new to WH40k need advice on painting

[houtex73]

Greetings all,

 

Well as the title says, I am new to the hobby/game, and have a couple of painting questions. Today I assembled my first Rhino and a squad of initiates. Not to bad, tho the rhino did give me a headache getting the top piece to line up.

 

Now on to my questions:

 

 

1. Should I prime and paint the squads before attaching their arms and weapons, as to make it easier to detail the chest logo? If so, do i just prime and paint the arms on the sprues??

 

2. As far as the vehicles are concerned, the interior walls should i try and prime and paint those before fully assembling the model?

 

Now I know everyone has different ideas of how to do something, i am more just looking for the norm. I am by NO means a great painter (not yet, lots of practice ahead of me), but want to have a good table top finish.

 

Thank you for any help and advice you give me and I will take pics of my WIP once I get ready to do an assembly line of painting. Only 4 more crusader squads to put together, 2 rhinos and some LR's.

[Red Fury]

For a new player/painter, I would say:

 

1. No. go ahead and attach everything and paint it all together. It will save you boatloads of time and you can achieve a good table top quality by reaching in to paint what you can get to. From 18 inches away sitting on the table top, nobody will ever know that the aquila beneath the bolter is painted. Or, if you are really aiming for a better than norm paint job, leave off the shoulder pads and bolter. Use a bolter and some sticky tack to help line up the arms correctly and glue them in place. You will be able to reach everything really well and only have to attach the bolter and pads later.

 

2. It does help. A lot of people don't ever paint their interiors. I usually leave the top hatch removable, which helps a lot with trying to paint the inside after assembly. I glue the two jagged pieces together to be one piece and don't glue it to the hull (I magnetize it though).

 

I think the biggest hurdle for new guys is finding out modeling is much more work than they originally planned and get burnt out on painting. Set yourself up for success and start with quick and easy and move onto better and more time consuming later.

[Kronk]

Welcome fellow Black Templar Player (and possible fellow Houston, Tx player, going by your name).

 

1. I completely assemble my miniatures, then I spray them with primer, then I paint them. Black Templars are a bit easier since you can use black primer and be mostly done with the mini! I personally think that painting on the sprue is silly as you still have to cut off the bit then scrape off the mold lines.

 

2. I assembled all but the top of my rhino, then primered and painted the insides, then put the top on and primer it (being careful not to get primer inside the vehicle).

 

Does that help at all?

[Master of fact]

I have been painting for 8 years and am still learning. My honest advice is the follwing

 

Priortise scraping mould lines. Easy to do but will ruin a model when painting

 

Dont go all flash and use lots of diff colours on a mini, painting base colours neatly to start with, ie blue armour, skin tone and weapon colour then wash with a shade. There is a lot of painting advice out their but PRACTICE!

 

happy painting

[Imperialist]

Greetings fellow Black Templar player.

 

if you intend to do strong gray edge highlights (which i would advise you to do), i found it´s best to leave arms, shoulder pads and backpack off when priming black. Just makes hitting those edges easier if you can move the brush freely in every direction. If you use Templar upgrade sprues with those tabards you should not glue the legs in before priming, otherwise highlightings the edges of the legs will be rather hard.

 

So my advice:

For a normale Space Marine without tabard, and with Boltgun, leave the arms, shoulders and backpack of.

For a Space Marine with Boltpistol and Chainsword, you can usually glue the arms on before priming, as theres plenty of space left.

With Tabards don´t glue the legs on.

 

For vehicle interior...i glued on the ramp on the back, and always hav that top hatch on the model(but unglued, in case i want to put a predator turret or the likes onto it). So none should see my interior. Therefore it´s not painted. If you want to paint it, my advice would be to to so before putting the top part of the rhino on.

[Abyssel]

My advice, granted my main armies are not anything space marine, accept chaos, I have assembled/painted lots of SM models including shrike, a chapter master, Emperor's Champion, couple of vehicles, and so on.

 

I'll agree that these little buggers are more work than what you originally expected. I still have lots of berserkers because of the detail and I don't have time. One piece of advice I can give is dilute your paint. 1:1 is usually good. you can do it in layers and make it look good. When using primers, there are 3 you need to choose from. Black, Grey, and White. The difference these make are a lighter/darker outcome of the paint you use. Berserkers primed white with blood red look exceptionally red, while Plague marines primed black with green look dark. You get the Idea.

 

As a BT player, you can always prime black and work from there. I never did this with any BT model I painted, because I find that black will cover ANYTHING. So I prime white, and then any thing that needs to stay white, IE shoulder pads, will, and everything gets a nice coat of black. reverse methods I know, but I do it so I wont have a dark layer of black under my white making it look darker.

 

Another piece of advice. When putting together something, if it came with it and isn't a part of the spruce (the plastic injection links) then it probably belongs. I assembled a land raider once, looked on the inside and there was a nub (anyone who put together one of these probably knows what I'm talking about) well..it looked like a spruce, so I cut it..low and behold it was a mechanism for the door... :)

 

Go to a store, and buy 4 kinds of brushes, these are the only brushes I ever use.

 

Thick brush about 1/4 wide with stiff bristles. This is for vehicle coating

 

a brush you think will be good for putting base coats on models, generally | | wide.

 

Smaller brush than that for smaller detail ||

 

Smallest brush you can find. The brush I have is extremely small, I can paint writing on purity seals...

[houtex73]

thank you for all the replies and thoughts on how to do this, and i do agree i am going to start out easy and improve from there, i am sure my squads will get better each time i paint them. right now, i am waiting on my magnets to show up for the arms of my troops. This is somewhat overwhelming, just learning the game is a daunting feat! LOL... let alone i have about 2500 pts worth of soldiers, and transports and tanks to put together! seems like i will be spending a month just trying to get my army put together, but i dont want to rush it either, i want it to look nice, no painting awards, but i dont want it looking like my 5 year old did either!! For the players that i will be playing just realize that my painting will get better, along with my game play (hopefully).....

 

thank you again!!!!

[Firepower]

thank you for all the replies and thoughts on how to do this, and i do agree i am going to start out easy and improve from there, i am sure my squads will get better each time i paint them. right now, i am waiting on my magnets to show up for the arms of my troops. This is somewhat overwhelming, just learning the game is a daunting feat! LOL... let alone i have about 2500 pts worth of soldiers, and transports and tanks to put together! seems like i will be spending a month just trying to get my army put together, but i dont want to rush it either, i want it to look nice, no painting awards, but i dont want it looking like my 5 year old did either!! For the players that i will be playing just realize that my painting will get better, along with my game play (hopefully).....

 

thank you again!!!!

 

Ewwww, bad move in my experience. Granted, I would love to have 2500 points worth of bits floating around, but whenever I've had that many models waiting for assembly, priming, painting, etc., it makes the whole thing seem to overwhelming. Still, what's done is done. I would recommend you just focus on one unit at a tie though, fro start to finish.

 

Ok, anyway, the painting. Black Templars are easy and hard at the same time: easy because we use a very limited palette (Black, white, whitish, and red basically) but hard because almost all of the colors have tricky things to master. Black can seem very hard to highlight, and it is at first. The trick I use is in keeping the colors rather dark: instead of a straight highlight of codex gray followed by another of fortress, I use a highlight of roughly 50:50 black and codex mix, with pure codex as the brightest highlight. The one big advantage of black is in correcting mistakes, and this is an important but simple bit: if the highlight goes on too thick, you can just "push" it towards the edge with more black. Quick, simple, painless.

 

For white bits, this is a time honored trick among many Templars: do not attach the shoulder pads to the model. Prime the whole model black, but prime the shoulder pads white separately. It's a hell of a lot easier than building up to a smooth coat of white on a black foundation.

 

As far as which bits I leave attached before priming, I leave the heads, two handed weapons, and shoulder pads separate. Most people rather have the head on than the backpack from the start because it helps define the pose of the model, but I find the nooks and crannies of the attached backpack a lot easier to paint that those of an attached helmet. I've never tried painting my rhino interiors though.

 

Most of this is intermediate level advice. For starting out, like most have said, just learn the basics and get a feel for what you're doing. Templars are easily painted to table-top quality.