Painting an Imperial Knight - The Heraldry & Base

With the bulk of the work done it's time to paint all the details and heraldry on the Knight.

I started out by picking out the details on the top carapace. Hand holds got painted with Vallejo MA Chrome and the viewport was just painted with black paint and given a white spot highlight in one corner.

The personal heraldry on the knee and shoulder pad were painted by masking off one stripe, spraying it black and then doing the other. This was because it was too fiddly to do both stripes at the same time. I accidentally went a bit too thick on the shoulder pad stripes though.

I used some Seraphim Sepia to separate the gold from the painted armour. This was fairly painstaking and took a while but the result made the gold pop far more and hid a lot of areas where the rub n buff hadn't covered properly (if I'm honest I'm not going to use rub n buff again for this. Hand painting with Vallejo metallics would be much faster and roughly the same result).

Lastly came the decals. First I coated the model with some gloss varnish and let it dry for about an hour. If you try and apply waterslide transfers onto gloss varnish that is only touch dry then the water has a tendency to make the varnish shrink away from the model and go wrinkly.

I'm not going into detail about applying decals here. I only use water and don't use any specialist decal chemicals and I still get good results.  Once the decals are applied I coat the model with another coat of gloss varnish to seal them.

I actually prepared the base separately from the model and pinned it after I was done. I just marked where the feet would go and made sure there was plenty of room to glue him to the base. I used my standard temperate basing style that most of my 4K armies are done with using some Flock, GW clump foliage and a lot of dried herbs. I actually use water effects to secure my flock not PVA because it flows around all the details on the base just by tipping the base at an angle. I also weathered the feet with a sponge and covered them in some Forgeworld mud weathering powders.

Once everything was dry I went over the armour plates with some matte varnish so only the gold was nice and shiny. You can see some pictures of the finished product below.