Painting Guide - Chaos Space Marine (part 1)

Painting miniatures can be a tricky business, especially if you can't find time regularly. If you are coming back to painting after a bit of a gap (as I seem to every now and again) you may find you are ruining all your lovely models!

The best way I have found to quickly re-teach yourself, is to start with a few footsoldiers. Leave Sergeants, leaders and command squads until later, when you can concentrate, as they are more fiddly and you'll be more upset if you go wrong.

Here is part one of me re-teaching myself how to paint with a chaos marine after about a year away from painting. Here is the finished product:

So, how did we get there?

Part 1: Undercoat


No matter what anyone tells you, you should always use spray undercoat, never a brush. The surface is even, the colour is (nearly) uniform, and it is an excellent layer to lay paint onto.

I almost always use black undercoat, too. I am not sure why, but I spend most of my time painting space marines or WH40k figures of some sort, and as such there are a lot of metallic parts, which lend themselves to a black undercoat.

Finally, never leave any undercoat visible. The figure above has many black parts, the edges of the shoulder pads for example, but all of these have been repainted with a brush, to ensure a consistant texture and gloss effect.

Here is my undercoated figure:

Notice that I have also removed the boltgun, as it covers lots of tricky areas to paint (like the chest and hands.) A better way to do it is to not stick it on before you start and use blue tack to hold it on while you undercoat. In this case I just snapped it off (this is not always a good idea!)

Part 2: Basecoat

What should be considered basecoat is debatable, but I would include:

• main armour / clothing parts
• flesh
• Dark brown (I use Scorched Brown) on all leather and bone.
• Nothing on black/metallic parts. I leave these until last, so I can go over any mistakes in the main colours at the end.

I tend to do two basecoats, one with a "very dark" version of the final colour, and another with a "dark" version. This means the colour builds up gradually, and you can leave the very dark shade in the small crevices and hard to reach areas, giving a more realistic surface effect.

The colour progressions I used on the space marine were:

Codex Grey -> Skull White (diluted with non-clean water) -> Skull White.
Regal Blue -> Enchanted Blue -> Enchanted Blue mixed with Skull White.

(the third colour in each progression is the "main" coat after the basecoats.)

It is best to avoid mixtures of colours where possible, especially with footsoldiers, so that they all match exactly. If you must, maybe keep a mixing pot handy for each full squad.

Here is the first basecoat:

Tip: in order to keep things neat, don't stick to the basecoat size brush the whole time. Do the larger areas, but don't go all the way to the edge if you think you might accidentally hit the basecoat of another part, or an area you are keeping black, drop down to the detail brush for those bits.

and the second basecoat:

This time, you definitely don't want to go to all the edges. You still want to cover almost all of the previous layer, but don't worry about the final finish of the colour, or filling all the corners this time.

Note that on the 2nd Basecoat I leave out the brown sections like leather. This is because I deal with them in the "detail" section, and they require different/fewer coats.

That's all for this time, next we'll move onto the Main Coat, Metallics/other detail and Basing.