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I decided to document my attempts to paint a small Imperial Guard army in the hopes that it will be motivate me to finish it. I have painted a few armies in the past, but none except for tyranids have they come close to what I would consider to be completed (and even the 'nids only because I just collected the models that I wanted instead of building a playable army.) By the end of this, I hope to have an army that is playable on the tabletop while still having some charm and character in it. I noticed recently that the genestealer cults brood brothers is just an infantry squad with an extra heavy weapons team for free so there might be some infiltration going on in the army soon enough.

I am still not very good so advice is always welcome.

First off is a regular old guard infantry man who I tested the colour scheme on. I think he turned out fine. The colour scheme of grey on grey was a bit bland, but the gold decorations and the purple pauldron help break it up. The cloth is eshin grey with a black wash highlighted to dawnstone and the armour is dawnstone with a black wash highlighted to grey seer, meaning that it is a relatively quick colour scheme to throw on.





Next was the sergeant to command the squad. I tried to do a different skin tone which worked out okay even if the camera had a hard time picking it up. The biggest problem I have with him is that without the light helmet, the dark grey of the cap makes the model's head look too dark. I might change the colour of his cap or try to fade in more of the dawnstone. My biggest concern here though is that the cap will start to take on the appearance of being a weirdly shaped helmet. I also made the stripes on his sleeve too bright because my lamp was having problems and I was painting bad light (though you can't see those because I forgot to shoot that angle). Also how do you give this man lips?





Finally for today, I finished this sentinel. The legs were a bugger to highlight and I feel like I screwed them up a bit, but I am relatively happy with the final result. The armour plates around the cabin turned out surprisingly well. The colour scheme also translated really well from infantry soldiers to a vehicle even if the darker grey only gets to be used inside the cabin for chair cushions. I decided on using red as another secondary colour for the cabling, sensors, and displays as it compliments the grey and purple quite well (and I had a lot laying around from my CSM). The autocannon is stuck in place with putty inside the peg so that it can be swapped out depending on the needs of the army, though I have yet to get around to painting the other weapon options. My biggest gripes with the model are that I need to be more careful while applying wash to machine parts and that to take care while highlighting complicated portions like the legs. I am also not happy with the yellow lamp and really would appreciate any advice on how to spiff that up.

(Please ignore the paint station in the first image)







While I have you here and hopefully entertained, I do have some questions though for which I am dying for answers.

First, how do you resize images? The ones that I posted here are bloody huge and hurt my eyes to look at. Is there a simple way to do it or do I need to go and make the images themselves have less resolution.

Second, what is a good setup for model pictures? I used backgrounds of printer paper with a desk lamp with another sheet of printer paper over it to diffuse the light, but I feel there must be a better way.

Finally, this is less about painting and more on the game WH40k itself, but I have not played since 7th and are army specific detachments still a thing? All I see are the basic patrol, battalion, brigade, etc. I know some of them were bad for balance, but it seems a shame to get rid of them entirely.

I hope that this blog will have a long and happy life documenting the construction and painting of a successful army. I will see you next time.

Hey, that's a good start! Simple but effective paint scheme and as you say it translates well from infantry to vehicles etc. And yeah, it should also work fine if you'd shift into GSC territory ^^
What do you want to do with the bases? There are some really simple options like just fine sand etc. and a bit of drybrushing, but bases are also a great way to tell a bit of background story & create atmosphere. Even might be a fine possibility to subtly show GSC infiltration by making their bases look a bit more corrupted with some toxic waste or whatever.

Re: resizing images, you're not using the Dakka gallery, aren't you? I'd advise for this, also because you can just copy and paste 'standardized' image sizes from the gallery into the post editor. For the setup, well, you could either build or buy a light box (I got a Foldio which I think also a couple of other people on Dakka use). But I also think getting an image processing app (just get GIMP for example, it's free) would be useful for 'fixing' lighting via white balance correction - this will adjust all the contrast + colours to the pure white elements in the image so they'd look less murky (compare the first front view of your sentinel to the other pics!)

Looks like a good start!
For the lamp, I'd probably start with pale yellow with white centre and then a wash of watered down bright yellow, it looks okay as it is though, just a bit brown