I am right now wrapping up on 20 tactical marines. I have them glued together now and am finally working on the details. I am hoping to have them done by this weekend/early next week.

I thought I would share some of the steps I go through to get the dirty bone color for the armor. The first step is that I prime them white and then spray them with GW bone. This was done mainly to speed things up.

Next I paint on little areas of chestnut ink where I want the dirty "rust" effects to be:

Next I apply a flesh ink overlapping the chestnut ink. This helps tone down the color when I start layering on the highlights. I have found that what happens on the next step is that when you brush on the paint over the ink it bleeds through a bit allowing you to "streak" it.

After the ink I start going over the entire area (maybe leaving a bit of the ink showing) with a watered down vallejo bone. As I said above the ink bleeds through to an extend allowing for some interesting rust streaks.

At this stage the armor is still too dark and the streaks much too prominant. So another layer of 50/50 mix of Vallejo bone and Ivory are applied. Care is taken to leave some of the more prominant rust streaks showing (after all you don't want to cover them all up)!

As you can see the color is much more similar to the final outcome. The details just need to be added. I use a watered down smoke to fill in the details in the armor, black for the webbing between the joints, and I black/darkline around the feet, purity symbols, and other emblems...