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Hi guys,

I'm painting two armies, orks and space marines, so I can move from one to another when I get bored. I'm ok with the orks, but I always hit a block painting a space marine army. The first twenty models or so are ok, but I start to get sick of painting the same colours.

What I want to do to get an army finished is to use a variety of colours that still go well together, but I'm not sure how to go about it. One way is to just paint them all different chapters but that might look a mess. Another way might be to paint them all in different stages of a deathwatch selection process with the black as a unifying colour.

Any ideas are welcome, please advise.

Thanks

One thing is to break up the power armor with other units. While it might be similar, doing terminators or vehicles can help break stuff up. Characters and special units often have slightly different pallets.

At last resort there are scouts. One of the reasons mine are in forest camo is so I had something not Ultramarine blue to paint.

With 7th Edition you don't have to have all of them the same color army depending on the rule set you play. If you play Unbound, you can basically do whatever you want color scheme wise, as long as your opponent agrees with the rule set.

If you have access to a SM Codex there a lot of color variations even in the same color scheme. Different ways to paint the knee pads, trim colors and shoulder pads. I was actually really surprised with how you can paint the same army if you follow the fluff.

Take a look and good luck!

I counter this by working on 2-3 projects at once. Right now I'm finishing off a 1.5k crimson fist army, out if the 4k+ I've got. Then I'll do half of the stealer cult, then I'll finish my HE blood bowl team, then do some more crimson fists, then finish the other half of the cult, then do some more ad mech...

Means that projects take longer to finish, but having the changes in colours and textures definitely helps keep up the motivation to paint.

Model them interestingly, that always helps feel like you're not just doing bolter marine #31.

Choose slight variant schemes for different units.

My marines are black and white with a bit of crimson trim. But I'm always switching up the white areas on the helmet and legs.

Mdlbuildr wrote:
With 7th Edition you don't have to have all of them the same color army depending on the rule set you play. If you play Unbound, you can basically do whatever you want color scheme wise, as long as your opponent agrees with the rule set.

You can do this in any edition without playing unbound; your paint job has nothing to do with the rules you play. I don't know anyone who would stop you playing your Blood Angels as Ultramarines so long as it was clear what the models were actually being used as.

Crusading forces of Marines sometimes team up with multiple chapters; it is possible that a few chapters have combined together into a larger strike force to tackle some specific objective if you want to paint every squad a different colour.

Try adding weathering, extra gear, conversions, and dynamic posing to keep your painting fresh too.

 SilverMK2 wrote:


You can do this in any edition without playing unbound; your paint job has nothing to do with the rules you play. I don't know anyone who would stop you playing your Blood Angels as Ultramarines so long as it was clear what the models were actually being used as.

From what I understand, certain space marine armies have certain special perks/abilities. So if you have a smattering of different armies, the rules should be agreed upon by the players. That's alI meant.

You could paint them in a similar fashion to a DA army.
So elites in one colour, tactical squads in the main army colour and fast attack in another.
Just use the main army colour in areas to unify them all as a whole.

I like to give my dark angel tac marines all green shoulder pads, I have a lot of red pauldrons in my terminators, my assault marines are all going to be getting red helmets (like the airborne berets), and I'm thinking of spicing up my devastator squads with hazard striping on their backpack units. I find that if you do a singly primary colour, you can change around the secondary colour on the models quite a bit while maintaining consistency.

Good question, I'm kind of suffering from this too. One reason I loved painting my skaven is you really don't expect as much consistency from a horde of scavenging rats. I'm pretty much breaking up the tedium with different projects, so I'm only painting maybe say five up to a certain stage, then moving to something different then back to the marines. It does tend to make it take longer though. I like the idea to vary the secondary colour areas, I think I will try that as well!

Mdlbuildr wrote:

 SilverMK2 wrote:


You can do this in any edition without playing unbound; your paint job has nothing to do with the rules you play. I don't know anyone who would stop you playing your Blood Angels as Ultramarines so long as it was clear what the models were actually being used as.

From what I understand, certain space marine armies have certain special perks/abilities. So if you have a smattering of different armies, the rules should be agreed upon by the players. That's alI meant.

SilverMK2's post just means that you can paint your marines however you want but for the game you only use one ruleset, for example like this: You could (in older editions) paint each squad in another chapter's colours but play them all as one Blood Angels army (you just make the unique stuff identifiable and tell the other players which codex you are using). They would be a crusading army which consists of multiple chapters fighting in one war. So you could have some Space Wolves Blood Claws miniatures and use BA assault squad rules for them as long as the miniatures are equipped like regular BA assault marines (so no 15 man squads and whatever other strange options Blood Claws) and use the points values, stats, rules, and equipment from the BA codex. Or you could play Wolfen as Death Company as long as the equipment options are distinct nobody cares how you paint your army.

You could even throw in some Ravenwing speeders and bikes (paint scheme) on top of the Space Wolves assault squads and use whatever the BA equivalent is as long as the options are not confusing. It's just a paint scheme after all and tell your opponents what's what (most people are used to a one colour army). You could even throw a campaign badge on the lower leg armour of your marines (where they can usually be found) and vehicles to be really authentic. They are usually a simple icon like a (winged) skull, knife, any GW imagery really on top of a geometric shape (triangle, square, circle) contrasting with the underlying armour.

You can find some badges here (under Army Campaign Badges): http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Honour_Badges_(Space_Marines)

I've found doing different types of units to be the only real break in the monotony. Something else I do from time to time is justify a completely different type of paint scheme with some heroes/named models of the same army by keeping one part of their armor loyal to the original chapter. So for example, a flyer will be way darker than usual for 'night fight' purposes, but then a few panels of armor will be blue with the Ultra logo.

I've also got 8 other armies when I'm tired of doing power armor, so I suppose I have a big advantage.