Painting Brass

[Kaldoth]

Was curious if anyone had a good recipe for brass? I've been browsing the current citadel paint range and I'm pretty disappointed in what they have available now that you can't get Runelord Brass anymore. The only brass colors they have in the range look too coppery or gold. Using Screaming Bell or Brass Scorpion as a base is probably where I'll start, but does anyone know of a good color to go with to layer and highlight from there?

[Bung]

Brass and Gold are rather similar in real life the only difference would be shading and weathering as gold doesnt react much to a normal environment.

I tend to use brass tones for gold like Golden Acrylics Iridiscent Bronze.

You could mix in something like old Tin Bits or Scale 75 Decayed Metal for a darker tone and some silver to highlight.

Sorry i dont use much GW colors.

[Arkhanist]

Oh good, it's not just me! I've been using runelord brass for ages, and I couldn't figure out if it had just disappeared without trace recently or what. I've found a number of comments from when they first came out where sycorax bronze was hard to tell apart from runelord brass in real life (they look less alike on the webstore) so that may be a suitable replacement.

 

My current recipe is similar to Lorenzen's from here i.e. warplock bronze, brass scorpion, agrax, runelord brass. If I want a more coppery appearance, i swap out hashut copper for brass scorpion.

 

edit: bit more research and my paint equivalence app is chucking out valdor gold (air) as a very close match to runelord brass, so I think I'll be trying that too.

Edited February 20, 2020 by Arkhanist

[Sword Brother Adelard]

I'm lazy, I just paint everything Warplock and dry brush Retributor Armour. It turns out surprisingly well.

[Ranulf]

I've always thought the GW brass colours were more like bronze. 

 

Brass:

 

Bronze:

 

My brass recipe is - Tamiya Titanium Gold X-31, washed with Agrax Earthshade and highlighted with Scale75 Citrine Alchemy:

 

 

-Ran

[Arkhanist]

Depends on the age of the brass and zinc content; polished brass can be near gold (like a trumpet), down towards the brown of bronze as it develops patina.

 

 

That's a really nice look though for clean brass which suits the model. Will have to find an equivalent to the tamiya gold though to replicate (don't have that!) Maybe vallejo metal color gold.

 

 

Edited February 22, 2020 by Arkhanist

[Magos Takatus]

Depends on the age of the brass and zinc content; polished brass can be near gold (like a trumpet), down towards the brown of bronze as it develops patina.

 

That's a really nice reference photo. It looks like you can paint brass pretty much however you wish. I suppose the imagined lighting that the model is affected by has a strong effect on the finished paintjob too.

 

Is that Vallejo paint a water-based acrylic or something a bit nastier?

[Ranulf]

 

Is that Vallejo paint a water-based acrylic or something a bit nastier?

 

 

The Tamiya X-31 is a water-soluble acrylic and the Vallejo Metal Color range is a water-based acrylic, but the Tamiya still has a smell similar to enamel paints. 

 

-Ran

[Arkhanist]

First up - Runelord Brass is back on the GW webstore. So uh, the search for a replacement is bit moot now!

 

FWIW though I decided to spend half an hour painting out most of my current brass/bronze/copper paints. This was straight out of shaken pots onto white card without primer, so all of them have brushstrokes etc - but I didn't have any white plasticard, and this was for colour, not a shinyness test anyway. (all paints got 2 coats, bar the air paints which had 3 - they didn't really like the card)

 

 

Nobody's colour names are worth a damn for matching real metals, bar darkstar.

 

The closest colour I have to runelord brass turns out to be scalecolor moonstone alchemy, by eye they are very close.

 

Fulgurite copper, a newer paint with finer grain is virtually identical to the older sycorax bronze, so I'll be sustituting fulgurite in recipes I think.

 

Compared to my actual pieces of brass rod I use for pinning, darkstar brass is absolutely bang on, and skullcrusher brass is not far off. Scalecolour citrine is lighter, but I'm not surprised it makes a good edge highlight.

 

The main takeway is I buy too many paints.

Edited February 24, 2020 by Arkhanist

[Magos Takatus]

Wow, it's amazing how far my paints have strayed from these examples. A lot of my GW metallics are almost unusable now, with no amount of shaking or stirring having much effect on them. Maybe I need to replace some more metallics in the future if I'm going to get colours anywhere near those again. Sticking in agitators doesn't seem to save some of these paints.

[Firedrake Cordova]

 

The Tamiya X-31 is a water-soluble acrylic and ... has a smell similar to enamel paints. 

Whilst they can be thinned with water, I believe I'm correct in saying that Tamiya acrylic paints use alcohol as a solvent (which would explain the "flammable" hazard icon on them), so they can be less-than-healthy for natural-hair brushes (like Vallejo Liquid Gold, but unlike Vallejo Metal Colour). :)