Welcome back to the Colour of the Month, an article where we take a look at not a particular paint, but rather an entire colour family. This month we explore the many shades of silver. A staple of nearly every miniature out there, whether it's for heroic armour, dashing weapons, or even just a simple coat button.
This simple but striking colour branches out into many of our paint ranges, providing you with plenty of opportunities and options to choose from when it comes to painting your minis.
Colour Primer
There's no faster way to get an army project started than with the appropriate Colour Primer. Luckily, for you metal heads out there, we have both Gun Metal and Plate Mail Metal available in a handy-dandy rattle can format. Our Metallic Colour Primers are close matches to both the Warpaints Fanatic and Warpaints Air equivalents. If your latest hobby project contains a lot of silver, there's no better way to start. Knock out an entire phalanx of Necron warriors in minutes or get your knightly order ready for their heroic charge faster than a destrier can crush a shield wall.
Warpaints Fanatic
Moving on to the mainstay of many hobbyists' paint collections, Warpaints Fanatic is home to not only the two colours mentioned above, but also an additional three silver metallic colours. You have your classic progression of dark to light with Gun Metal, Plate Mail Metal, Shining Silver, and for those who really want some extra bling, Mithril. On top of that Warpaints Fanatic is also home to Cobalt Metal, a slightly blue silver which is perfect for alien or magical armour. You can't really go wrong with Gun Metal when choosing a silver. As the name implies, it's great for guns, swords, and any other weaponry, but it's also a perfect fit for any other metallic doodads. Being the darkest of the silver colours in the Fanatic collection, it's an excellent place to start, as it gives you plenty of room to add highlights. Just throw on some Dark Tone Shade and start picking out those edges with a little Shining Silver, either with a drybrush or one of our Wargamer or Hobby brushes for a bit more precision. All of these paints share the same unique blend of Aluminium and Mica flakes for that perfect combo of shine and coverage.
Warpaints Air
Designed to complement our main paint range, Warpaints Air contains airbrush-ready versions of Gun Metal, Plate Mail Metal, and Shining Silver. This allows you to quickly basecoat your mechanical creations and noble knights or create some sick fades between the darker and lighter colours. Or, even, hear me out—both! Kick your models up a notch with a little bit of pre-shading using these metallic Warpaints Air colours before dousing them in some Shade and highlighting with your Warpaints Fanatic colours.
Speedpaint
Metallics? In Speedpaint format? That's right! These first of their kind paints combine the shining qualities of metallics with the revolutionary 3-in-1 properties of Speedpaint, allowing you to achieve a shadow, midtone, and highlight all in one go when applied over a lighter undercoat. They're a bit more opaque than the other Speedpaints, meaning you get a little less contrast between the layers, but as a tradeoff, they cover really well—even over black! Broadsword Silver is your workhorse of the trio, roughly equivalent to Gun Metal in the sense that it's the darkest silver of the bunch and will work wonderfully for weapons, armour, and mechanical gubbins. Polished Silver adds a bit of a brighter tone, perfect for minis leaning a bit more on the clean and tidy side of things. Lastly, but not leastly, we have Enchanted Steel, which has a slight blue tint to it and is a little darker than Broadsword Silver. In fact, this colour pairs wonderfully with Cobalt Metal from the Fanatic range. All three of these colours are also available as Speedpaint Markers, making tricky armour trim a breeze.
Warpaints Historical
While the Warpaints Historical range doesn't have any unique silver colours, many of the larger sets do contain Steel, a match for Gun Metal from the main Fanatic range. Why improve upon perfection?
John Blanche Masterclass
Are you looking for something a little darker? A little grimmer? Well, step on up to the John Blanche Masterclass range and the fan-favourite colour Heavy Metal! Not only does it have one of the coolest names in our paint collection, but this brooding silver is darker than Gun Metal, broadening your silver spectrum by yet another degree. Do you look at Gun Metal and have to shield your eyes like you're looking at the overly bright screen of an octogenarian's phone? Worry no more. Join us on the grimdark side. We have cookies.
Combat Se7ens: Sanctified Silver Relic Armour
Are you looking to paint up some mystical armour, but remove all the messy guess work? Combat Se7ens: Sanctified Silver Relic Armour is where it's at. Combining the blue-tinted Cobalt Metal with Shining Silver for a bit more bling and Dark Blue Tone Shade to push those blue shadows even further, your minis will look like they just stepped off the parade grounds. Complemented by Greedy Gold, Bony Spikes, Dragon Red, and Soft Tone, you'll have no trouble wrangling several interesting colour schemes out of this set. In fact, it works perfectly for the secretive and mystical Grey Knights from Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 setting, as Joachim so wonderfully demonstrates in our tutorial.
Moving away from our oh so shiny metallics, next month we'll be back with that starkest and trickiest of colours, white.
