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I'm currently painting my first ever minature. I'm eventually going to put together my beloved Eldar, but I didn't want them to be the first thing I paint, so I'm starting out with the AoBR Space Marines. I am going to make it a proper project though, not just a few minatures I'll discard once I've got over my awful beginner painting.

While I can't hope to live up to it, I was inspired to paint Imperial Fists by this awesome artwork.



So I'm going for black trims and silver details rather than the usual red, which I never liked much. I gather that painting lots of yellow is a bit of a baptism of fire, but I figure it will be a learning experience, which is what I'm hoping for after all.

I'm just painting tactical marines for now, but I'll eventually be painting everything I need for a nice fluffy Imperial Fists army, which means plenty of vehicles and terminators. My job leaves me with next to no free time, so progress is going to be very slow, especially considering my snail's pace beginner painting. I'm hoping that the esteemed dakka painting community can support me through this endeavour.

All I have to show so far is a half painted marine. I've made many slip-ups and learnt a great deal from them. I don't think it's a lost cause yet, but hey, it's my first minature so no stress.



I made a bit of a mess of the spray priming. This became oh so very noticable later on, but I'll have a very good idea of how to get it right next time.



I've seen these kind of minatures painted fully assembled, but how this is done is beyond me, so I'll certainly be painting the (not many) pieces separately.



And here's my first ever coat of paint. I had to experiment with just getting a decent consistency and working with my palette. The shoddy spray job reared its head here too. Still, this will be completely covered later on. I used bubonic brown, which I'll later paint over with Sunburst yellow. You might be able to make out some blotchiness, which is even worse on some of the less visible parts of the model that didn't get a very good undercoat.



After struggling with bubonic brown, chaos black went on much easier, although getting clean lines on those shoulder pad trims was a nightmare. I also painted the skulls and eagle mithril silver, although I've since had second thoughts about this. Maybe I should have put down a darker non-metallic undercoat first? I really like the whitish/silver in the artwork, but I'm not sure what the best way to go about this is. I don't want it to look super metallic, especially when I start doing veteran helmets.



I broke out the fine detail brush here to paint the seal and the gun. I made numerous errors, but for the most part they ended up ok after plenty of touch ups. Everything looks very dark and plain, but so far everything just has a bottom layer that I'm planning to build on with lighter tones.

That's where I am so far. Next I'm gonna throw on some washes to get a bit of depth before I start apllying lighter coats and eventually highlights. Any suggestions for a wash? I have ogryn flesh, with badab black on the way. I saw some Imperial Fists featured on the GW site washed with a 50:50 mix of devlan mud and badab black, but I'm not about to take that as gospel. Do you think I'll need to apply another coat of bubonic brown after the wash, or will I be able to go straight to sunburst yellow?

Thanks in advance for any assistance or comments.

Coming up: Finish the first guy... Figure out how to expand to painting a squad to keep him company... Terminators... Dreadnought... Vehicles...

This is a great start.

Looking pretty good so far. Imperial Fists are my favorite coloured space marines, although I have always had trouble painting yellow

One thing I can definately say will help you in painting your minis is a set of washes. GW does a starter pack of them, which is reasonable, but any companies washes will do.

They help to create areas of light and shade without having to spend ages painting them on, and really help to bring your work up to the next level.

Best of luck with the rest, I look forward to seeing them.

Disaster!
I used Devlan Mud on the armour, and other washes on the other parts, and this went great. I also painted the eyes green. Once I'd finished all of that, I figured I'd use Sunburst Yellow to apply the final layer of yellow before highlighting. Catastrophe ensued. I didn't water the paint down so much, but it seemed to seep straight into all of the gaps that I'd just painted with the wash, undoing all of my hard work. Worst of all, the paint just isn't forming a proper layer. It feels like I'm painting on unprimed plastic. In fact Red Gore went onto bare plastic much more happily than this yellow did onto primed, painted and washed plastic.
The backpack looks ugly, while the legs look so bad I'm tempted to throw the whole thing away and pretend it never happened.



You can zoom in on the leg here, though I can't bear to look at it.

What went wrong? I was planning to try a slightly different process for my next guy, but I'll still need to be able to put on a brighter yellow without it looking like vomit.

Don't throw it away, it's nice to laugh at your horrible failures when you're better. Or you could strip it and try again.

lol I have made similar mistakes as well but least you know what to do next time

i call my bad paint jobs Fail marines

I'm really not sure what I'm gonna do next time though. I've learnt a lot getting this far, but I'm really not sure why this particular layer went all crazy. My next guy is going to look a lot better, but once I get to the point when I want to brighten him up, besides being more careful, I'm not really sure what I should do to get this paint to hold properly. I think I'll paint a few sprues to see if I can overcome this problem.

May seem like a patronising question (isn't meant to be) but did you shake the yellow thoroughly before using it?

There is a good tutorial here for imperial fists:

http://cbstudios.co.uk/#/tutorialimperial/4525393843

CadianXV wrote:May seem like a patronising question (isn't meant to be) but did you shake the yellow thoroughly before using it?

I'd be very surprised if I didn't, but it went on so horribly that I could almost believe it was down to something stupid like that. I'll give it another go in the morning.

Temujin wrote:

CadianXV wrote:May seem like a patronising question (isn't meant to be) but did you shake the yellow thoroughly before using it?

I'd be very surprised if I didn't, but it went on so horribly that I could almost believe it was down to something stupid like that. I'll give it another go in the morning.

Sunburst yellow is a very poor-covering paint. It comes on blotchy as hell if you don't water it down enough and will really screw over your paint job with its crazy amount of work. I have two suggestions.

1. Skip the Bubonic Brown and paint it right over the yellow in a few layers of watered down Sunburst. Not highly recommended if you want the dark shades to be made easy, but it will work.

OR

2. Use Golden Yellow. It's more orangeish and closer to bubonic brown in color. It should also cover much more easily.

Also, only use the wash where you want it to show. This way you'll have a lighter shade to paint over, making the undercoat covered much more easily.

I'm gonna go pick up some Golden Yellow then try out the following: Prime (properly this time) with white spray, undercoat with Iyanden Darksun, paint the non-yellow parts, paint Bubonic Brown, wash with Delvan Mud (more targetted this time) then use Golden Yellow to lighten things up. I might then use Sunburst Yellow as a highlight if I can get it to look less horrible, though I'll have to give this a go on a sprue first.

I think the key will be whether the Golden Yellow is close enough to Bubonic Brown that I can get away with keeping the Golden Yellow to a minimum without having obvious borders between them. Maybe I should drybrush the Golden Yellow?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
On second thoughts I might give it a heavier wash before the Bubonic Brown.

Have you thought about moving away from the mainstream and paint your Fists a little different? A friend of mine has the SW and paints their armour much darker, which funny enough, looks far better. I always use a custom paintjob on my army as I don't want to end up fighting someone who has the same coloured army.

If you have issues with yellow, try other brands of paint. Reaper have a line of paints called Pro Paints. They are for that first cover of colour and you paint straight out of the pot. I bought some very light blue and yellow and they work rather well. I find I may put a very tiny blob of water with the mix but they work rather well.
http://www.reapermini.com/Paints

I personally don't like GW paints and will only use them for basic painting. Yellows and reds are terrible. You may also want to try Vallejo paints.

With the spray can, give it a very good shake. Then, put it in some warm water for a few minutes. The reason for this is because shaking the can, the pressure makes the paint very cold which does strange things to the paint once it hits the mini. After the soaking, shake for another min or so then spray. Always move the can when you spray (left to right) and keep at elbows length. Don't spray right on the model, instead spray when off the mini then move "over" it.

What I'd really like to do is take a modelling knife to them and cut them up like in the above artwork, then give them a worn metallic look. I think I'd better get the basic scheme down before I do anything like that though. My first 10 AoBR Marines are all going to end up as testbeds.

Don't paint your AOBR marines just yet! Yellow is a real pain in the ass and it takes several tries to get it right. What I'm saying here is that you should experiment on something that isn't expensive. GW has a pack of 3 AOBR marines for a low price. These are great for experimenting paint schemes and techniques. I reccomend buying a box of them and try to figure out a yellow scheme that's easiest for you.

The AoBR Marines are cheap enough, and I think it's gonna take more than 3 before I can paint something that won't eventually look out of place in a complete force. I've already got a proper Tactical Squad box that will be my first 'real' troops, and I'm not going anywhere near them until I've worked out the gremlins.

Why are you bothering to use Iyanden Darksun over white? It covers black in one coat. If you're painting over white, you can do so just using yellow. Working Iyanden Darksun up to yellow isn't hard. Once you've done that you can just highlight the armor and be done. I've seen someone do a really convoluted scheme where they primed white and did multiple layers of Ogryn Flesh wash to get their yellow - I don't remember the exact details though.

To be honest, my choice of white over black was fairly random. I'm just experimenting at this stage. I want to achieve a decent level of depth, and I like what I've seen from people who've used washes quite heavily, but I don't have enough experience to pick one scheme over another without just getting stuck in and seeing what works and what doesn't.
I figure that using Iyanden Darksun will help aleviate some of the coverage problems I've had this time around, but I hadn't considered how my choice of primer would play into this at all. I know I could just highlight from Iyanden Darksun and get reasonable results, but like I said I really want to go for more depth, so I at least want to give it a heavy wash and then go back to either Iyanden or Bubonic Brown on the exposed armour before highlighting.
Besides choice of colours, I'm really clueless about how to actually build on my base of Iyanden/Bubonic. I know how to highlight the edges of armour and the like, but brightening up the armour more generally without just wiping out the base colour is less clear to me. Drybrush?

If any of my choices seem weird it's almost certainly because I really don't know what I'm doing.

So I should prime in black? Scale back the Devlan Mud?

It's cold and miserable in Osaka so I won't be able to spray the next unlucky guinea pig marine for a couple of days.

Thanks for your advice, it means a lot to me.

Temujin nice to see a fellow Impfist player. I am new to them also and will be following this thread very closely. I would like to perhaps start out by saying I have tried about three methods to painting yellow all of which have started from a black primer. The one which resulted in the best was stolen from Insaniak works like this.

Base Coat Black->Bestial Brown->Bronzed Flesh(This took several small layers)->Sunburst

These are the results.



The others I have used were Dark sun and several light coats of Sunburst which did not work, the sunburst ended up being very blotchy and not covering well at all, except on the sides, I don't know why.



Here are some other attempts, I am still endeavoring myself.




Sorry for the big images. lol

Use foundation paints. Iyanden Darksun or one of the Foundation Greys are the basis of all good yellows.

I've also noticed that another way to make a nice yellow is to mix in some skull white (for pale yellow) or bleached bone (for pastel yellow) to the foundation for either the base color or for highlights.

Final thing - for Imp Fists especially- starting with White is so good!

lords2001 wrote:...starting with White is so good!

Agreed.

I've prepped another marine and he's ready to go (I destroyed his first boltgun with my drill - definitely not safe to pull the trigger!). I've also cut off a few sprue pieces and carved out some recesses with a file (to stand in as detail) so that I can test out my paint scheme. I'm going to do one sprue with black spray and one with white, then base coat them both with Iyanden Darksun and work them up from there. My FLGS is closed tomorrow (I need to buy some Golden Yellow) and I think Osaka is going to be rainy again, but I'll post my progress as soon as I can.

My yellow paint scheme after the spray coat will be Iyanden Darksun -> heavy Devlan Mud wash on recessed areas -> Bubonic Brown to tidy up after the wash (leaving the edges and recesses alone) -> Golden Yellow drybrush (my first go at drybrushing!) -> Extreme highlight (not sure about the colour - either Golden Yellow + White or evil Sunburst Yellow). Hopefully this will give me a fairly dark yellow with decent coverage and certain golden feel to it. If it pans out I'll tackle guinea pig marine #2.

Thanks again to everyone for indulging a beginner.

If yellow is your dominate color, prime white.

The weather and my schedule have finally allowed to get out and spray, so I now have two bits of mangled AoBR sprue sprayed - one in white and one in black. I'm beginning to see why people prefer black. It went on much easier and more cleanly than the white. Still, they're both nicely primed and I'll be giving my paint scheme a go on both of them later today.



I'll post some results when I'm done, then I'll choose my preferred priming colour and get my second test marine painted tomorrow.

Experiment complete. Here are my two Imperial Sprue prototypes. And the winner is...



I guess I should have expected it to be more difficult to get yellow, even foundation yellow, to cover black, but I was surprised at how prohibitively annoying it was. Given my poor brushwork (I'm learning fast enough to already be embarrased by the painting I did this afternoon), the poor plastic sprue didn't turn out well. The mighty white Imperial Sprue was however a reasonable success, as you can see in the next images.





I didn't bother finishing the black prototype because it just didn't work out. I didn't really highlight the complete sprue seriously, but I did enough to figure a few things out about the colours involved.

As usual however, I've come out of this with more questions than answers, so I still want to try out a few different schemes before I settle for one. The question about which colour to spray has certainly been answered though.

Tomorrow I'm going to start Marine 2 (from white) with a heavy Devlan Mud wash, then basecoat Iyanden Sun, then highlight from Golden Yellow working my way up to Sunburst Yellow. I'm going to try and leave it fairly dark, so that Sunburst Yellow is my highest highlight only appearing in the slightest quantities.

I wanna see the final product!

Thin the foundation paints a bit with water, and apply smooth coats, especially with Red and Yellow.

Very slow progress today, but I have some updates for you. First up I unloaded some major Devlan Mud as a nice deep basecoat and to pick out all the detail.





So Devlan Mud looks nice but it's too dark leave alone with Iyanden Darksun. I'll try Gryphonne Sepia as my guidecoat next time. Anyway I figured I could at least leave the recesses alone when I did my real basecoat, but of course I'm not good enough for that...

I had a bit of a nightmare maintaining any kind of consistency with my palette. I knew I needed to water down my Iyanden Darksun, and I was able to hit that sweet spot between a wash that ran into all the detail and a thick mess that comes out all chalky, but I was painting way too slow and I couldn't keep the consistency where I wanted it. The end result was the worst of both worlds - I destroyed all the detail that the Devlan Mud had picked out and I have lots of areas where there's just too much paint.



I'll try to rescue the detail with a touch of Devlan Mud, but I fear I might have filled a lot of the recesses in. Besides practice makes perfect, does anyone have any advice about keeping that all important consistency? I thought I might err on the side of watered down, and the great painters I've watched all use really watered down paints, but just can't seem to apply that kind of mixture without it just behaving like a wash and gunning straight for the recesses when that's the only place I don't want them to go.

On a more positive note the yellow is looking good, so colour wise things are looking up. I like the way Golden Yellow looks on Iyanden Darksun, so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in with the highlighting. After that I just have to worry about the much more forgiving colours on the rest of the model, which should feel relatively easy after all the yellow. Black goes on like a dream, and the metals look beautiful after a Badab Black wash. Even red is simple in comparison to yellow. I might even finish this guy.

Oh and I should ask you guys - do I do progressive Golden Yellow/Sunburst Yellow drybrush highlights or be brave and do some proper layers? I'm pretty confident I'll pull off a half decent job with drybrushing, but I should probably go with what I don't know and do the layers as a learning experience.

Thinned paint can be troublesome for beginners- It won't look perfect, it will usually take more than one coat. Note on thin paints- You don't want them watery, just thin. Think that they should be able to flow- practice that on a sprue or something. Just note how GW paint can seem kind of thick, and you want it smooth. Not like water or a wash, but just smoother. I'm sure people with more knowledge than I can tell you more about thinning paint properly.

PSSSST: Prime yellow and use a Gryphonne Sepia wash + more yellow paint. You'll be a happy camper.