Painting Guide

[verdantgreen]

I appologize if this has been posted elsewhere.

Can anyone offer suggestions as to painting techniques for many of the iconic ships of Babylon 5?

In particular, I would like to know how you did some of these:

The pattern and color of a Sharlin.
The pattern on a Narn G'Quan.
The subtle veins on the skin of a Shadow warship.
The pattern found on Vorlon ships.
The pattern and color of the Drakh.

I've seen the gallery, so I know the talent is out there

 

[demonllamma]

For the Sharlin, I just do stipling along where I want the stripes to be. Although to be fair, I paint mine a little bit different from the standard. Take a look at Chernobyl's site under King of the Jump Gate II in his pic gallery =>it is under KublaCon 2006 under best painted fleet here

The process is largely the same for the Vorlons, just with different colors.

 

[Locutus9956]

Very nice Not my particular cup of tea (too light for my tastes) but stunning work nonetheless

 

[Johnny D]

For the g'quann undercoat it black and then dry-brush the non-red areas dark then light silver.
Then paint the hull red . I’d recommend doing one coat dark red (Scab red using GW paints) and then another light coat in a brighter red (blood red ).
Then paint on a set of irregular jagged lines and shapes in a light silver colour(mithril). In terms of the shapes keep them relatively small for best effect and use triangles, stripes and V’s that start from one of the edges of a red area and then do another shape that starts from the opposite edge, go along the entire model like this red area by area. On the g’quann you can have a line or shape that starts on one side of the ship and then carries on in the other side of the ship this works best on thinner shapes and lines though.
Then fill in the middle of the silver shapes with black leaving the silver lining around the edges and touch up as necessary. Found this to be much easier than trying to outline the black shapes. Overall effect is really nice and can easily be applied to any ship in the fleet.

 

[verdantgreen]

Hmmm...the G'Quan doesn't seem as hard as I thought.

I'm mostly worried about the Sharlin and the Shadow warship. For the Sharlin, I have no idea.

For the Shadows I thought of maybe experimenting with a flat sealer and then going back and painting a web of lines with a high-gloss sealer so that the web pattern might appear under the correct lighting conditions.

Can any of you offer any advice as to whether this would work or not? I'll probably test it out on a flat piece of metal sometime this weekend.

 

[Chernobyl]

Demon Llama's fleet was quite stunning in person, my pictures surely don't do it justice.

Chern

 

[Admiral Phlop]

I spray my Minbari with Vallejo flat blue and then use lighter shades of blue to get the stripes. You can look at the link below and see the results.

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k214/phlop1/100_0301.jpg

 

[Shadow Queen]

@ verdantgreen

The subtle veins on the skin of a Shadow warship.


Im working on one hon

 

[Shadows]

Is it just me. But is there other people out there that think mongoose should help us all out by bringing out a proper a call to arms painting guide.

 

[Shadows]

Can anyone help me out and give me some ideas on what colors to paint earth force ships.

I was thinking myself of a black base coat. Then codex grey followed by highlights of fortress grey. Using citadel paints or vallejo game color paints.

 

[angelus2000]

For earth ships I did the following mix.

Chaos Black. GW but whatever black you have is fine
Codex Grey. GW
Midnight Blue. GW
Metallic Base. Vallejo

The Metallic Base is a clear metal paint that can be added to any pigmented paint to make a metallic. Extremely handy stuff as using silver of any kinda greys out whatever u mix it in.

The real trick is adding the metallix base and midnight blue, as too much of either can leave the mini too blue or too metallic. The blue overtone should only be noticeable when its painted on and dried, if its blue at all in whatever mixing pot your using, then youve added too much blue. For the metallic base, its there too add a hint of shiny too the paint, not to make it a full metallic. Go with a roughly 40/40/10/10 mix of the 4 paints, and add the blue and metallic in bit by bit, as its easy to over do. Once mixed, just slathered it on whatever earth ship your painting.

The end results pretty fantastic. Under low light conditions, the ships look simply a very dark grey, get the right kind of light on them and the metallic and dark blue overtones pop out.

Note though, Ive only used this on white undercoated minis so i'm not sure what the effect would be on black undercoat. Whites better anyways, as you can definitly see what areas you missed.

For highlight drybrushing, reduce the amount of black and increase the grey and metallic base in response, leaving the blue proportion the same.

 

[Lorcan Nagle]

Can anyone help me out and give me some ideas on what colors to paint earth force ships.

I was thinking myself of a black base coat. Then codex grey followed by highlights of fortress grey. Using citadel paints or vallejo game color paints.

I use a similar method for my EA ships. Early ships get drybrushes of Codex, fortress and space wolf grey, followed by skull white. Details are then picked out in black, red and blue. 3rd age ships get codex/fortress grey, crusade ships just get the codex grey followed by very light drybrushes of fortress.

 

[Shadow Queen]

i added white to one of my novas and she looks sweet

 

[demonllamma]

Can anyone help me out and give me some ideas on what colors to paint earth force ships.

I was thinking myself of a black base coat. Then codex grey followed by highlights of fortress grey. Using citadel paints or vallejo game color paints.

I use a similar method for my EA ships. Early ships get drybrushes of Codex, fortress and space wolf grey, followed by skull white. Details are then picked out in black, red and blue. 3rd age ships get codex/fortress grey, crusade ships just get the codex grey followed by very light drybrushes of fortress.

Actually, if you start off with a basecoat of fortress grey (or some other suitably dark blue-grey), you end up with better color and shadow.

 

[Silvereye]

I went for a metallic EA look.

Black undercoat.
50-50 chain mail (or gun metal) + black ink basecoat
Armour wash
drybrushed with the basecoat + a little silver, to highlight

Result: