Another Space Marine, Dagnammit.

As I stated in my last post, I used to be a lazy painter. My days of playing warhammer was all about the game rather than the painting, so my armies didn't look that amazing on the table. I had a Skaven Army that included a massive slave unit of sixty models. All I had done to paint them was spray them brown, paint each nose black and the end of their spears silver. Oh and flock the bases, jobs a good'un. My first 40k army was actually Blood Angels. They were so badly painted I have actually overpainted or sold most of them, so apart from a terrible Mephiston Librarian on a Bike conversion I still have I technically don't have any Blood Angels.

I recently ventured into the town centre for a visit for the first time in a long while for my first Covid Vaccination (Yay!!) Whilst there I decided to get some hobby supplies. I still haven't touched my Stargrave plastics as I don't want to waste them, I am saving them as a treat. We have a small independent store in town that mostly sells airfix type kits so I picked up some Tamiya plastic cement from there. I have good memories of that brush on poly that GW had back in the nineties that just bonded the two surfaces together without getting any gloopiness everywhere. Apparently this stuff is just like that, so my Stargrave plastics will get the same VIP treatment. I really want to get these plastics right, almost to the point where I am scared to actually build them. Not having definitely decided on what any particular rule system I am using them for (I didn't actually buy the Stargrave book) I'm not sure what I'm going to arm each model with. Do I go for lots of variety for a skirmish type games or do I make whole units of models armed with similar weaponry? I also grabbed a few new texture paints to try out.

I also thought I would pop into my local GW store to get some paints and another painting handle. When I first saw these painting handles I thought they were a waste of money, but then I got one for my youngest as he was struggling when painting to hold the models. Then I'd actually started borrowing it myself and found it really useful so now we have one each. (Never too long in the beard to pick up new techniques.)

Whilst in there I showed the store manager a picture of my latest Space Marine paint job and he was impressed (I know, I know, it's his job to be nice.) and he asked what I was going to paint next. Well the store is having it's anniversary soon and they are having a couple of competitions including a conversion competition. GW only bits or green stuff allowed. So, I decided to go right back to the beginning and have a play with some green stuff. Could I make a new style Primaris Marine look like an old school Blood Angel. Well, I don't think it's gonna win the competition, but I had fun making him.

Oh and of course it had to have an old school green trim on the base, nothing else would do.

Paints used:

Coat D'arms. Blood Red, Bone, White, Grass Green, Ink Wash Armour

Citadel. Abaddon Black, Caliban Green, Eshin Grey, Retributor Armour, Grey Knights Steel, Steel Legion Drab, Flash Fitz Yellow, Baal Red Wash, Brown Ink

Painting Space Marines

So regular readers will know I'm no longer a GW fan, I am definitely not up to speed on the current rules, or background of their systems. I'm not anti-GW at all. I buy their paints and I will peruse their shelves to see if anything jumps out at me, although I'll be honest, a lot of the new style models with their insistence of using lots of negative space and delicately balanced "stringy" bits isn't to my taste. (just me, I know I have no reason not to like it, I just have no idea how anyone transports any of it safely!) 

There are a large number of people who look back on the nineties as the "Golden Age" of Warhammer, whole groups of people look back with tinted glasses on what was once my teenage years and the "best of times" rather than the "end of times". (Okay seriously, that is enough with the quotations.) There is an excellent fanzine out there here dedicated to those days of goblin green edged bases and cardboard standees for that larger model in your army you just can't afford. 

There is an argument to be said that us Longbeards need to let go, like the middle aged man with his car on his drive he had when he was a teenager, tinkering with it every weekend to keep it running because it is a classic. When in reality, it's just a piece of metal from the eighties. Things improve, technologies change. When I was a kid embracing the latest 40K rules coming out there were probably Longbeards at the time tutting and stroking their facial hair, lamenting the lost days of Rogue Trader. So, maybe things have improved?

The last time I played Warhammer 40K the rules were in the midst of a trend that bigger is better. Apocalypse was the trend so all games had to be bring everything you have to the table. I had a Space Marine army and so had increased it to the size of an entire company and then some. I had a lot of Space Marines, mostly painted as quickly as possible to get them on the table. The game took all day for us to play, turns would last for up to two hours, the rules were basically skewed towards whatever the latest new models were, so my Space Marine army suffered horribly. I packed my lads away carefully in their foam trays and I was done with them.

More recently GW did one of those magazine runs where part one is £1.99 to entice you in and the first issue came with three new style Space Marines, a brush and three pots of paint. As one of those colours was black and paint costs more than that per pot in store, I proceeded to buy three copies just for the paint. The Marines were packed away for a rainy day.

This week I decided it's been long enough and to see if I could paint Space Marines any better, also to see if it the models are any better. My painting style has changed over the years so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I also read somewhere recently where someone suggested that we should try not to compare our painted models to others across the internet but rather our own earlier attempts. That way you can see your own improvement. So, here they are.

I've gone for an Ultramarines colour scheme for a mass appeal so I can use them to show my painting ability. It's amazing how many paints you actually use though for what initially seems a simple colour scheme. As an exercise I took note for once in the actual paints I used:

Undercoat: Coat D'arms white

Main armour blue: Citadel Macragge Blue, Citadel Blue wash (if you don't happen to have a twenty year old pot of this Coat D'arms do a similar ink blue wash), highlight with Citadel Russ Grey.

Helmets: Coat D'arms white with a wash of Coat D'arms light brown super shader, Citadel Eshin grey for the eyes.

Sergeant head: Coat D'arms horse tone brown, then drybrushed with Citadel Cadian Fleshtone. Hair is Citadel Sunburst yellow with a glaze of Coat D'arms Golden Yellow.

Boltguns: Coat D'arms gun metal and horse tone brown with respective washes of Coat D'arms ink armour wash and Citadel Brown ink. Citadel Abaddon Black for the middle body.

Brass trimmings: Citadel Retributor Armour with Citadel Gryphonne Sepia.

Purity seals: Coat D'arms Blood Red and Bone. Washed with the same Gryphonne Sepia.

Base: Vallejo thick Mud.

There you go, 19 pots of paint for a "simple" paint scheme. I think I've come a long way since I first started painting Space Marines.

What do I think of the models? Well they are a lot less fiddly to put together than they used to be, this might be partly due to the fact they are bigger but that is explained by the fact that apparantly they are a new strain of superior advanced Space Marine. I due wonder if the larger sculpts came first then the backstory was invented as an excuse. They do feel more like the genetically superior beings that I always imagined when reading the novels though. The original guys never seemed to tower over their guardsman counterparts.

I fished out a couple of my old guys to do the comparison. 

Well, they are clearly a lot taller, but these are Primaris Marines, an improvement on the original geneseed. Maybe the larger model came before the story, maybe not, who knows. I actually kinda like them. Has my painting improved? I'd like to think so, mainly not due to any increase in skill but in care and attention. I spent probably ten times as long on each model as I would have back the first time. I certainly couldn't paint another full company of Marines at this rate, not if I didn't want to go crazy. Nevertheless I don't think I'm going to go out and buy the latest 40K rules and get playing again, but to be honest, when I first painted Space Marines I think 90% of my hobby time was about the game, the painting was a means to an ends, these days, this old Grognard likes to take his time painting a model, if I get to roll some dice now and then that's just a bonus.

Talking of bonus content, those of you who did the maths, will know that if I bought three copies of the magazine I would have nine marines, well I first painted up just a five man squad, then I thought I would have a little play with a tiny conversion by fishing out an old power fist from my bits box. (Yep, I never throw any spare bits out.) I think it fits quite well, in fact in the old marine models I felt the power fist looked too big, here it looks pretty good.