Field Projector:

 Not getting overly fancy with these, as they really aren't too involved, more for scenery than anything. Just for the sake of them not looking bad, though, I'm putting in a decent amount of care and taking pains to not paint sloppily.

 After filing down irregularities and washing the plastic to remove any traces of mold release agent, I cover 'em with a solid (but thin) coat of GW White Primer - repeated thin sprayings from all sides with dry time in-between. I also have a mixture of things that I use to thin my paints, as opposed to plain water - for ease of reference, I'll call it "Mix."

 So as to not handle the miniatures directly themselves, I'm sticking 'em to plastic bottle caps with extra-strength two-sided tape. Been doing this for all my miniatures since I started back into painting, and it seems to hold up even for metal miniatures. Also easy to remove when done - just tilt slightly and pop 'em off the tape.

 This picture shows a basecoat of 1:1 GW Boltgun Metal/Mix, with a wash of thinned down GW Chaos Black over the top. Nothing too involved, but it's an easy and quick way of shading the metal since the pieces themselves have a lot of raised and depressed details even with a lot of flat surfaces overall.

 A few things going on in this pic. To start with, I went back over the flat metal surfaces with 1:1 Boltgun Metal/Mix again, to tidy up a few areas and to bring the "light" areas back up to their desired color. The areas in "shadow" I left as the slightly darker "Boltgun washed with Black" color (the lining between panels, around bolts, and the bottom-to-underside of the "energy coils," for example.) The wiring at the base I painted a basecoat of GW Goblin Green. The eagle decoration at the top I basecoated with a 1:1 blend of GW Shining Gold/Flesh Wash - this gives a nice coppery color on which I'll build. Unlike the trim on the armor of the Ultramarines I'll be painting, I'm going for a more yellowy/brassy look for the eagle decoration on these - I rather liked the final color of the first one I did, and have thought up an easier way to replicate it that I'll be posting here throughout.

 In this step, I put a thin wash (maybe 10:1) of Mix/GW Dark Angels Green over the wiring at the base to give it some shadowing and even the color out a bit. I painted Blood Red on the tips of the projector "coils." The trickiest part was getting the red to cover evenly - painting over the white tips involved a few coats of paint. Last but not least, and no doubt the most involved, was painting 1:4 Shining Gold/Mix back over most of the eagle decoration leaving the darker copper color in the shadows and on the upper indented areas of the wings and such. By thinning down the paint a bit, I ensured that it would be a smooth transition from the darker metal color to the slightly lighter Gold color, gradually darkening/layering the Gold towards nearly a solid coat on the lower edges of each wing's "feathers," the body, etc.

 In this final step, most of the work was cosmetic as opposed to actually getting color onto the mini. I touched up the wiring at the base with GW Striking Scorpion Green to bring in a little bit of highlighting and brighten up the overall color just a hair. I lightly lightly drybrushed GW Chainmail along the edges of the projector's metal body to get some subtle edge highlighting. (When I first started I had decided that I wasn't going to get too involved with these things. Well, at the end I decided that a little bit of drybrushing really wasn't too involved, seeing as how it took all of 2 minutes to add a touch of a brighter metal color to the edges and highly raised parts.) The last part I worked on was the eagle. I already had the shadowing and a semi-highlighting effect going on just by being selective as to where I re-applied the Gold Paint. In this last step I mixed up 1:1:4 Shining Gold/Polished Silver/Mix and painted this with my narrowest brush along reverse edges and a few other areas just to make the body, the "heads," and the sharp edges of the decorative eagle base stand out a bit more.