Imperial Fist Space Marines!!! (How to paint them cheaply!)



Starter Sprue Primed White

So you want to paint your space marines a color other than blue, red, black or green. A color that REALLY stands out and marks your army as the ork-kickers they really are. The color scheme for the Imperial Fists is your ticket!









My first admission is that I don't play this game or even read the books etc. I really know almost nothing about the system. I got a commission paint from an aquaintance of mine, and he wanted me to paint these guys up. Send me a picture I stated. When I got the pics, I couldn't resist passing on the project.




Standard El-Cheapo flat white spray paint bought at Walmart for 97 cents!

Bright yellow folks! That's right, a color unknown to me in any project I had ever done. I couldn't wait to try it. Yellow seems like such an easy forgiving color. I will tell you it is NOT. I tried several shades, and methods, which dragged this project on far longer than I wanted. This method I am showing you here is the best and easiest I have found.

Mozaltov! The best color ever for IMP Fists!

The watered down Kings Gold effect. White shines though!

The secret as listed above as you might have guessed is to use flat white spray paint as your base coat. I really use a lot of black and gray for most of my stuff, so white is always an adventure. I tried starting with black and it was HORRIBLE...don't ever try it when undercoating for yellows or pales. Just don't OK. So then I wanted to paint large quantities of these guys so I wanted to quickly overcoat the yellow. I tried some badger opaque yellows through my airbrush, and while it was a fast hard coat, it was way too uniform, and covering. It defeated the purpose of the white undercoat. Plus it was WAY too yellow.
I will spare you the barrage of crap that I tried to get a good yellow combo, and cut to the stuff that worked. Here in the USA, we have Apple Barrel acrylics for sale pretty much anywhere that sells arts and crafts paraphenalia.  As an ADHD side note, all you single fellas out there, if you want to impress/pick up girls on Friday or Saturday evenings, head on over to Michaels or Hobby Lobby, or your large chain craft store. Dress nice (no sweat pants or grungy sports shirts) and hang out in the paint isle for a while. I mean take your time. Pretty girls seem to need acrylic paints on weekends like guys need beer for sporting events! Seriously, once they discover your NOT gay, and you know the difference between oils, acrylics, flats and gloss, you will be a hot commodity!!!! ADHD moment over.....


So why Apple Barrel paints? 3 things. 1) CHEAP! Around a buck or so. 2) Made in the USA! 3) 2.5 times the amount or more of the fancy GW, or Army Painter brands, for way less money which means you can experiment with it, guilt free. I read an article on the amount of pigments in these acrylics vs really good brands and the good brands smoke these paints by like 25% more pigment to water ratio. HOWEVER if your going to mix your paints WITH water, who cares what the ratio is??!?!
So that is the secret. The color I picked finally was called Kings Gold. It, by itself looks nothing like the proper yellow that is displayed by proper Fist troopers but bear with me. The gold is a much deeper shade more towards the dark orange spectrum. You will need to mix the paint with water, around 50% or maybe a little less. Once you get a relatively bubble free mix, you can slather this crap on. It will look bad, REALLY bad. But trust me. If you used your flat white undercoat and let it dry for a day or two, it will be fine. You can speed paint an entire army this way, as long as you keep your paint to water ratio pretty close. It is super fast.

Once your first coat is dry, you might have to wait awhile, you will see the paint pigments has accumulated in the recess areas. The larger areas such as the shoulder pads are a brighter yellow.
At this point you have a couple different options. I hit the mini with a mix of white glue and brown ink. TRUST ME, mix the ink with white glue or it will be a hot mess once it dries. It will look amazine when wet, but the next morning it will look like a rorshach test of poop brown on your fig.

You can now use the yellow of your choice to over coat this. I did stick with the Apple Barrel line and used just regular yellow, and overcoated the large open areas. The results were great. You need to be careful not to overcoat too much of the brown ink spots. The yellow can be a drybrush if you like.

To do the final highlights of yellow, I jumped between Apple Barrel bright yellow or bannana yellow. Both were very effective as an edge painter. Sorry if these pics don't quite do this process justice.










Lastly add your color highlights. I used the same 50-50 water technique with Apple Barrel black on the weapons, and the highlights look almost silver in color, a very cool effect. I also used this watered down black for the large joints like the hips and the backs of the knees. For the rest of the paint, I used red and bright red for the crest and armor baffles. For the skulls, I did a light grey over coated with Apple Barrel parchment white.



Put us in Coach were ready to play...

I hope this helps you paint some minis on the cheap!!! I will post pics of all these guys when the project is done!!