Painting Guide - Chaos Space Marine (part 2)

In our first instalment, we went through undercoating, and the first few basecoats required to paint a basic footsoldier. Note that we aren't looking for massively high quality and complicated, we are looking for a quick and simple way to paint some figures that look cool. My purpose was to re-teach myself how to paint after a break, but it is also useful for making lots of similar models for the core of your army.

Part 3: Main Coat

The final coat of the main armour and clothes needs to look good. In particular, make sure you water down your paints a little bit (with clean water) so that the paint will go on easily and won't dry out half way through the process.

Move carefully over the model, painting over the "dark" colours only where light would naturally fall given the pose of the model. for example, I leave out the insides of the legs, the bottom of the arms, and the areas under/to the side of the backpack on the space marine pictured.

Note that in these photos the accessories have caught up; some Dark Angels Green/Snot Green for the frag grenade and some nice Bestial Brown for the leather. The bone has an additional layer of Bubonic Brown as a final highlight.

At this point, the model looks OK. We need to be careful not to smudge onto the nicely shaded main areas of armour/clothes.

Part 4: Metallics

Metallics comes in two phases, although both are pictured together. First, you must go over all the areas you want to be metallic or black, and paint over the black basecoat with a thin (watered down) layer of black. This will give them a nice gloss, like the rest of the model, and provide a suitable surface for metallic drybrushing.

Next, you take your desired metal colour. I prefer Chainmail, as Mithril Silver is a bit too bright for the 41st millenium, and Boltgun Metal just looks a bit too dank and boring; but you choice of colour should be determined by the overall look of your army. You can always make a metallic colour look a little bit darker, but adding a drop of black, but the reverse is not true with white!

Don't add any water to the paint initially, but take a blob on a nice big brush and run the brush up and down your palette, until most of the paint that was on it is spread thinly on the palette, and your brush looks dry. Then run it over all grilled/uneven metal surfaces lightly, just allowing the shine onto the raised bits of the metal surface, leaving black in the recesses. Try and go "against the grain" of the roughness, as this will reduce the probability of accidentally doing too much.

You can top your brush back up by wiping it over the palette where you left the paint spread back out, don't waste another blob. Here is the result of such a technique on the Chaos Marine:

Next, with a smaller brush, use the metallics as you would normally to fill in proper details; large shiny surfaces and so on. On the Chaos Marine I used Shining Gold for this task, as it makes them look a bit more gothic and archaic than standard Space Marines, but again the choice of colour depends on the job in hand.

Tip: for studs of metal on a non-metallic surface, use the smallest brush you have but don't approach laterally as usual. Point your brush perpendicularly to the palette when picking up the paint; so as to get a larger spread of bristles, and use the brush similarly perpendicularly to the studded surface, just touching it on top of the stud. This avoids accidentally drawing a line going through them, which can take a while to fix again afterwards without painting over the stud too!

Part 5: Basing

You want to pick a good basing scheme for your whole army and stick to it, so this section may be irrelevant to you.

I tried to base this model in a classic 40K fashion, i.e. with grass flock, however I don't like the look of bases that are painted flat green and then flocked. I prefer to do something muddier, in this case Bestial Brown, as the basecoat going all the way down the sides of the base, and then PVA only about 80% of the base (leaving out the very edges, and the places near the model's feet.) I also wildly prefer static grass to standard flock, although I have been known to use sand/gravel with a similar base colour. I think it makes the terrain look a bit more marshy, and a bit less like the armies are battling across a well mown cricket pitch.

Below is the based, finished model. It is by no means perfect, and my messy approach leaves much to be desired around the edges, but it is a usable figure in a large army, and thus a useful way of brushing up on your painting skills (ahaha...)

That's all for now, I hope you'll return for my future painting guides (which might be a bit more adventurous...)

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.