Painting tutorial: Afterlife C-48 Warden Autonomous Mech

Here I'll go through the steps I take to achieve these rough and quick paint jobs!


1. Undercoat

I used Uniform Grey spray from the Army Painter

2. Colour Blocking

In this order based on layers and physical depths (to minimise mistakes):

• Skavenblight Dinge for rings and washers.
• Leadbelcher for metal areas, including features on the base
• Ceramite White for the armour plating
• Mechrite Red for the eye lenses

3. Wash

Nuln Oil over everything, even the base!

4. Highlight (the make it pop stage)

Fine edge highlights for this stage, I sometimes call this 'mechanical' painting - it's all straight lines.

• Ceramite White for the armour plates, and a little dot at the top left of the eye lenses
• Russ Grey for the main casing of the Mech
• Evil Sunz Scarlet for the bottom right half of the eye lenses
• Runefang Steel for all the exposed metal areas

5. Battle Damage - OPTIONAL STAGE

You can skip this if you want! I use this step to add character to miniatures, and to tidy up any mistakes I've made along the way.

• Skavenblight Dinge - Paint some chips and scuffs. Pick out the edges and the corners: areas where the paint will get chipped off during a stumble in a concrete warzone, or where stray bullets make contact.
• Runefang Steel - Paint thin streaks of silver on the Skavenblight Dinge, leaving the dark grey showing around the edges.

6. Finish it! (Base)

Before we do the base paint a tiny dot of Macharius Solar Orange in the bottom right of the lenses.

• Drybrush the base texture with Adeptus Battlegrey.
• Drybrush the metal base features with Snakebite Leather.
• Do a final drybrush on the base texture with Ulthuan Grey (see the final note regarding line dynamics on this).
• Chaos Black for the bevel edge of the base.

DONE!

Appendix. Line dynamics

If you look at the light grey drybrushed lines below you'll notice that they generally follow the direction of travel or attention of the miniature.

• On the left one, less noticeable, the selective drybrushing conveys a forward movement - the light grey runs parallel on either side of the right foot touching the ground. 
• On the miniature on the right, there's a very clear light grey line that runs parallel to the gun arm taking aim. This line is so pronounced it could be a pavement or road marking.

Either way, there's a method to the highlight - it's selective in such a way that complements the miniature and suggests action and direction!

The Crane Corporation. I'm pretty sure Anvil Industry are expanding this faction next year...