How to Paint Mechanicum

The Heresy-era Mechanicum is a heavier, more industrial thing than its forty-first-millennium descendant. Where an Adeptus Mechanicus force is largely robed infantry, a Taghmata is mostly machinery: battle-automata, Thallax, Krios engines and the odd cluster of tech-thralls between them. That changes how you paint it. Most of your surface area is metal and armour plate, not cloth, so the brass and the grime matter more than the robes do.

The machine red

The red should read as a painted plate on a machine, not as fabric.

1. Undercoat Chaos Black and basecoat Mephiston Red in two thin coats. Army Painter Dragon Red is a close alternative.
2. Shade with Agrax Earthshade rather than a red wash - the brown pushes the finish towards oxide and industrial paint. Carroburg Crimson in the deepest recesses only if you want a richer look on a character.
3. Re-layer the flats with Mephiston Red, then edge highlight with Evil Sunz Scarlet.
4. A last, very sparing touch of Wild Rider Red on the sharpest corners.

Robes on tech-priests and thralls take the same colours, but shade them harder and let the folds go almost black.

Brass, steel and verdigris

This is where a Mechanicum force is won.

• Brass: Balthasar Gold basecoat, Agrax Earthshade, then Runelord Brass on the raised work and a touch of Sycorax Bronze at the very edges. Warm and dirty, never bright.
• Steel: Leadbelcher, shaded Nuln Oil, edged Ironbreaker. Pistons, hydraulics, gun barrels and the exposed skeleton of an automaton.
• Copper accents: Hashut Copper on cabling ferrules and coolant lines gives a third metal to separate the other two.
• Verdigris: a thin, broken stipple of Nihilakh Oxide where the brass meets a recess. Sparingly. It is a seasoning, not a coat.

Cabling in Corvus Black with an Eshin Grey drybrush; parchment and data-slates in Zandri Dust, Seraphim Sepia, Screaming Skull. Lenses and eye clusters go Mephiston Red into Evil Sunz Scarlet with a single White Scar dot off-centre - or Warpstone Glow if you want the cooler, colder machine look.

Grime

Working machinery is dirty. Stipple Typhus Corrosion around vents, rivets and foot joints, then dab Ryza Rust into the middle of it while it is still tacky. Drag thinned Agrax Earthshade downwards from every bolt and hinge so the streaks follow gravity. Finish with a dusty Karak Stone drybrush on the lower legs and track guards, and a Stirland Battlemire base to tie the thing to the ground.

How long it takes

A Taghmata is fast per point of surface area and slow per model. Battle-automata are big, so a squad of three covers a lot of table quickly, but each one is a small vehicle's worth of painting, and much of the range is resin - so allow real time for washing, mould-line scraping and pinning arms and weapon mounts before you start. Tech-thralls, by contrast, batch-paint in an evening.

Tips and common mistakes

• Brown-shade the red. A red wash over red keeps the finish looking like cloth; Agrax Earthshade makes it look like a machine.
• Three metals, not one. Brass, steel and copper doing different jobs is what separates Mechanicum from a generic red robot.
• Grime downwards. Streaks that run in random directions look like mistakes; streaks that all run down look like weather.
• Do not over-verdigris. A green cast over every brass surface reads as ancient ruin, not as an active war machine.

When you are happy with the palette, open this scheme in the generator to swap paints between brands or shift the red towards oxide or crimson.