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So I'm hoping that making this thread will help keep me enthusiastic about painting this army. I'm not a painter. I've been playing the game for 20 years now, and every painted model in my 3 armies has been done by someone else.

Well, Army #4 I am doing myself. This was the first of my 1st Legion. I've got 39 more Tactical Marines, 5 Terminators, a couple characters, 1 Doredeo Dreadnought, and 1 Contemptor Dread awaiting the brush.

Any tips anyone would have along the way I'd really appreciate.

I'm using Citadels Chaos Black as a primer. Based with Model Color acrylic black, and using GW Ironbreaker and Khorne Red. Also using Model Color's Natural Steel for things like the cables on the face mask.

I've done like 5 different armies with black as the main colour.

If you have an airbrush, it will make this process easier but if not you can dry brush and get pretty good results for table top.

The recipe for straight black is:

Abaddon Black
Eshin Grey
Nuln Oil

Thats it. Just paint it all black, dry brush Eshin Grey, and wash the whole thing with Nuln Oil. This creates a very toned down black with subtle grey highlights with a matte finish. This is good if the model has a lot of detail like gold trim etc.

For Space Marines, because their armour is very round and there's not a lot going on, an extra layer of highlighting can make the model pop more. In this case you do the exact same thing as the recipe above, but after the nuln oil dries you go back and dry brush again (more lightly) with Eshin grey again. You can go for yet another highlight layer and drybrush even more with Dawnstone grey. Additionally you can edge highlight with Dawnstone too, I usually don't edge highlight but some people put this technique to great use.

If you are looking for a more brown/black you can substitute Eshin Grey for Skavenblight Dinge and Dawnstone for Stormvermin fur.

If you are looking for a more Blue/black you can substitute Eshin Grey for Darkreaper Blue and Dawnstone for Thunderhawk Blue.

A friend has an air brush and said I'm welcome to use it. We'll probably discuss it tomorrow.

Appreciate the tips.

So yeah, I didn't stop working. I've actually painted up most of my army now. Here's some pictures of the progress. Some of these are still WIP. They all still require basing, a technique that I'm still trying to teach myself.

Working on the beginnings of my Ravenwing.