Having a lot of fun painting my Harlequins including the checkerboard pattern on the vehicles and various infantry models.  I watched the GW tutorials with the ever effective Duncan and his "just Thin your Paint and twist to a point" technique but found that while interesting these methods didn't suit my approach.  That approach is very simple - base coat, wash, retouch the base coat, one highlight and done.  Only in very rare cases do I use multiple highlight colours my Dwarven WHFB army perhaps the last time I did it across an entire collection.

The finished product

To get to the finished product my chosen colour scheme was all in honesty down to what colours I happened to have available that were reasonably bright.  To create the checkerboard painting I used the following steps.

Step 1 - Basecoat & Lines
The basecoat is Armypainter Deep Blue.  Only a very thin coat is applied just enough to give me a surface to draw the lines for the pattern onto.

Step 1 - Base coat

For the checkerboard patterns I cheat and draw the lines on using a pen rather than paint them.

Primary straight lines get drawn on first so I can keep things even and then its just a random lines to make up the squares smaller at the front of the vehicle and larger at the back.

Step 2 - Applying the colour blocks
I used 3 colours Blue/Orange/Red - you could use as many as you like and make it complicated but I would suggest writing it down or drawing it on a piece of paper for reference so you can check it while painting. The Orange is GW Fuegan Orange from the GW Foundation Paint range.  Two layers one thin and watered down one slightly thicker.

Step 2 - First colour block

The red is GW Mephiston Red principally as I have a lot of it lying around courtesy of my Word Bearers and Khorne Daemonkin. Again 2 layers one thin and watered down one slightly thicker

For the blue I just add a thinned down extra layer of the blue base coat where ever its needed, but otherwise I leave the blue areas alone unless I need to tidy up the shape of the squares.

Step 3 - Highlighting
The fun part and nice and simple using a single lighter colour for each block.  For the Yellow I use GW Yriel Yellow, GW Wild Rider Red, and Vallejo Ice Blue.  Two thin lines one following the vertical axis of the model the other going from side to side down the back half of each square.  The harder lines and vents were also painted with GW Abaddon Black.



After that its just black everywhere else a few touch ups here and there were the squares aren't quite right and your all done.  Lessons I did learn from the first Skyweavers I painted though were (1) do not redo the black lines with a pen they turn out horrible and (2) if you paint more than 2 layers keep your paint really thin or the result is poor - why I had to paint strip my first Voidweaver.  One thing missing from painting these guys was a wash as I found it wasn't necessary on the vehicles but I did use them on certain parts of those infantry models that got the checkerboard pattern.


In terms of how they look as a collection the pattern is pretty effective and the overall impact is good (IMO) but close up because I'm using one base colour applied generally in a single thickish layer they don't look that clean.  So great from a distance not so great under a microscope.  If you wanted to take the time to build up multiple layers you could but that's not my approach - although it would give you a much cleaner look.  I'd also suggest using better brushes than me possibly one with a square flat edge rather than a traditional point one to make the paint flow more eveningly.