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I've been wondering if anyone has any wisdom regarding painting or modeling kill markings, battle honours or promotions etc. onto minis?
If anyone out there does it, what do you do? Are you subtle about it, or do you go mad and exult your the heroes in your army?

I've got a Black Templar who was always just intended to be another grunt, but was assembled back when I didn't really care for playing, so (fortunately, as it would turn out) I gave him a power fist and a combi-melta. In a game where my woefully underprepared army came up against a wall of tanks, I bumped him up to the rank of Sword Brother so he could legally be equipped with both, and he quickly single-handedly became my only reliable anti-tank model.

Thankfully, he's already pretty heroic looking, though I'm thinking of making his promotion to sword brother more permanent, and maybe re-painting his pauldrons accordingly when I get the chance.

Any similar stories and examples of promotions or kill markings? Any wisdom for doing them?

One rule of thumb I heard a while ago (and cannot remember where from), was to apply kill markings according to the model's highest kill count within one game.

For example, the kills markings on one of my Chimeras (if I ever get around to updating it) would be five or seven, as that is the highest number of enemy casualties it has created in a single game (drove up to a unit of fire warriors and hit them with a heavy flamer, it was great.)

Big thing with this methodology is that since the kill markings are not cumulative, you won't end up with models having 500 different kill markings painted on.

Added bonus, the specific highest kill count within a single game also gives you a story to tell.

I was wondering about something like this just this morning, so sorry to piggy-back off your post.

Does anyone have a list or table regarding the colouring and the general markings for SM? I'm hoping to paint and mark my marines according to standard codex.

Funny there should be a thread about this right now, as I've been reading the Dark Angels story collection Legacy of Caliban, which has 3 novels (Ravenwing, Master of Sanctity, Unforgiven), and a bunch of short stories. I haven't finished it yet so no spoilers please, but I have read about some of the Marines getting chevrons, laurels, etc. painted on their armor after making certain milestones/feats. I was thinking about doing the same with my models to "reward" them for their accomplishments in-game.

I give my aircraft kill markings for air to air or tank kills (because railgun), and put little grey marks of friendship on my Stormsurge's pulse blastcannon for every superheavy I kill with it.

I had a scout who took out two enemy terminators with his bolt pistol. After the game, I painted a small terminator honors crux on his shoulder pad.

I did something of the opposite. My Guardian squad back in high school failed so miserably in its game store debut that I painted black shoulder pads on them and they were forced to suicide-charge at the enemy in every game following that (i.e. for years).