How to paint Black Legion colours

Guilt at neglecting my Chaos army saw me resuming work on the Black Legion Forgefiend, which has been a pleasure to paint so far despite the insane amount of mind-numbing and repetitive details, especially the armour trimmings found throughout the miniature. Painting the Forgefiend has also allowed me to practice painting stylised line highlights to accompany the trimmings. As I was taking work-in-progress (WIP) shots anyway, I did a tutorial on how to paint a Black Legion colour scheme. I hope this will be of help to new painters who have chosen the Black Legion as their first army.

Step 1: Undercoat with chaos black

Duh! That was pretty obvious. Since in most cases a miniature from the Black Legion army would be covered mainly in black armour, it makes sense to undercoat it with black. Here, I used the Chaos Black spray-can to achieve a smooth layer of undercoat. It would be preferable to using a brush-on primer as the model is quite large in size.

Step 2: Basecoat armour trimmings

A 1:1 mixture of Scorched Brown (Rhinox Hide):Runelord Brass was used to basecoat the armour trimmings. For me, having Scorched Brown in the mixture served two purposes i.e. it allowed for a better application to the undercoat (paint sticks better) as well as enabled a darker hue of the Runelord Brass which will serve as the shadow for the metal.

Step 3: First layer on armour trimmings

Next, a layer of pure Runelord Brass was painted on the trimmings while leaving the basecoat layer showing in the deep recesses. This provides an initial level of depth to the armour.

Step 4: Wash armour trimmings and selectively re-layer

After the first layer has dried, wash the armour trimmings with Devlan Mud (Agrax Earthshade) to give an additional level of depth to armour. Following the wash, re-paint the edges or upraised areas of the armour trimmings with Runelord Brass to re-establish the highlights. As I did not want my Forgefiend to be too shiny, that was the extent of my metal highlights.

Step 5: Line highlighting

Finally, I opted for a more stylised line highlighting as opposed to a realistic layered highlights on the black armour to achieve even more depth. As such, I mixed Codex Grey (Dawnstone) with some flow enhancer to reduce the surface tension of the paint and make it easier for it to leave my brush without too much pressure. When doing line highlighting it would be easier to do the strokes quickly rather than slowly because the slower your brush strokes the more mistakes you are likely to make. You can still achieve the realism of layered highlights by being selective of where you put your line highlights but for this instance I was going more for style than realism.

Surprisingly, I am rather physced up about completing the paint job for the Black Legion Forgefiend. It turned out to be more fun to paint than I had anticipated. With a bit of luck, I should be able to finish painting a large portion of the Forgefiend before the week is out and post some WIP pictures. Thanks for reading and have a good hobby week!