I have been plugging away at this, but always neglecting to post.
In the time since my last post, I've done a lot of painting and sanding... I get the base metal coat down, then when I apply the white paint, it crinkles up. I clean the plates with dish soap between colour changes... is that the right thing to do?
Anyway, it turns out it's all for the best, since at a recent armour party, I was trying to lock in my check plate placement, and it turns out there was some trimming and reshaping that needed to happen. My ruus'alor was very helpful with the shaping/trimming, but I'll need to wait for the next armour party to finish that up.
Moving onto parts that have been going better, I decided to beef up my gauntlets. On one, I'll have a sort of communications panel, with four "buttons" that will blink blue and white. The fun part is that the lights will show the (approximate) time. One colour will show the hour encoded as a 4 bit binary number, while the other colour will show progress through the hour.

here's what I have so far for the right gauntlet.
I've done some preliminary tests, and the lights diffuse nicely through the "buttons" I have.
In the mean time, I hope to make some real progress on my helmet before the next armour party, Let's all hope that the paint doesn't crinkle.