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This feels like and exceedingly silly question, but i feel i should ask it

I recently started the hobby, and my painting isn't up to scratch yet, but i need to know. the person who taught me told me that if i fully assemble the model, prime it then paint it, it will be incredibly difficult to paint.

he said i should assemble the body, then the arms (put on the bolters and shoulder pads and such) and leave the backpack separate. then prime each piece individually and paint them individually then assemble.

which is the better way to do it? painting everything individually seems like it would take more time, and i did it for my first model i ever assembled, but then it wouldn't glue together properly.

It's not incredibly hard to paint with the model fully painted but getting paint to areas behind where the bolter/arms are can be a bit hard to cleanly get the details.

Assuming the units come with the gun unnatached to the arms i would recommend gluing the arms on and painting the model then painting the gun seperately and attach it. But thats only really neccesary if you want to paint every last bit of the model (you often can't see the areas that are hard to paint)

If you do decide to individually paint the parts of the model when they are done just scrape the paint off the areas where model joins and they should stick together just fine.

I leave the Backpack and Boltgun seperate. If it's, say, a Khorne Berzerker, the Arms don't cover the Body at all, so you can leave those on. It's only if something hides an area of the Model that you need to keep it seperate.

Hi Obsidian Raven!
I always assemble my plastics completely before painting. It's true that you can find parts of the model a bit harder to reach with the paint brush doing this, but I find that for table top grade models parts that are very hard to reach are also not very noticeable. The upside of painting fully assembled models is that if you have trouble with the gluing stage, you aren't ruining the paint job while you fiddle with the parts, and that is more important to me, personally. In the end, it's a matter of taste I guess.

--- Be well, be blessed!
Frankie

I prefer to paint the pieces seperately after i pop em off the sprue. If you are having trouble assembling the model then try super glue, it dries just as quick as plastic glue, but the piece can be popped off later for further conversion/modeling without damaging it (IE its a bit of a weaker bond) or if you want the strong bond, use plastic glue but file the paint and primer off the attach points, that way the glue will get to the actual plastic.