Step by step, painting Chaos Space Marine part 1

 

Hi all, I’m back with a new tutorial.

 I play a night lords CSM army, and people often seem to be pretty interested in how I paint them, and so I thought it’d be a good idea to make a tutorial on them. This tutorial covers how to make a fully completed chaos marine in step-by-step.

Martin

These guys are relatively straightforward to paint. You don’t need to know any advanced techniques like salt weathering, or NMM, or airbrushing or anything, all you need is GW paints and be able to blend/glaze reasonably well.

What you will need:
GW paints: Regal blue, shadow grey, fiery orange, blood red, scorched brown, tallarn flesh, shining gold, boltgun metal, chainmail, mithril silver, skull white, dark flesh and devlan mud.
AND a wet palette. This is really important because you need something to store large mixes of paint for a long period of time, and it just makes everything a million times easier. If you don’t use one, get one! Once you start using one you’ll never go back.

PAINTING

Part 1 - armour

 I start over a black undercoat.
To paint the rusty blue armour of the night lords, start off with a basecoat mix of 7:1:1 regal blue/black/shadow grey. Make sure to mix up a lot of this on your wet palette, because you’ll be using it a lot. If you’re thinking of making a lot of these guys, I’d make a big batch of this in a mixing pot. Here’s a photo of what it should look like: it’s on the right, and there’s regal blue on the left just for comparison. Apply a good solid basecoat. 2 layers should be enough.

 Shading

 Shade the entire model with a mix of 4:1:1:2 scorched brown/tallarn flesh/blood red/fiery orange. With this, have the paint slightly thicker than you would with a wash, and just paint it into the recesses, and then blend it out so you get a smooth transition. Remember that this is your shade, so apply it any areas that are dark, or would accumulate rust. You will need to do this a few times. The model will end up looking very “red”, but it doesn’t look as weird once it’s been highlighted back up.

 You can play around with different amounts of red and orange in different parts depending on your taste.

Highlights

 Take your original blue mix, and add a little shadow grey to it, and blend it over some of the raised areas. This is only the first highlight, so do it over a broad area.

 Keep adding shadow grey to the mix, and keep blending up the highlights until you are applying pure shadow grey just on the very edges of the armour plates.

highlight 2 (bad pic)

highlight 3

highlight 4

pure shadow grey

Now, apply a final, superfine highlight of 50/50 shadow grey and skull white.

 Part 2 - metals

 Basecoat all the metal areas with boltgun metal. 

 

 Now, get a 50/50 mix of devlan mud and scorched brown, water it down just a tiny bit, and apply it to all the metal areas like a wash. It’s thick enough for you to be able to push the paint around and move it into the areas you want, kind of like blending.
When doing metallics, to achieve a realistic effect, you have to create the impression of reflections. When you look at some metals, even something like a kitchen knife, you’ll notice alternating areas of light and dark that vary depending on the shape of the metal. Although, you don’t actually have to know how the object you’re painting will reflect the light, instead, just put light and shade in areas that look interesting. For example, on the axe head: I had the light coming from the top of the model, so I shaded downwards. But on the actual blade, I shaded in the opposite direction, just because it looks more “shiney” that way.

 Highlights

 Once your shading is in order, just blend it back up with chainmail, and then apply mithril silver on the edges, just moving in the opposite direction to your shading.

Chainmail:

 Mithril:

End of part 1