Thursday 14 April 2011

Tin Bitz



I don't know if you noticed but back in the day I was a fiend for metallic paint, insomuch as I always liked to contrast silver with gold and as evidenced with my Epic Ultramarines would differentiate units by metallics. Aside from silver and gold I had a shockingly bad copper that never mixed right and subsequently abandoned all usage thereof. Fast forward to today and I've the typical Vallejo Starter Game Colour Paint Set which affords me a Chainmail, Silver and polished Gold equivalent. With the additions of washes any set of Metallics can now be enhanced beyond all my schoolboy dreams, with shadows, stains or grime.

Saying all that I've a need for more metal! I'm in the market for a copper and a bronze but equally I needed to do it on a budget. Most of the art acrylics go up in price to GW equivalent as soon as you say the word 'metallic'. You do get about 3 times the amount of paint though so it isn't that bad. They have an awesome copper and bronze but I thought I'd go for Tin Bitz, just because. I'd been doing a pretty good approximation by mixing Mechrite Red and Chainmail but that's not sustainable when I need the red for basing.

With the Drop Pod in progress I decided the interior needed more variety than Chainmail and Gold. I'd also tried the Gold on the back of my Dreadnought with shocking results and needed a way to rescue this. In the mean time I'd seen this story on GW's website. Michal Gmitrasiuk had painted some awesome Blood Angels and I wondered if I could use the same battered gold/bronze effect on my Drop Pod...

So with Tin Bitz in hand I wondered what I could do? A simple dilution with water and as a wash it's awesome. Suddenly everything looks like it's coated with a stained oil. I'm not sure how well it shows up in this shot of my DropPod ramp but it's a nice effect that could be enhanced with more washes. As a dilution of paint you'll certainly get more coverage than using a wash to get the same effect though so it's a neat little option.




 Additionally it made a perfect base on the 5 uprights of the drop pod. Then a 50/50 mix with gold and there was a pretty decent bronze that when stippled in place was starting to approximate Michal's effect. With a rough 30/30/30/10 of Tin Bitz, gold, chainmail and silver the next set of stippling was even more effective. The end result isn't quite as good as Michal's [but then have you seen is painting?!] but his tutorial on CoolMiniOrNot [that I found after this] has a few more process involved and a lot more washes [which I wasn't about to shill out for].




Overall I really rate Tin Bitz as a versatile paint choice that can really broaden the options of what you can do with just a pot of chainmail and gold.

3 comments:

  1. Great effect. I hope to pick some Tin Bitz up this weekend to use on my Black Reach Deathcoptas.

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  2. Very cool, I may have to try this to see what I can do with it. I have a pot of Tin Bitz lying around that doesn't get much use anymore. I'd don't know if I would have thought to thin it out this much with water.

    Thanks for sharing.
    Ron, From the Warp

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  3. MCT I'm sure that'll add some greasy orkiness to the coptas.

    Cheers Ron I look forward to checking out your efforts

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