I’m not the quickest painter in the world. Well, I don’t think I’m actually slow, but I don’t paint for tens of hours each month, not even every day like a lot of painters. So when I had the itch to paint an Ultramarine I pulled out my space marine pile of shame, my trusty Tamiya hobby saw and got to gluing and cutting.
One (of many) areas of feedback I have gotten recently is that I’m not clean enough, so I needed to practice being as neat as I could, both with edge highlights and black lining to really make the model punch with clarity. I thought building and painting half a space marine would be a good task as the aim was for practice and not competition, and to also not take me the six months it usually does to finish a piece, where I could focus on cleanliness, contrast, colour composition and also try my hand at painting the best human face I could.
THE BUILD
I made two mini busts and I set out with one main focus in terms of their composition. I wanted to get as many textures, materials and colours in to the bust as I possibly could because the mini is so small and in order to make it impressive you would need this variety in order to try and show off my skill set.
So I focussed on the more veteran space marine kits, Sternguard veterans, blade guard, sergeants and lieutenants all came together to show off purity seals, battle honours and fancy shoulder pads.
THE PAINTING
I started by painting the head and face because honestly if I messed that up and wasn’t happy with the end result I’d have just abandoned the whole project. In actuality I was really happy with the result! I was trying for an almost realistic result, using painters like Jojiko as inspiration. I can’t really remember the paints that I used, but it will have been various AK and Citadel (now warhammer colours eww) paints, with Vallejo Ice Yellow used as the main highlight colour. I personally try to not get hung up too much on recipes unless I’m army painting and so rarely ever write down what paints I am using.
I think that I pulled off my objective in improving my cleanliness, in particularly I like the cheek and eyes, even managing a catch light in the iris. But there is definitely still plenty of room for improvement. I probably wouldn't lean so far in to yellow in the future as he is bordering on jaundice.
I played around with a few different recipes for the blue, as if you go too grey you end up with a Space Wolf, too green you’re in the Alpha Legion, too dark you’re a Night Lord and too royal blue you’re a Crimson Fist. The recipe that I settled on started with Kantor Blue , mixed up to Macragge Blue, then Teclis Blue, with the final blue being Lothern Blue. Once I reached here I pulled out the trusty Greenish White and mixed up to a beautiful teal highlight. It was nearly pure Greenish White for the main edge highlights. If I was to do this again then I would add specular spot highlights of either Ice Yellow or a pastel orange colour, and maybe some purple or red in to the shadows.
I really enjoy painting non-metallic metal, there is something in the process of selecting your viewing angle, main, secondary and tertiary highlights and then problem solving your way through the mini which is very enjoyable. That’s not to say there were bouts of frustration, the shoulder pads were very difficult to say the least. I would actually recommend painters who identify themselves in the beginner-intermediate skill level to work on space marines. Their form is quite easy to break down in to simple shapes and then work on your lighting from there.
Probably the most relaxing area of the mini was the tabard which was slowly stippled up from a dark brown basecoat to a bright off-white. Again, I cannot remember the recipe whatsoever, but I would take a good guess that it goes something a little like this: Mournfang Bronwn > Steel Legion Drab > Ushabti Bone > Screaming Skull.
Stippling is the process of making thousands of dots instead of the usual layering brushing technique. What I love about this is that it creates this illusion of physical texture, in this case that of heavy fabric.
The process is very back and fourth as I start with large stipples just trying to cover everywhere quite quickly with relatively watered down paint. As there will be many passes over I'm not too bothered about the consistency of size and spacing. But once I'm getting to around the 3rd layer I start to get much more specific and precise. I try to be quite consciousious with my stipple placement and I am not just stabbing the model. I'm quite slow and methodical to ensure that the size and spacing is consistent. This, to me, is what helps sell that texture effect, because if they varied then your brain wouldn't read it as cloth, but just random dots.
Something new for me was painting on top of transfers! I've used transfer on army projects before but that was just throwing them on at the end and hoping that they looked okay. This time, because of the volumetric highlights I painted over the transfers to be consistent with the global highlights and added in some light weathering.
I think that they've come out great, much better than I expected! The tonal shift is subtle, but adds the required interest, with the tiny chips just helping to show that it is part of the pad itself and not a transfer.
SALUTE 53
With the mini all finished I decided to take it with me to the Salute painting competition and enter it in the Miscellaneous category. It felt too small to go in Large Scale/Bust and wasn’t a full mini for the Sci-Fi single entry. Salute was a much bigger competition than I expected, with multiple Golden Demon, Slayer Sword and open masters medal winners throughout all the categories. I hadn’t been to a closed competition since Golden Demon ‘23 so I wasn’t expecting to get anywhere in the comp so overall it was a rather stress free day.
As we got close to the awards ceremony I was happy to see that two of my entries had been placed in the finalist tier, my Beastlord in Fantasy Single and this mini bust. I was then even more surprised that I took silver in Miscellaneous!
This was a welcome confidence boost as my opinions on my painting goes up and down and with MPO just a month away it gives me hope of doing okay! I'm entering standard painting again after asterisk-gate so lets see how it goes...
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