Rust

Over the past few weeks, I have quietly been getting in some painting time to get a batch of scenery ready for our games. The terrain is often large scale (cities of death), but in this case, I wanted to look a bit more at some of the smaller scale items that can be scattered around to represent abandoned items and otherwise decorative pieces.

These items come from both the plastic Munitorium Armoured Containers set by Games Workshop (the smaller pieces), and resin crates from Game Mat EU (the two larger crates). 

I wanted to try to get a rusted effect for these pieces, whilst maintaining an underlying paint scheme. Green lends itself well to this approach thanks to the contrast it makes with a relatively normative orange rust colour. 

Following a black undercoat, I used the death world forest green to base coat these items. A double wash followed using diluted black. I tend to favour this slightly over Nuln oil since it leaves a darker stain and makes it suggestive of being out in the weather too long. 

Highlights for these items were done in Scorpion Green (the closest present analogy is Moot Green). This is actually a rather strong green and can be seen clearly on the round parts of the corners of the large resin crates. Is is also on the Imperial eagle of the smaller crates to provide a contrast to the rest of the painting, but it is more subtle and watered down there.

To achieve the rust effect, I used a sponge combined with orange paint to dab on in random directions and frequencies all over the crates. Some of them have been underscored in black to make the a bit more realistic. But otherwise this sponge approach to rust effects works very nicely for these battlefield debris items and it is an approach that I will be carrying forward to other works in the future.