This is something I gave to a friend for his birthday. I learned a lot about washes on this model. The metallic areas are where I really put them to use. I still have a lot to learn about it, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I also learned a lot more about hard edge highlighting as well as working with metallic paints.
Over at Bell of Lost Souls they have a great tutorial on building one of these. It's not hard, but you do have to build and paint it in a certain order, or you're in trouble. Basically, I painted everything separate then glued it all together. I had to do some touch up painting after, but it wasn't bad.
Above you can see some script on the doors. I hand painted some latin phrases on the doors, including the famous "Ave Imperator morituri te salutamus." The hand-lettering was pretty tough. I had to calculate the halfway point of each phrase, and then make sure it would look ok. I wrote half of it backwards to make sure I didn't get to the end of my space and still have more letters.
