paint with gun on or off?

[Lowpro]

Simple question but figured it's one of those "up to you really" answers.  Usually I've assembled troops all together with their respective weapons glued and then I prime.  But for painting the chest it becomes very difficult to do well, especially for chaos marines which look much better with a wash over the metallic bandolier thingies.  It's possible but takes a lot of work.  

 

I know that you can paint all of the figurine first and then superglue on the painted gun later but I wasn't sure if that works well and you still have the possibility of your fit, even after dry fitting, to not work out optimally. Imagine getting all the way to the end of a paint job and then trying to fit a melta-gun (which REALLY SUCKS to fit BTW, it always seems to make contact with the chest; I've seriously considered just having my troops hold it in one hand forward with a grenade in the other hand because CHAOS!!!).

 

What's your "course of action" in this respect?

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

What I do is glue the left arm to the body and glue the bolter to the right arm after several dry fits. I prime and paint the right arm with attached bolter separately and attach once the body is done.

 

I also paint the heads separately for similar hard-to-reach reasons.

[GrandMagnus]

I usually paint the body without arms first. Then I attach the arms, paint them, after that the weapon and the backpack. It lets you paint all those places that would otherwise be unreachable.

[MagicMan]

I usually dry fit, then glue the model together except for the backback/gun and sometimes the head.

 

You can still move the arms while the glue is drying to make sure the gun fits, and it lets you reach the chest and other areas when painting.

[Gargantuan]

If you can't reach it with a brush then you can't see it. I usually fully assemble my miniatures.

[tvih]

I really don't see a reason to paint with the gun already attached. But that's just me.

[Dosjetka]

Well, as Gargantuan said above, if you can't reach it with your paint brush, you can't see it, so there's little point to actually paint it. You don't gain much time for one model, but if you're painting a whole army, you can save quite a bit of time.

[tvih]

Details partially obstructed by the arm are harder to do. Like aquilas and whatnot. Not to mention the gun's other side etc. Never mind actually getting the basecoat spray to reach all the places blocked by unnecessary extremities.

[Fibonacci]

I find it easier and faster to paint first, then apply the gun and backpack.  Usually.  It depends on what is on the chest and what I want to do with it.  However I always paint backpacks in batches seperately since I can crank out a dozen at a time pretty quickly.  I would like to say it works better that way but it is probably as much of a procastination crutch as anything If I am not sure what I want to paint or how to get started I can always fall back on doing a bunch of packs to get back into the rythmn of painting. 

 

If your hands are steady you can get a brush everywhere you can see on a model.  If your hands are like mine you can get a brush all over everything next to what you can see on a model :(  So I need the extra room and anything I can do to make it easier is a win for me.

 

In the end it is entirely up to you.  There is no right or wrong to do it.  Some things matter how you do them; like multiple light coats is always better than one heavy coat.  But pre-assembly vs sub-assembly?  The way that gives you your best results is the way to do it.

[Urauloth]

What I do is glue the left arm to the body and glue the bolter to the right arm after several dry fits. I prime and paint the right arm with attached bolter separately and attach once the body is done.

 

I also paint the heads separately for similar hard-to-reach reasons.

 

I do exactly the same, but I mag the right arm at the shoulder in case I ever want to change weapon loadouts.

 

Lately I've started tacking or dry-fitting the backpacks on my chaos marines, too (it's important to know where the backpack will be as it's a huge part of the mini's overall balance and helps dictate where it needs to be on the base) then painting them seperately and sticking them on last. I imagine loyalist ones are less of an obstruction, but chaos backpacks couldn't be more of a nightmare to paint around if they were designed by tzeentch himselt.

[nurglespuss]

As more an more marine kits have the bolter stuck to the arm, I tend to convert them to be holding the bolter out one handed to avoid the problem entirely!

 

However, I usually paint the bolter seperate to the arms, as I hate to leave anything unpainted (even if I can't see it!)

[skawolf]

I prefer to paint space marines with the gun off as it lets me paint whatever details may be present on the chest of the model. Though, if you paint with the gun on it may cover those details anyway so it doesn't matter if they are painted or not.

 

When I paint Tau, Eldar or Dark Eldar I usually have the gun on as it doesn't really get in the way like a bolter (or other space marine heavy/special weapons) does.

[Chaeron]

I often simply paint with it on, mostly because it's a lot easier to glue at once than do it separately. However, this is immensely frustrating for the aquila etc. - and so now, if I had the choiec of buying new, I'd deffo glue the gun after!

[hisdudeness]

I base what I pre glue mostly by the foundation color so I can spray. I mount parts on finish nails for holding. Second I look at details I want to make sure I am able to get to them. Once everything is painted I will start gluing. Down side is that this slows painting down but gives a better product.