Hey all, I'm looking for some advice from the group. How do you paint your models' blasters to give them that shiny blue-black look?

Well I paint a mid Grey, then wash with black wash...then some very minor metallic highlights but not much.

I follow Sorastro's recipe from his Legion Stormtroopers video on YouTube, substituting the Citadel/VMC paints with their P3 nearest equivalent.

1. Pure white over corax white zenithal prime (entire mini).

2. Extra diluted coat of grey (VMC German Grey - I used P3 Greatcoat grey, don't remember if I had to darken it with some black.

3. Black wash (Nuln oil - I used P3 armor wash)

4. Grey/gunmetal mix highlight.

Sorastro has used at least two other approaches as well, see this thread, page 8 for a short discussion:

I actually just paint them with "Gunmetal" paint, similar to "Leadbelcher". Then I use a Nuln oil wash to get the desired effect for all my weapons. I then go back and detail or highlight as desired. It gives all my weapons a unified look and makes it easy to determine where trooper hands end and weapons begin.

I use a 3:1 ratio of Army Painter Matt Black to Gun Metal then a wash of Dark Tone. Here's an example on an AT-RT

Empire - Black with a dark gunmetal highlight.

Rebel - Dark gunmetal with a 50/50 gunmetal/silver highlight.

Medium to dark gray base coat, dry brushed with lighter gray, then dulled down on contrast by black wash. Finally highlights & details with metallic- gunmetal or similar.

Cool, thanks for all the tips everyone. I'll try this out this weekend on a few RPG models.

Greets Sharkbelly,

These blasters take nicely to drybrushing too. Perhaps add that to your experiment list if curious. One recipe I like for dirty and heavily battle-weathered weapons is:

black primer

Warplock Bronze Dry Brush, or similar metallic "tin bitz" color

Dry brush leadbelcher over this, leaving some of the rust effect showing

wash with badab black or a blue (optional)

pick out silver edge details (optional)

I hope this proves interesting. Cheers and enjoy.

For Legion, which is it's own unique snowflake in my painting world, I use some kind of grey paint followed by a dark wash of some kind. For my first go at guns (14 stormtroopers, 1 scout trooper, from core box) I used black with a grey drybrush. But at this scale I found the results sort of chalky looking.

I paint them black and then run a little bit of dark grey along it to highlight a bit. If you want more of a blue/black I'd highly recommend P3 Coal Black and doing the same thing.

2 hours ago, LunarSol said:

I paint them black and then run a little bit of dark grey along it to highlight a bit. If you want more of a blue/black I'd highly recommend P3 Coal Black and doing the same thing.

Cannot recommend this enough - I've been using the same technique, as there's only so many sleek/plastic style colors available for the Empire. Been very happy with it as the the dark grey highlights catch all the details on the guns quite nicely. A buddy also has some muzzle flash options if you're looking to make guns more unique which does require additional investment. But it's hard to argue with the results:

Paint in dark grey

Wash

drybrush with leadbelcher