Painting Prometheum

So, a few weeks ago I started priming up some terrain for an upcoming Apoc game.  Truth be told, all of that terrain has since been painted, but I’m woefully behind on my blog status updates, so I’m going to try to hammer out a few posts in an attempt to catch up.  One of the pieces I was working on was my Prometheum Relay Network, which is basically a pipeline (though I haven’t for sure figured out if promethium is a gas or a liquid when it travels through that pipe).

After thoroughly priming and salting it (in an attempt to pull of a rust-like effect), I wound up spraying them with a hammered silver finish from Krylon.  The plus side is that it has kind of a neat texture, and I didn’t have to worry about mixing up a color or sullying my airbrush.  The downside here is that it also sticks to the plastic a whole lot better than anything that comes out of the airbrush.  The end result is that it was far harder to scrape the salt off later in the process–and I’m pretty sure that I shouldn’t be eating anywhere near as much of that paint as I wound up consuming during the painting/cleaning process.

By the way, for anyone who is wondering at all what that process is when it comes to salting, I talk more about it in an earlier post.

There was some debate about what color I would paint the pipeline.  My natural inclination is to paint them silver because the only pipeline that I have really seen in the wild was painted silver (plus, that’s a great color for a generic piece of metal).  Zzzzz from Devos IV pointed out in a comment that “IRL, Gas pipelines on that scale tend to be painted in a colour, with the colour changed every few years or so, in order to tell if it needs repainting or not.”  I’ve never heard that, but then again, I don’t know anything about gas pipelines myself and he seems to know what he’s talking about.

I do happen to work with some folks that have experience with oil & gas though, so I pinged them on the matter.  They said that they hadn’t heard of that particular quirk.  They knew that the pipelines had to be coated on a regular basis, but they had always believed them to be coated in the same colors because specific colors denote specific kinds of pipelines.  Perhaps there’s a difference between the standards in our locations–which is likely to be true because it looks like Zzzzz is from Europe.

Whatever the case, I decided to go with silver as the base color for my pipeline, and then put in a little bit of black and blue accents to make it fit with my Ultramarine army.  I tried to make the accents subtle enough that they wouldn’t look out of place as mere terrain, but also prominent enough so that it could be associated with my army without stretching the imagination too much.

I also was sure to put a little splash of color here and there (such as the red–umm.. what do you call those things?  “Frame” around the skeleton?) and, of course, painted the skulls in bone as per my standard.

This eventually got an armor wash, plus a little splash of brown and green washes to demonstrate areas where the pipeline has leaked over time.  Eventually, I would also put a little yellow into the mixture with some OSL courtesy of the airbrush, but that will be for another post…