I have been looking for a easy method to paint marble effect as it is pretty cool material in terrain.
Additionally, I have been stacking up on vitamin tubes until I would find such an method. The day has now come, and I think I found good, fast method to produce marble in tabletop quality.
The actual column is a vitamin container, similar seem to exist in every country.
On the plus side, you get shitloads of vitamins while collecting these.
Obviously, the work begins with basecoat, white in this case.
I also constructed a stick that holds the container while I paint it further, and allows me to rotate it on the spot.
The magic is in masking airbrush with unevenly torn paper, the colour I use is beasty brown from army painter. Other colours could be colder blue-greys and such.
Just place the paper close to the surface, and spray carefully, varyind the nozzle distance and pressure to make the patterns more organic.
I did not vary paper distance as I wanted the edge of the pattern to be clear and hard.
Obviously splitting seams are done by starting another seam.
After I did all these (about an hour), I went through them with the same colour and did few touches here and there without the mask to liven them up a bit.
Then I used Vallejo's sepia shade heavily dilluted to wash them and tie the effect together, it took the edge and harshness away from the pattern.
Lastly, gloss spray to make it more marble like.