The Saga of the Paint-effect Elves - Part II

In my first post on this subject, I smugly joked that now that I had found a paint that gave a convincing chrome effect, I should make sure I bought enough tins. Well, with predictable tempting of fate, I finally got round to buying some tins (18 months after writing that post) and discover that Dragon Colour chrome paint is no longer in production.

[Sigh]

So it's back to square one. Not quite square one actually, because in the meantime I've been building up a collection of high elf models from ebay and have amassed quite a collection, all waiting for their shiny new chrome job.

So what now? Well, I do another google search and discover another technology that I missed last time. There is now a chroming process that is applied like a paint, but is a chemical process (akin to the silver mirroring solutions used to create mirrors). The results are really impressive...

Furthermore, you can use the process on anything. You can buy the chemicals and do it at home, but you'd need a spraying setup like a car body shop, which I don't have.

You can purchase a non-spraying, bath type of rig where you pour the chemical over the object, but in either case the chemicals are really, really expensive.

And how they deal with detail is unclear - I haven't seen anything as detailed as a miniature silvered in this way.

So if I'm going to look into this further I'm going to have to ask a professional and get a quote from him. That involves approaching someone who sprays cars all day for a living. Like, a real man. I can't describe the sheer terror I feel for approaching a burly, tattooed gear-head and introducing him to my pathetic little hobby of collecting little stupid toy soldiers. Imagine his confused and disgusted face when I tell him what I do. Picture his contemptuous incomprehension when I show him a sprue with silly little toy soldiers on it. And not even actual military soldiers (he'd probably like that), but babyish Harry Potter rubbish. Imagine his bearly-contained anger when I correct him: "actually, they're elves, not goblins".

Email would normally be the perfect medium for this sort of enquiry - anonymous, distant, easily escapable. But real men who wear spray masks all day for a living don't really do emails, do they?

And I know what they'll say... £100 per sprue (or whatever). There's no way this is going to work out cheap. And therefore, there is no way this will work out.

[Sigh]

High elves colour scheme

I've mentioned in a previous post my idea for paint-effect high elves, specifically making them highly reflective chrome effect. So let me show you how that might work.

A few ground rules

First of all, whatever colour scheme I choose mustn't just fit in with the overall GW universe, but also with my vision for "total warhammer"(ie an all-encompassing aesthetic applied to all armies, scenery and accessories in my collection, with a believable narrative linking them all).

I intend to collect a number of armies and so having light and shade, not just aesthetically, but also in character, will be important to giving each army its own distinct identity in the collection. However, GW are keen to make every race either "properly evil", or just "not-evil-all-the-time"; they don't really have any white-hat-wearing good guys.

High elves have traditionally been the closest you get to filling that good-guy slot, though in GW's universe, while they may fight a lot of bad guys, they aren't particularly nice conversationalists. So while they are white-hat-wearing good guys, they'd break your face if you got any mud on their nice, bright, white hats.

I want my high elf colour scheme to show that dichotomy. So my idea is to have an army whose armour and robes look not of this earth; angelic; nothing like the grubby horsehair shirts of the Empire.

This works for me because:
1. the whole glittering supermen thing suits the elite nature of their army composition and units.
2. there's a simple black vs white relationship with their evil counterparts, the dark elves. I like the idea of pushing that to an extreme: an all-white army vs an almost identical, but all-black army. Kind of like Spy vs Spy.
3. the high elves get paint-effect armour just like their dark elf counterparts. Again, the symmetry of that I find appealing.
4. I haven't seen it done before. To push the colour scheme to a total absence of colour would hopefully  be original and garner fame and kudos with my entirely imaginary audience.

So here are the rules:

1. Impossibly white clothes
2. Impossibly shiny mithryl armour
4. An overal light and bright tone, avoiding dark shading.
2. No other colours (other than perhaps magic-effects)
5. As much white as possible, or shades of white (for animals, wood etc).
6. At a push introduce grey (for shadow warriors, patterned fur etc)

All white now

Games workshop have a nice little pdf template you can use to test your high elf colour scheme.

I used it to see how this colour scheme would look, and here's what I came up with.

You'll notice there's an awful lot of grey, but that's because chrome paint will give a very high contrast of light and shade. But notice that I've stripped the rest of the detailing of colour - no shiny red jewels, no blue sashes and ribbons. Just white. Heck, he's even wearing white gloves so that as little flesh is showing as possible.

I like it. But the picture doesn't look like a real life figure. So I found a picture from ebay of some painted units and fired up photoshop. Here's what I came up with...

Now we're talking. Okay, I'll be very lucky if the chrome paint gives me that super bright silvery look, but overall those colour scheme rules are working. Note that the hair isn't pure white, but so blonde as to be a shade of white. Importantly, the sea-themed detailing hasn't lost any of it's character, despite being bleached of colour. The unit has a really strong visual identity. It's attention-grabbing and (hopefully) original.

Game on!

The Saga of the Paint-effect Elves

This is the saga of an idea I have been pursuing for about 14 years now. It serves as a demonstration of just how obsessive I can be about this stupid hobby. It spans decades and constitutes hours and hours and hours of my time. Time I could have spent with my loved ones in the sun, or making exquisite love to my wife on a beach. Was it worth it? You decide...

I used to collect 40K miniatures (back in 3rd edition) with no real intention of ever playing; just collecting for collecting sake. I wondered about what colour scheme I would use to paint eldar and dark eldar. I figured it'd be cool to somehow represent their armour as wraithbone, or some crazy alien material. So I had the idea of mother of pearl.

I got as far as buying a pot of special paint and that was that. It went no further, but I did collect a small force of dark eldar.

If the good elves had a lovely alien paint effect, then their evil counterparts should too, right? So I thought it'd be cool to make them look like their armour was iridescent, like the carapace of a beetle.

I assumed this was impossible to achieve other than by painting a number of different inks over silver paint. It didn't really work. Project shelved.

Then in 2000 I started playing warhammer fantasy and the dark elves called to me, asking to be collected and painted. Once again I thought about creating the effect of a weird kind of dark mithryl.
At about the same time I started seeing cars with custom paint jobs that were two-tone. The colour changed depending on the angle at which it was viewed, and some had a kind of black/purple/green effect like a beetle's back (yay!). The effect was simultaneously eye-popping and mind-bending, and immediately I knew I wanted to try it on some dark elves.

In 2000 this looked like magic

My research took me to every custom paint manufacturer and supplier in Europe and the US. For a start, this stuff was expensive. Hundreds of pounds for a litre. And secondly it was for car body sprayers, sold as formulas of mixing powders added to base paints. It just didn't exist in aerosol form off the shelf. By now it had become a quest, and I was actually beginning to consider forking out the coinage to get the paint.

Oh wait! It did exist! After about a year I saw some guy in the US had painted a Tau devifish in two-tone purple and gold (it looked rubbish) and he said he'd bought the paint in an aerosol can. Hours of research later and I find that Dupont didn't make it any more, there were no suppliers in the UK, and customs forbid shipping aerosols from the US to the UK anyway. Scuppered again.

Diplocolor mirage. Hard to get hold of.

While the quest continued I couldn't help thinking that if the dark elves did ever get their fancy paint job, their snooty high elf cousins should do too. So I looked into alternative paint-effects for them. Afterall, their armour is mithryl too, only of the shiny kind.

I thought that maybe if the bad guys are black turned up to 11, then maybe they should be silver turned to 11. That is to say, chrome. Paint effects claiming to make chrome were all rubbish, so I began researching how to get figures chrome plated. Metal figures have been chrome plated from time to time (and even gold plated) by the odd crazy hobbyist with access to electrodes and a bunch of chemicals, but plastic figures were un-platable.

Or were they? Afterall, there's plenty of chrome plastic stuff out there. I researched the process and it involves chemically treating it, powder-coating it and then electroplating it. It's all done in factories on a large scale. I researched small electroplating companies but no dice.

Then I found a guy in the US who makes model custom cars - those guys use all sorts of chrome parts. He plates his own stuff, all set up on little 8" x 6" sprues, and he does the service for other model car enthusiasts. So all I would have to do is arrange some high elf figures onto a sprue of that size, send it to the US and he would chrome plate it. Yay! One problem: relatively inexpensive for the odd sprue; eye-wateringly expensive for a whole army. Scuppered.

About a year later I was in a motor parts shop when I saw a set of colour swatches pinned on the wall by their customised paint mixing service. Bugger me if they weren't colour-changing. And one was in purple and green - the exact colour I'd seen on the car years before. I immediately got a tin made for me (for about £15) and tried it at home. I couldn't believe it. IT WORKED. And I was really pleased with the results.

My colour-changing dark elves. They're purple. No, wait! They're green. 

You see, the search had lasted so long that technology (or maybe the market) had changed over the years. What was impossible or unprofitable to sell on a small scale had over an evolutionary timescale become affordable and widely available (which, incidentally, is why every chav in a fiesta has a fancy flip paintjob nowadays).

I felt king of the hobby. Using the paint was incredibly difficult but I'm jolly proud of the final effect and they get tons of comments from people who see them. Admittedly it doesn't quite get the effect I had imagined - you don't get to see an individual model's armour shifting from purple to green with the contours of the model, but rather the whole model appears either purple or green. Not quite what I had in mind, but awesome on an army scale. And on models that include large, curved surface areas you do get that magical effect that wowed me when I first saw it driving down the street.

The other downside is that as a metallic spray paint, there's no shading or overpainting to be done. This is a one-trick paint effect and the impact comes solely from the colour-changing properties. As specimens of my painting skills go, these models are no more impressive than models sprayed with gloss paint by some kid in his garage. They won't be winning any awards any time soon.

I should mention a ridiculous coda to this quest. It happened when I'd been using the paint for a while and decided I wanted to expand the army. Uh-oh. I'm all out of paint. A year or two had gone by, and when I wet back to the shop the swatches were no longer there. When I asked, they said they no longer made it. I couldn't believe my stupidity. Why didn't I buy three tins in the first place?!

I had to get back to internet researching and finally found a UK model shop selling out-of-production Dupont spray cans (the ones the Tau guy had used years previously). They had two in stock (probably the last two in existence) and they came bundled with a base coat and top coat, making them very pricey. When I used them, thankfully they were the same colour but the consistency was very different and I had to give each model about 6 coats of the stuff, which glooped into crevices and started to obscure detail. The cans would never last more than a few models and the results were getting poor. The project looked like it had hit the skids.

About a year later I was in the car parts shop again and noticed a glass vial sitting on a shelf behind the paint mixing desk. I couldn't believe what I saw - it was filled with concentrated flip-paint colour in the exact colour I'd originally bought. This was the magic stuff they used to create the paint, so I inquired and what would you know, they never ceased making it in the first place. They'd just taken down the swatches because people weren't buying it anymore, and the nice gentleman who had told me they no longer sold it had been talking out of his colon. I bought two tins straight away (though I'm wishing I'd bought ten).

And what of the high elves? Well after years of thinking the chrome elves would ever happen, I did a search the other day (just in case) and found a paint (sold only in germany) that gives incredibly impressive chrome results. If this bizarre german transexual demo is to be believed, it looks amazing. I might just have to buy a tin and experiment.

Now, how many tins of the stuff should I buy?

So there you have it. 14 years and counting. Mozart had written most of his life's output in that time. Alexander the Great had conquered most of the world. I have managed to paint four units of crossbowmen and a unit of spearmen.

Someone please save me from myself.