Brother Christopher's Purple Marines Project

[gaurdian31]

The highlights came out really well, glad that the angry lines ended up working for you! I also think the gunmetal works well with your scheme, excellent choice!

[TheArtilleryman]

On 11/4/2025 at 10:51 AM, Brother Christopher said:

 

Thank you! That's actually very helpful - what you wrote somehow made things way easier - something appears to have clicked into place.

 

***

 

Since I went to the mountains and failed to get the fourth model finished by the end of October for the 12th Months Challenge, I figured that I can be lazy this time and skip the grass and bushes. For once. I'll glue some one with the next batch of miniatures. But apart from the greenery, the model is ready:

 

Unlike the case with the Phobos marines, the Company Champion didn't feel like a chore to paint. I'd even say that painting him was a blast. Don't know why. And to be honest: I will take it for what it is and enjoy the feeling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My thoughts and comments:

- It seems I've given up trying to be a "better painted." And I'm growing more and more content with this. I've given up trying to refine the edge highlights and put more work into blending the colours on the armour partly because I feel liek improving this is a bit too time-consuming and partly because I think (ESPECIALLY WITH THIS MODEL) I found a great time-to-results balance. Furthermore, I quite like the chonkier highlights: while they don't look great in close-ups, they make the model better-defined when looking at it with the naked eye. Also, I bought a new purple paint - it wasn't what I hoped for but I've found a great use for it to get (more) reliable colours for the highlights. 

- I missed a splash of purple on the elbow pad - I'll have to revisit this part.

- The chequered patter on the tassets is a bit rubbish with close up, but you've got to believe me that it looks great in person. I'm very happy with it - a small bit, but very cool.

- I'm a tiny-bit annoyed that I failed to mask the line resulting from reducing the size of the shield properly. But I'm not annoyed enough to revisit this part.

- I'm still not entirely sure about the gold and if whether I want to continue using it for commanders in the future. I think I'll keep it for Champions and go with something more restrained for other HQs.

 

Next up: I'll try to equip some Infernus Marines with some Melta Guns (Rifles?) instead. I'm quite apprehensive about this since the weapons are resin and I expect that they'll put up a fight. Depending on how forgiving resin is, I intend to make a squad of 5 (including a Multi Melta) or a squad of 3 'tankbusters.' 

This guy is AWESOME. Possibly my favourite marine of yours so far. I like how you combined both the panel highlighting and edge highlighting to great effect.

[Brother Christopher]

Thanks for the positive feedback! Particularly about the reassurance about the choice of colour for my fire support guys.

 

This week has been... strange. Mostly because of work. In order to combat the time-consuming mundaneness, I surprisingly spent a lot of time doing actual painting progress. This has taken the time from other things, like being online, though.

 

I managed to finish the armour and do the base metallics for all three melta marines. I also did some soul-searching.

 

  

On 11/12/2025 at 9:14 PM, TheArtilleryman said:

This guy is AWESOME. Possibly my favourite marine of yours so far. I like how you combined both the panel highlighting and edge highlighting to great effect.

 

I'm very glad you like him! I appreciate the comment about the combination of panel and edge highlighting. This ties neatly into my soul-searching.

 

During short breaks between chores, I did some Googling in an attempt to research alternate painting techniques and find some inspiration to perhaps change the way I paint my minis.

 

And I think I meandered a bit but turned the full circle. For some time now, I'm slightly enamoured with the idea of trying to do volumetric highlighting or focus on panel "highlighting" by properly blending paints so that the painted-on lights and shadows imitate reflections from a single light source. I'm not particularly sure whether I'm using the right terms but I'm considering trying to 1up my painting and do some 'pro-style' models that are more like display pieces than game pieces.

 

Putting aside my skills threshold (i.e. I doubt whether I'd be able to pull off blending lights and shadows and whatnot), in the end I'm not sure if I really need that: it might just be me wanting to try something new. 

 

The conclusion I've come to is this: in the near future, I'll need to decide whether I want paint an army or whether I want to paint miniatures. Right now, I'm leaning towards the former - I think I'll want to stick to painting models that will look nicely in a display cabinet and - hopefully, one day - on the tabletop. And for this purpose, the style I'm developing for my Purple Marines works pretty well. I see it as a bastardised 'Eavy Metal wannabe style. Depending on the complexity of models, I manage to get single marines painted in between 2 and 5 hours. I think it's reasonable. The thick edge highlights help in defining the details and my attempts at making colour gradients make the large flat surfaces look more interesting. Does it make sense to make armour darker at the bottom and lighter towards the top? Not always and, therefore, not really. But it's simple enough and doesn't require much though, knowledge of (art?) theory, nor skill.

 

Come to think of it, I've reached pretty obvious realisation about painting styles. The 'Eavy Metal/boxart style is very striking and aims to market the miniatures, make them look nicely from all angles and on the tabletop and feels achievable. The other styles I have in mind look way more time-consuming and appear a bit prohibitive. Additionally, it seems that the minis look good from certain angles - something that's great for posting photos of them online or displaying them in a cabinet, but seems a bit problematic on the tabletop. There's also the real-life/hobby time factor involved. While the dream of doing 'pro-level' paintjobs of single miniatures appears to be alluring, in the end I find painting squads of Space Marines (instead of individual Space Marines) more pragmatic and fun due to potential of painting more different things.

 

On top of that, I do like my Space Marines but I think that even the coolest of SM models are quite boring. I'll try some of the pro-stuff in other projects. Or maybe attempt at a 5-6 model squad of fancy marines in the future. (There's also a chance that if I'm in the mood, I'll sidetrack my melta marines and do 1 'fancy' test model over the weekend, who knows.)

[gaurdian31]

52 minutes ago, Brother Christopher said:

While the dream of doing 'pro-level' paintjobs of single miniatures appears to be alluring, in the end I find painting squads of Space Marines (instead of individual Space Marines) more pragmatic and fun due to potential of painting more different things.

This bit to me is the most important part. Go down the path that offers the most enjoyment. You can always paint a one off miniature in the other method, but the main thing to keep in mind to me is what is most enjoyable.

[Brother Christopher]

@gaurdian31 That's what I'm trying to do. Although, this is probably the first project that really got me thinking about painting as a hobby. Before, with my Black Templars, I've been fixed on finishing the project and keeping to a more or less uniform style in a reasonable time.

 

With these purple guys, I find myself thinking and planning way more than I did about what I want to do with them. Presently, I want them to be my modern Templars: largely painted in this faux-boxart style. After experimenting with painting Primaris for the previous batch of models (including sponge painting), I returned to using brushes exclusively. There are also some ancillary ideas, realisations and plans - all a result of this week's soul-searching. Overall, this has been a very fruitful week hobby-wise.

 

The new thing that 'clicked' into place in my mind is that I realised that I want these models to be intended for gaming. 1. They should look nice at a distance (and the highlighted edges help with that), when looked at from all angles. 2. There's going to be a fair bit of them - I don't really want to spend more than 5 hours per model when there's 50-60 in the queue. 3. I want to get back to scratch building and I want to have some custom-made vehicles for these guys; I have to account for non-painting activities in the army project as a whole.

 

With these principles in mind, I am now set on painting them to a standard that's pushing beyond what I can do quickly and comfortably, but not my a lot. I still want to find shortcuts and fixes here and there. And with these melta guys, who are a direct follow-up of the 'success' with the Champion, I think I've found the sweet spot.

 

While not completely ready, I really wanted to share my progress:

 

 

Here's my first attempt at painting the heavy support symbol. It turned out that it was more tricky than I expected but I feel I'm quickly getting the hang of it:

 

Here's an example of me being overzealous. I thought that it'd be a cool idea to add a yellow stripe on the gun without realising that it'll blend with the scroll thingy. Now, I think I've managed to separate the yellow stripe from the tan ribbon... but yeah, it took some fixing and I should've thought about it sooner. I'll follow up with the same 'mistake' on the other two guns.

 

 

And here's a close-up on the face. I think it turned out pretty nice, although, it looked better without the eyebrows. I'm still not sure why I bother to keep on trying to get eyebrows right - it usually comes with a detriment to the face but... I kinda want them to have them. Maybe I should google a tutorial or something: perhaps there's some easy fix of other thing that I'm missing.

 

 

All in all, I'm quite stoked about these. At the end of the day, I'm not 100% sure about the metallic finish to the shoulder pads, backpacks and helmets but I think I'll reserve my judgement till they're properly finished. 

 

***

 

On the subject of heraldry and/or colours.

 

Over the months, with your help, I've been developing and redeveloping ideas for markings for my Chapter.

 

As it stand right now, I've decided on the following custom markings:

- Base chapter colour: Purple

- Company designation: Colour of the emblems on shoulder pads, as well as the stripe on top of the backpack.

- Squad designation: battle role symbol on the left greave.

- Battle role designation: Colour of the shoulder pads, shoulder-pad trims, as well as the round element on the backpack; non-battle-line troops also wear helmets with a different colour.

• Battleline: purple shoulder pads, white trim.
• Fire support: gunmetal silver pads, black trim; gunmetal silver helmets.
• Close support: black pads, -undetermined trim-; black helmets.
• 1st Company Veterans: white arms (including shoulder pads), white helmets.
• HQs: some variation of the Veterans' livery (perhaps white arms but purple pads?)
• All sergeants wear green helmets. 

- Special formations and roles (Vanguard marines, Champions, Techmarines) may use custom markings, as need be.

 

In the end, I've decided to reduce the number of colours and focus on the more 'boring' combinations (white, black, silver, gold) - while it perhaps won't be as 'fun' as I wanted it to be, limiting variants of the livery should help with keeping the project more uniform in the long run and, perhaps, will make it a bit more mature (i.e. I won't regret the different arm colours and four variations of the scheme in two years' time).

 

[kabaakaba]

Wow, i don't check your purple pals for quite some time and.. wow! They are great. And I like you develop a plan. it's always help. Yeah black/white/metallic may be not fun, though depends how you paint them.
Regarding brows, just check some picts in web. find variant you like. Brows hairs always  faced in different direction at different part of brow so some parts darker some lighter. if color/darkness of brow is uniform it's looks like it shaved. 
Any way great work. Your guys is a one of  project which make me think about my own chapter.

[space wolf]

I dont know, i think the brows look fine, for what its worth. As for your color choices, i think youve made good ones. Going with those more neutral colors will let your purple "shine" and once youve got several units on the table, i think youll be happy with how they look.

[bloodhound23]

Highlights look great on the meltagun.