40k: How To Paint Yellow… part1

As regular visitors will know, I've been experimenting for a week or so trying to get a recipe for painting yellow marines that works for me. This weekend I made a decision about how I will proceed with my Imperial Fists army and wanted to pass on what I've learned.

I wanted to find a recipe that would allow me to paint the footsloggers rather quickly, but that could be expanded upon with the character models so that they looked awesome. I think I've found it, and all you need is 3 pots of paint (for the basic colour).

Going against all my years experience of painting 40k, I undercoat with white. This recipe does work with my usual black undercoat, but I've found results slightly better with the white. I like to make sure that the white is as solid as possible as it just makes things a lot easier down the line.

Next is a good basecoat of GW Averland Sunset. This is one of GW's base colours and covers almost anything in solid colour. Having said that I thinned it down quite a lot and gave the models a couple of coats to be sure.

Now comes the most time consuming part – adding highlights. This is where you must decide how long you want to spend and how subtle you want the results. In this test model (below) I spent about half an hour trying to get some decent graduations in there that I would normally reserve for character models.

Take your Averland Sunset and start adding white. Do as many or few layers as you like – obviously the more you do the better the graduations and final result – adding slightly more white to the mix each time and keeping the paint thin. You want your final fine highlight to be pretty much pure white.

At the moment our model is looking rather pastel and washed out, but the magic is coming. However, if you find you've lost a lot of the original pure Averland Sunset in the shadow areas, don't be afraid to go back in and repaint some shadows.

More tomorrow (once I've taken some more photos!)…