Learning an awful lot, here... thanks, folks! Terrific job! I thought about sandpaper, but it strikes me as a bit tricky to work it exactly where you want to... I'll try and compare with using the files. Fair! I'll leave that one to the pro! ;) Someone mentioned pinning as an option. No way I am going down that route for anything smaller than S6, but I set my eyes on the Shasvastii Sphinx (too cool not to have...) and in that case I feel pinning could help. Same drill (pun intended) as for pinning plastic? Meanwhile, here is a rather heretical CB-GW insignia crossover...
For pinning, depends on the quality of the drill bit you purchase. I've bought a lot of cheap ones over the years in packs or the like and broke many (watch out as they can put a serious hole in your finger), but I've purchased some much higher quality ones too. They will eventually blunt for the most part over time and much faster so if used on metal, it's easier to simply replace them when you find they don't drill anymore. I've used pin drills for plastic, resin, lead metal, white metal and even actual slate rock (that was the toughest ever and not recommended one bit doing it by hand with a cheap drillbit hehe), most of the time I will not even bother changing the drillbit until it becomes blunt, exceptions for slate of course. For Vallejo primer and the video embedded earlier, it really requires a clean surface and good cure time (24-48hrs, not sure if he achieved that in the video) if you want the primer to give good results. From my experience, messing about handling and painting the model whilst the primer is still curing will result in it being easily chipped etc.
For tricky-tricky places, diamond coated drill bits on a pin vice, by hand (cheap Chinese will be fine). Like files, but shaped like small cylinders, spheres, cones, etc.
Yes, same pin vice and bits as for drilling into plastic. It's just a harder material. If the bit is sharp, then it will cut its way in readily (because white metal castings are still softer than steel). If it's not cutting, then either you are turning it the wrong way, or you need a fresh bit. Same as for a knife. Certain bits can be resharpened, but it's not recommended on the sub-1mm bits.
I'm going to go against the grain some here and say that I do prime black. I like to prime black because I find I have a hard time painting recessess and it is an easy hack for me, because the black serves as a shadow. You still can get vibrant top colors, but it takes patience and using multiple layers. One thing you notice with infinity is that people rarely use metallic paints. Metalic colors are good for grim dark with a lot of washes, or steampunk type settings. Infinity has a very manga feel, and the use of non-metallic metal painting techniques and extreme highlights are used in liu of metalics. I'm certainly no expert, but you can decently hack this by doinga sparing highlight of light grey or white on raised surfaces on a black gun. Similarly extreme highlights on other portions of the model help to bring that bright feel you are talking about. I tend to do less shading as I build up from black, but everyone has their own system, feel free to experiment.
Both Games Workshop and Privateer Press use metallics in their studio schemes; Corvus Belli does not. Infinity models look perfectly fine with metallics, but a lot of players draw on the official paint jobs as aesthetic guides, even if they don’t use all the same colors. I’ve intentionally stuck with non-metallic paints for Infinity, but have used small amounts of some colored metallic or colorshift paints for things like the giant bubble helmets Brawlers have. For the record, that was painted over black primer, and everything except the helmet visor is Citadel paints. The visor is Da Ba Dee by Turbo Dork.
Hair brush or air brush? Tried any in the turboshift range? Uh... they even have ones (zenshift subrange) that work with white undercoat, not just black. That calls for preshading (normal or flipped) and even random white-black undercoat experiments.
I applied it with a normal hair paintbrush over a black undercoat. You have to do a whole lot of really thin coats to get a good effect with their paints, so bring a lot of patience with you. The zenishift paints are very new and I haven't had a chance to see them in person yet. Some of the existing line do already have a similar effect where the color differs based on the undercoat, but I've never tried to use it intentionally. In general, their paints are really hard to use and require a huge amount of shaking in the bottle and stirring in your palette pot. I have painted one model with larger amounts of coverage, but mostly they're something I prefer to use for small areas of accent.
Thanks. That is the idea I have in mind at first: glasses, visors, etc. Of course, car bodies would be nice too... but I guess better with airbrush, so not soon.
Thanks folks, keep the advice coming... never enough! Right, that all makes sense... let's talk guns/ranged weapons, though. At the moment, I am going for some metallics on top of plain black - something like this: For the CA in particular, however, I have seen a lot of black-fading-into-magenta/purple ranged weapons, that is, the body of the thing is mostly matte black (with some highlights, more on that in a sec.) and blends into a rather flashy pink/purple/red toward the tip of the barrel(s). The Sphinx (which I have built, pinned and primed already... can't wait!) is a good example: Now, that looks ok, but it doesn't look great and, at least in my silly mind, it makes no sense at all... Vodoo tech or not, why the heck should the barrel transition to pink/purple/red? Which leads to the actual question... what do you do with you ranged weapons? I am spending some time on a Seraph at the moment (that thing's HUGE by the way...) and I have this big, black gun that I don't really know what to do with. I have a single red&white stripe running across the barrel, and that's it. A dry brush of Necron compound? How do you usually go about highlighting black weapons? Thanks!
I feel like a lot of the gun barrel fades started as heat / oxidation effects from firing, but over the years have turned kind of abstract. I’ve never done them like that, I just paint the gun a single color (black, blue, ...) and highlight accordingly.
That heat/ oxidation effect was used by armor makers to produce 'colored' armor bitd. When you see an illustration or painting from back then which is of dark metal armor, that's why it's dark. The visor effect is very nice. I want to try it now.
