Ye Olde Inn

G'day. I'm looking for suggestions on how you paint your metal weapons as well as gold, steal and bronze items? I'm not moving onto the mini's yet but I thought I'd have a stab at the weapons rack and some chests which would have some metallic finishes.

Seb has something on rusty weapons and zee Count has something too.

Well i'm no expert with weapons at all, but i did discover two nifty things:

1: bronze blends well with brown. so i paint my "bronze to be" stuff brown first, then mix the brown and bronze for the top layers
2: You can add a colour to your metals to give it a different kind of metal look, for example:
shiny silver + a little drop of black + a drop of red (or green or blue), then your metal becomes a bit different, a magical effect. Paint in thin layers with this stuff my first one was too thick and ugly.

Diggins method id similar to mine. By mixing non-metalics in say grey with silver then you can get a nice fake non-metalic metal look.

I tend to base paint it the colour i want, so for steel I will paint chain mail or bolt gun, the wash it with a mix of black and blue ink, then retouch with the silver and highlight with mithril.
For brasses or gold then its the same kind of thing, but start from a base of tin bits, then a browny green ink mix, then the metalic colour and a highlight of the colour with shining gold mixed in.

You can play around with the ink wash colours, purple makes things seem a bit magically, blues for strong, brown on silver give an aged effect ect.

Really they are no different from non metalics, but I would usually leave them until last and use a separate water pot so you don't get shiny glitter bits in the other colours, like to woods and stuff.
I don't go in for this metalic self highlighting business, it does look better if you just treat them as you would regular paints.

No washing up liquid this time

Good methods.

And then there's this that you could start with and use as a basis for more advanced techniques:
Undercoat brown for gold, black for stell or silver, dark green for bronze.
Basecoat in a metallic color a shade darker than you actually want the end result.
Wash. Be creative here. Mix in olive greens or purples into the basic browns and blacks for gold, greens and turquoises for copper, BOB's method for steel and silver.
Neaten up with your target color, leave the recesses be.
Highlight with a lighter version of the target color. Give gold a silver edge highlight, very fine.

Optionally, weather as you want it.
For rust, wash with a brown, then with an orangy light brown in tighter spaces. Stipple a light orange very lightly. Sometimes I go all the way up to yellow with this.
For verdigris, wash any light or medium blue or dark/medium neutral green or a medium turquoise you want and then a light turquoise in tighter spaces. Stipple an almost white very lightly.
These weathering washes get lighter, the deeper the recess, opposite to what a regular wash does. Try to get the most weathering in places where water runs down (streaks) and collects (intense rust/verdigris).

I'm no expert either. But I stumbled upon a method that I like the look of. I mix the metallic color (Iron Breaker or whatever) with some black or some other darker color...for a couple coats. Then I do a super light dry brush action with the same metallic color (no black) around all the edges, even sword blade edge.