
I went with a tan color because it seemed closest to the gold without actually being a metallic color. It worked perfectly. A quick pass covered the last stray marks and gave me a good surface to work on.
A couple of coats of Shining Gold and I had the perfect blank canvas to work with. And that pretty much concluded what I knew to do. I had hoped that when I got to this point, I would somehow know what to do next.
I knew what I wanted the end result to look like, but I just wasn't sure exactly how to get there. Turns out, it was fairly easy.
I ended up washing the plates twice with Gryphonne Sepia. I used an extra wide brush and made one slow, smooth pass each time so I left as few brush marks as possible. Then I took a dark brown paint and started drawing out the images and painting them in.
At first, I didn't know what I was going to paint and then it hit me, I'll use the same images that are on the other Land Raider. It's the perfect way to tie the two of them together without it being obvious. And here it is...
After I had the images painted on, I added some script to fill out the rest of the plate and added a small dab of Devlan Mud to each rivet to make them stand out.
All in all, I think this model was a success. My Client loves it and it definitetly looks important on the battlefield. As for how long it lasts, that's another story but at least it's AV 14 all around.
My Project Link: Space Marines Commission
