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When it comes to painting my army, do I have to follow any certain color scheme? I know that the army needs to match, but if I wanted to do let's say a Purple / Teal Space Marine army, could I do that? What are the rules or preferences on something like that?

In the past I've painted a handful of 40K First Strike Starter Set Space Marines and Death Guard to practice, and I've always used Chaos Black primer. The problem is, my paints seem to be SUPER thin and dark over the black. (I do thin my paints a bit and do at least 2 coats of base color paint.) Should I try Seer Grey or another color for primer? If I go with something like T'au or Space Wolves for my first 'real' army, I wouldn't want them to look as 'grimy' as the Death Guard I recently painted with Chaos Black as a primer.

Thanks in advance for any constructive criticism!

First of all, welcome to the hobby!

You can paint your army in any scheme you like. Marines in particular have special rules assigned to chapters in specific colours, for example, Blood Angels in red and White Scars in, well, white. but as long as you are consistent and are clear with your opponent, then if the scheme looks good, then people tend not to mind. People tend to get grumpy if they think that you have used a paint job to conceal something deliberately and will suddenly pull a sudden unexpected switch on them. Otherwise, counts-as is an important tool in the hobby box and tends to be viewed favourably.

For example, I don't know if this is even possible any more, but if you have an army with multiple detachments and each detachment is a different chapter, but you have them all in your own scheme and still want to use chapter specific rules, then its confusing and you'd likely hit some push back from opponents. Clarity is the key in my opinion.

Also your army doesn't need to match. The 40k lore is awash with examples of last-ditch forces coming together to work together, or long lost crusades that have been scavenging whatever they can to survive, or even just a normal crusade force with squads provided by different chapters, all working together in a single combat theatre. The Departmento Munitorum is not known for its communication efficiency, or for significant lead time in deploying forces, and therefore you can have ice-world armour still in its tundra camo schemes being deployed alongside jungle troopers in some kind of wacky red/blue alien flora camo. In other cases, a force will be properly equipped for the climate and environment it is being deployed to and all the regiments or chapters involved will have a consistent colouration. Its up to you.

Lo and behold, a purple/teal space marine:



Paiting bright colours over black is hard, and you will need to use multiple coats. also base coating of any kind I find to be demoralising and painful process, so I would recommend finding a spray-can that matches the main base colour you want to use, and build up from that, rather than black. Grey Seer is a very light grey, almost white, so that makes painting darker colours harder, and you end up with a very bright result. This is great if that is the look you are going for, but can cause problems otherwise.

Using a mid-grey is a handy go between if you don't want to use a coloured base coat.

There are loads of good painting tutorials out there, so definitely look them up to see what kid of colour combos you like.

I only use black brush-on primer (Vallejo Black primer) because I tried lighter colors of brush-on primer and it did not adhere to the plastic at all.

If you're like me, and you only use black primer, it would be a good idea to do an undercoat before applying a base coat. Corax White is a very thick light grey paint with good coverage that makes it ideal for painting lighter colors, like pink. Wraithbone also has decent coverage and makes a great undercoat for yellow.

Another thing to note about Citadel paints is that they are semi-transparent in nature, the layer paints being more so than base paints. So if you use black primer, the colors will always be darker than if you use white or grey primer. If you're doing Space Wolves, Mechanicus Standard Grey primer would be a good alternative to Chaos Black.

Look up 'zenithal highlighting'. It's quite simple to do, and works with rattlecan primer as well as airbrushing.

In my experience you don’t need to put primer underneath GW coloured rattle cans. The paint performs admirably as a primer as well on GW plastics. But then I’m biased against brushing any kind of undercoat on anything as I find it super dull

Primer is designed to coat your model in a layer of material that paint sticks to very well, much better than bare metal or plastic.

Your primer can be your base layer but you will probably have multiple base colours even with space marines as your armour might be blue but you will have gold parts on the armour and red parts on the bolter (using a basic ultramarine example). So whether you use black, white or grey primer (or even blue) you will need to build up your base colours to look how you want but the colour underneath, your primer, will make a difference. It if your base colours are looking dark and not colourful try another layer to build it up.

Orks are a good example as they have 2 main colours, red armour and green skin but you wouldn’t use 2 different primers. So building up smooth layers to the thickness you want is a skill to learn. A grey or white primer won’t necessarily make your paint brighter, if the layers are too thin they could look pale.

I would recommend getting multiple primers and trying them out. For brushing on primers I personally prefer green stuff world primer.

mrFickle wrote:

I would recommend getting multiple primers and trying them out. For brushing on primers I personally prefer green stuff world primer.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely half to try out their primers.