Painting Machine Guns on Armor

Fred, I just wanted to thank you and everyone who responded to my post. These are some really good ideas for painting machine guns and I will have to give them a try.

Thanks again,

Brian

Brian D wrote:

Hello, I am wondering if someone could tell me what paint colors and technique they use for painting machine guns on armor models.  Any pictures of your work you could provide would be helpful. Thank you, Brian

A lot of builders overcomplicate this procedure IMHO. Just a good base of gunmetal or semi-gloss black followed by a dry brush with some metallic color. I like to use SNJ aluminium polishing powder, but MM Steel will work. :

Well, I don't build much armor either, but I've painted more than a few Spandau & Vickers machine guns. What I do is start with a base coat of very dark flat grey, give it a black oil wash to bring out the recesses, then whip up a mix of testors chrome silver enamel and burnt umber oils and lightly drybrush. While straight silver really stands out, I've found it to be a little too harsh for the effect I'm looking for, which is something a little more subtle, but very effective.

Gunmetal paint or perhaps matt black with alot of drybrushed silver would work.  Pencil dust is the way to go.  If you dont want ground graphite floating around just color straight onto the gun.  Now a silver pencil would be better for highlighting say, corners or bolts but a regular 2HB will give the old-metal-ly look.

 

                                                                 -graham
 

I don't paint armor, but I have painted machine guns.

My favorite technique has been to paint it gunmetal, followed by a flat/dull coat and then drybrush the hightlights with silver.  Depending on the scale, I'll sometimes also rub it down with a pencil.  The graphite looks like a worn-down bluing (just do it before the drubrushing).

I don't have any pictures of previous stuff, but it's always looked pretty good to me.

-Fred