Sculpting is a paint technique often found in cabal ships. it has a rather unique look due to the beautiful gradient that makes cabal unique. This guide aim is to cover topics that needs to be learned in order to paint in this specific technique,tips and tricks that I personally use and some personal opinions that I follow.

Paint is a subjective topic that is highly dependent on personal taste. Due to this i would like to put a disclamer that this guide may be subjected to some bias and i will try to seperate my own personal opinions to a seperate section.

The paint system contains 4 layers, base paint, decal 1-3. Each of these layers will serve a different function.



Generally, the layers for this style of paint would be:

• Decal 3 = accent colour, second colour to complement the main colour,
  
  
• Decals 2 = very dark colour, usually black serves as the shadows or panel gap
  
  
• Decal 1 = highlight colour, usually the brighter colour in the gradient
  
  
• Base Paint = base gradient colour, usually the duller colour in the gradient. Base colour also serves an important role in setting texture of the ship as it is use to make ships looks dirty or worn, useful when going for a more fringe like look.

Right ship looks noticeably duller and dirty with just changing the texture



*There is a variation of this paint that instead of having an accent color, it is exchanged for a shadow layer, and have their layer 2 be a slightly brighter color. Examples of this can be found in cabal. Will cover this paint style later

The first step is to "sculpt” the ship shape, now why I call it sculpting? Due to the way the paint is done it is in my opinion easier to paint the whole ship with the decal 2 (dark layer) first and remove it to reveal the paint underneath and get shapes you want, kinda like sculpting a statue but 2D.

A good place to start is with parts that have a lot of roof details. Roof details are great way to be used as guides for painting as you can paint around the details, so things like weapons, shields and thrusters are great place to start. You want to treat it as the main shape of the ship and due to that they are made in shapes that look like the main structural pieces of the ships, with panel gaps between them. Since they are the main structural piece of the ship you always want the main colour to be in larger quantity then the accent colour.

The accent colour (decal 3) can represent many things depending on its usage, it could be as simple as just a second colour to fill up space, but with some creative usage you can make them look like the soft internals of ships such piping and wiring by running them under and over the armor strutural pieces of the main colour.

An example on the usage of accent color, yellow running underneath the silver plates to looks like powerlines.


one thing that is overlooked is that Text decals such as . , - and I are useful to fill in empty 1x and even ½ wide gaps using the accent color. useful to add detail on what would be just be blank.

Fades are an important part of a painter’s tool kit as they allow to us to mimic shadows giving a 3d effect, allowing the ship to have depth by making certain parts look higher and lower than others adding a lot more details to a ship.

before and after adding fades

Fades are usually done using the dark layer, but our accent colour is at the top most layer. Due to this you will be doing fades differently for top layer, instead of the dark layer fading away to reveal the layer colour underneath, the secondary colour will fade into the darkness underneath.

The specialty of this technique of paint. Using decal 1, by adding a highlight using a combination of fades and plains you can make the ship have a gradient. The dark layer (decal 2) will cover up all the unwanted bits giving the distinct paint.



to determine the direction of highlight, it is the easiest to have them all flow the same directions, my personal preference would be making it flow to the back and outwards, another way to determine the flow is using shadows and light source. The highlight is treated like the metallic shine of a metal body in sunlight, it is very bright where light will hit it and gets dull in places near shadows.


the highlight disapear as it approaches the dark fades

another use case for highlight
by combining the use of highlight and fades we can create softer shadows to create small illusions of depth.

alternative method of painting Cabal that is less popular, but equally impressive if done right. Like it was adressed earlier, this sub-style exchanges the colorful accent layer (Decal layer 3) with a pitch black (Or at least very dark) shadow layer and has its decal layer 2 be a slightly brighter color. This not only allows for shading around bright parts for much improved illusion of depth, it also makes it possible for you to have two dark colors in one tile, which can make for complex shapes and „custom“ decals otherwise irreproducable, on top of a dark color mixed with shadows that accent Cabal doesn’t allow you to do.

The decal layers for this sub-style are as follows:
Layer 3 — Shadow layer, either pitch black or extremely dark;
Layer 2 — The „base“ layer that you dig into to reveal the lower layers, slightly brighter than its accented alternative;
Layer 1 — The very bright highlight color;
Base paint — Darker and optionally duller version of the highlight (Layer 1) color, can also be a slightly different tint of the highlight color.

Sculpting remains mostly the same for this sub-style, but it’s worth mentioning that you should constantly keep the shadow layer into the back of your mind when carving out the layer 2 and creating highlights, and think about „How will these look when I overlay them with shadows?“

Giving up a colorful accent layer for the dull, black shadow might feel counterintuitive, but the sheer amount of unique use cases the shadow layer has can not be understated.
For example, like mentioned above, create unique decals that do not exist in the regular roster.


List of decals you can make with 2 dark colors. These are just the most popular ones or ones that I myself came up with, with enough creativity you can make far more.

You can also use the shadow layer to create much better looking ornaments, and speaking of which…

Another thing that is totally unique to Cabal paint styles and also what makes the sculpting style as a whole, unique is Ornaments (At least that’s what I call them). Ornaments are the big sprawling curvy lines that are placed in-between the large highlight lines (and in the underlinings in the case of the Shadow Cabal sub-style).



Ornaments can be used on any of the sculpting sub-styles, no matter if you’re using accents, shadows or anything else.




Additionally, the accent version of the Sculpting technique allows you to use both the underlinings and the accents to create these patterns.

Final of the known Sculpting sub-styles is the nichest and most obscure, yet still really interesting. It sacrifices both the accent and the shadow layer for not one, but two whole highlight layers, which allows you to create much bigger and more unique gigafade lines, but lacks the distinct visual flare of either speccing into more color or more depth.




Layer 3 — The darkest layer/the „base“ you sculpt the ship from, either very dark or pitch black;
Layer 2 — Main color of the ship, either the darker, or the brighter one;
Layer 1 — Main color, in-between the brighter and the darker one when it comes to brightness;
Base paint — Main color, either the brighter, or the darker one.



There are 2 ways to set up color layers for this sub-style, it can either be ascending in brightness, or descending, (It can either be darkest > average > bright > brightest or darkest > brightest > bright > average) whichever you prefer painting with. Also worth noting, these can be interchanged with no real damage done to the overall paintwork, it’ll just flip the direction the fades are pointing at. However, with the version of the scheme that has layer 2 as the darker one, you can sort of use it in the same way as the shadow version of the sculpting style, even though it might be difficult depending on how bright the darker color is.

This section is for rules that I obey when painting and is really just some optional things that doesn't have to be followed.



Accent color and main color should always be seperated at all times through the use of the dark layer or fades and should never touch each other. Both color represent different part of a ship and should be kept away from each other for clear seperation. Keeping the clear off each other also make the paint look in my opinion cleaner





I personally do not like having sharp 90 degree bends and prefer to soften them slightly, it also allows having 2 90 degree bends next to each other without touching so helps with seperation of parts.

a gallery of finished ships to be used for examples.

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