I’ve had some Warhammer 40K imperial knights kicking around for a long time, but on a bit of a whim I decided to start painting them. I wanted to work primarily with the airbrush, and use some of the fun metallic and effect paints I have. The base body is painted with Vallejo Metal Color (paints that use actual aluminum filings as their pigment) and the armor plate colors were done with Turbo Dork color shift paints. The trim was done with a gold from Darkstar.
In order to be able to airbrush everything I had to do a lot of masking between colors. There are a few places where some visible texture lines were left due to paint pooling against the tape. I didn’t let it throw me for too much of a loop, but it’s definitely something I will be continuing to work on as I do more of these models. It’ll also be easier to do some of this in the future if I paint the armor panels before gluing them onto the chassis.
When I built the knights, I magnetized the arm weapons, so I picked a neutral tone for use on those. It’s a pearlescent white (“Motherlode”) from Turbo dork. The effect is subtle but visible in person, but it doesn’t photograph well. I used the same color on the carapace weapon and some of the smaller panels on the main body so that it would tie in.
This is the questoris-class knight that was decorated with all of the imperial eagles, hence its designation “Imperial”. I don’t currently have clever names for the knights, but I may work on that in the future. This one’s personal color is Turbo Dork “Dream On”, a blue to purple color shift paint.
The snail on the shield was just something fun I came up with trying to doodle various designs. I really like it, though, and reproduced it on my second knight as well.
