Painting Armor With Contrast Paints

I’m a big fan of Citadal Contrast paints, but there’s no denying that they aren’t perfect for every thing you’ll want to paint. One example of that is armor for your fantasy miniatures.

However, in this article, I’ll cover off a quick and easy way to make that armor pop!

Step One

Choose your colour and go from there

The process is really simple. Start off by choosing the colour you want for your armor. In this example, I used Akhelian Green as I wanted to experiment with a magical look for these awesome minotaur sculpts by Artisan Guild.

Apply the contrast paint to all the areas of armor, and then let it dry. It should start to do what Contrast paints do best, darken the shadows and leave the raised areas lighter.

Step Two

Highlight time!

You can skip this step if you want, but it helps on certain colours. For this, you want to apply a drybrush of a much lighter colour to your armor. It really helps to add some contrast and make those edges and raised areas pop.

In this example I used Skink Blue and it really helped to add some definition to the armor.

Don’t go crazy with this, but you want to be hitting all those raised edges. This technique works great with bulky plate armor.

Step Three

Make it shine

This step is basically the same as the last and maybe you’ve skipped to this one.

Take your metallic paint and begin to add a drybrush to your armor. Don’t go too heavy with this otherwise you’ll begin to obscure your colours, but with a light dry brush you’ll add a good amount of metallic shine to the armor.

This step really helps to sell that armor as metal, while also keeping whatever colour you’ve chosen to go with at the start. In the heavier areas it looks like the metal is shining through battle damage, and adds a really cool effect.

So that’s it for this process. I love working all my base layers with Contrast paints as they are so easy and fast to work with. Using this method has allowed me to get some great looking metalic armor effects down on my models relatively quickly, and it’s also allowed me to experiment with different colours.

Let me know how it goes for you! Also, if you want to check out my video on this and follow along, be sure to head to my YouTube channel.