Six months ago, I bought a tube of Crawford and Black metallic red paint from a local book/art store, and promised to experiment with it (I said a month, but you know how that works with me...). Well, over the weekend, I did get to play with it, and I'm pretty damn pleased with the results!
The miniature is Ymrilix The False from Reaper. It's a bit of an odd pose, and not entirely natural in my opinion, but he's nicely detailed and was really fun to paint. There are only 4 colours on this model, red, gold, steel and leather, so he was pretty quick and simple to do too.
The red was very straightforward thanks to the Crawford and Black paint. It took 3 or 4 coats to go evenly over the black undercoat, which was particularly time consuming as the paint seemed to take an age to dry. I may have thinned the paint too much, but I think next time I'll use a grey undercoat. Once the base coat was dry, I washed it with Agrax Earthshade, which while not my favourite shade for brown, does the trick with red. With the wash dry, I then highlighted first with the red and then added more and more GW Auric Armour Gold, until it was pure Gold on the top edges. Without the solidity of a non metallic colour mixed in, the gold was a little trickier to work with, but it's come out pretty well.
The gold is pretty much the usual method, starting with Dryad Bark and mixing in the gold for highlights, but rather than going up to pure gold I stopped around half way and then mixed in the Mithril Silver, making the gold a little duller and less yellow/orange. I think this stands out from the red nicely, and works better for an "evil" miniature.
Nothing too exciting for the steel (i.e. the sword and chainmail), Army Painter Gun Metal for the base, washed with Nuln Oil and highlighted up with Chainmail and Mithril Silver, with some carefully blended in Abaddon Black shading where appropriate.
The leather was even more simple than the steel - Dryad Bark base, with more and more Bestial Brown, and then Snakebite Leather mixed in for the highlights - job done!
So not too bad for a few hours work over the weekend - the metallic red paint is definitely a winner in my opinion, and I'm going to be finding the occasional armoured vampire model, and maybe a few Khorne warriors to use it on.
As always, comments and criticism welcome!