Tutorial - Painting Moon Aelf Silver

Several people were interested in my painting process for the weathered silver armour on the Moon Aelves I built for the #28magchallenge last year. I finally got round to painting the last Aelf of the group so here's (at long last) a breakdown of the process.


Like all metals, silver has particular properties that make it look different from other metals, and that's what we're going to try to replicate. For the Moon Aelves armour I used Vallejo Game Colors Gunmetal, Silver, Black, White, Stone Wall Grey, Matt Medium, and a cheap off-brand Burnt Umber paint. The process is like this:

1. Prime the model, and basecoat it with Stone Wall Grey.

1. Basecoated with Stone Wall Grey

2. Paint the metallic parts with an even coat of Gunmetal.

From here on, the legs on this model will be left flat Stone Wall Grey. This is also the case with the other "space suited" Moon Aelf models. It's mostly that I wanted to focus on the silver armour and leave the unarmoured parts less distinguished. I could also argue that the harsh lunar light is washing out all the non-metallic pale colours ;-) In any case, you can assume I'm talking only about the metallic surfaces from this point on.

2. Armour painted with Gunmetal

3. Edge highlight with Silver.
This stage is very subtle and you could probably skip it. Take care that the Silver paint hasn't separated into clumps in the bottle– it's the worst paint I've come across for doing this.

3. Edge highlighted with Silver

4. Now we're going to add some zenithal highlighting by stippling.
Use a 1:1 mix of White and Matt Medium, use a soft, scuzzy old brush and use only a small amount of the mixture (only a little more than you'd use for drybrushing). If you wanted you could add a tiny amount of yellow to warm up this lighting effect a little.
Gently stipple the White/Medium mix from above, onto all of the upwards-facing surfaces only. It helps to hold the model so that you're looking directly down onto it from a birds eye view. This will look messy, but we'll clean it up with later steps.

4. With white stippling onto the upper surfaces

5. Now we'll do the opposite of step 4: stipple-shading, combined with a wash.
Mix up some Black and Matt Medium. If you add a touch of Burnt Umber to this black mix it'll add a realistic amount of warmth to the resulting shade. Use the same stippling brush, and gently stipple the areas that would be in darkness. Focus on downwards-facing surfaces and recesses. This step should be much more delicate than the highlighting in Step 4.
As this is drying, dilute some of the same mix and lightly do a more traditional shading wash over the detailed areas.

5. Shaded surfaces darkened by stippling Black/Medium, and washing

6. Add some edge highlighting with the same mix of 1:1 White and Matt Medium. Apply this thinly with a fine brush.

6. Edge highlighted with thin White

7. Use this stage to clean up a little.
Thinly apply Gunmetal to the larger flat surfaces, avoiding any smaller detailed areas. If you dilute this 1:1 with water it'll be thin enough that the shading will show through from underneath, and you can use this to smooth the transition between flat areas and edge highlights. Effectively this step smooths some of the highlighting we've been doing, as well as helping to clean up any messy areas.
Avoid going over the darker shading, because the metallic color will ruin the shading.

Cleaned up with well-controlled Gunmetal overpainting

8. Now it's time to apply weathering. This is where you can introduce more of a tint to the metal and bring it away from desaturated grey.
When silver tarnishes, it turns black. Polished silver will retain black in the recesses that the polish doesn't reach. Unpolished tarnished silver will take on a dull uneven brown-black discoloration. Here's a few reference images I got by searching for "tarnished silver":

For this tarnishing stage I mixed up a different tarnish color for each model to add a subtle amount of individual character to the otherwise monochrome group. We can imagine each warrior's silver armour has tarnished differently.

In this case I'm using a mix of Black and Burnt Umber again. You can mix this up with other warm browns or colder dark blue-greys if you like. No medium this time, just a very dilute mix with water – about 2 parts of water to 1 part of paint.

For a polished tarnished effect, use the darkest mix of your tarnish color as a wash on areas with lots of detail. Before this is dry, rub away the mix from the upper surfaces so that it's only left in the recesses. This is different from applying a shade in that we're not trying to imitate light and dark, but a discoloration of the material. Keep this uneven, use it sparingly, and for a more dramatic effect apply it to the most ornamented, detailed areas.

Finally, we're going to imitate some surface discoloration by applying very small amounts of very dilute tarnish color directly onto the flat surfaces of the model. Use the smallest amount you can. Add irregular spots, whatever looks right. Keep a dry clean brush handy to "undo" anything that doesn't look good. Keep this as subtle and light as you can. It's better to have less than more. Think about how exposed surfaces are more likely to get polished clean from contact with other things, whereas recesses are going to accumulate dirt.

The finished armour, with black tarnish effects.

Another view of the tarnish effect.

And that's it! The multiple layers of metallics and shade build up to a solid but natural-looking silver effect. All of my Moon Aelves are painted this way, with a little variation in the color mix at the tarnishing stage to add some variety.

I'll show off this completed model soon. I've got to complete his boat first.

Hek