WIP: How I Paint My Cygnar

Part of this year's ongoing efforts to only play with painted miniatures means painting up a small Cygnar force for Warmachine. Here's a tutorial for the paint scheme I'm using. It's as much for other people as it is for me. I'll be adding to the force and I don't trust myself to remember the paints I used or the steps involved.

Step one is to base and prime the miniature black. I know there is some debate on using black primer but in this case I like how the blue comes out on top of the black base. The base is white in the picture because I built it up using drywall paste after priming the model, then gessoed the base.

Next step is to base coat all the gubbins and metal parts with Tin Bitz.

Next the armor plates get a base coat of Lightning Bolt Blue and the drywall paste gets a base coat of Shadow Grey. After this I go back with Tin Bitz and clean up any spots that have unwanted blue or grey.

Warmachine jacks have lots of indentations and grills on them. I put a little bit of Bad Moon Yellow into these spots at this stage. We're going to be drybrushing over these spots in the next step so you don't have to be super careful of slop but you don't want to put so much paint in that you fill up the indentations.

Now we drybrush Boltgun Metal onto all the gubbins with tin bitz on them. This gives it all a nice metallic look. Use a light touch around the yellow grating so you don't cover up the yellow in the recesses. If you're like me you'll get some silver where you don't want it so you'll want to go back and clean up any silver that got onto the blue armor plates. Also, as long as we've got the boltgun metal out we might as well go in and paint the recessed screws and handles.

Next drybrush the blue plates with Shadow Grey and the base with Skull White.

Now put some Shadow Grey on the Cygnar symobl on top and give the model a good looking over to make sure nothing was missed. Afterwards give the whole thing a wash. The metal gubbins get a wash of Badab Black and the armor gets Devlan Mud.

Finally we add the last bit of detailing. The smokestack radiator grills get some Dwarf Bronze put on them. Chaos Black rings the base and I also put some on the metallic bits. The piston sockets, backs of legs and boiler gauges are good spots for this. Basically anywhere that looks like a wide expanse of drybrushed metal can benefit from some Chaos Black touchups. I also put some Skull White on the gun ammunition to make it stand out. Finally, every jack in the my force is getting Bad Moon Yellow construction hazard stripes somewhere on them.

The whole process doesn't take much time and I'm happy with how cohesive the jacks look standing next to each other.