New paint scheme for "One Force" marines

 Hey there everyone!

I revealed my spots here and my desire to make "One Force" (my new name for this project) of marines that are general, definitely not chapter specific, that I can use with many if not all codices in order to try different flavours of marines.  I mentioned in that post how I would like them to look, and I'm starting to settle on a scheme and method of painting them.

First up, I have to apologise for the awful pictures in this post, I'll be re-working this mini anyway and when I have, I'll be posting much better pics, promise!

I needed a test model so rooted around in my bits box and grabbed a bunch of bits that I wasn't already using or didn't have plans/intentions for.  I cobbled this guy together, and as I have a real dislike of purity-seals and the "unnecessary" ornamentation that is found on a lot of marine models, removed as much as I could except for the chest-piece.

I've tried out a few variations, but feel relatively settled on this scheme (at least for now).  Its pretty basic, quick and easy, and nice and dark which is a part of what I was hoping to achieve.  The painting method is:

• Orkhide Shade basecoat over the whole model.
• Metals are painted with Enchanted Blue, plastics/rubbers are painted with Adeptus Battlegrey.
• Metals and plastics/rubber are washed twice with Badab Black to make them almost black but with a hint of the underlying colour.
• Catachan Green is painted with a downward motion over the whole armour, leaving the Orkhide Shade showing in the recesses.
• Camo Green is used as a sharp highlight on the edges of armour plates.
• Dessert Yellow is used to paint in a basic double arrow Chapter marking and single bar squad symbol.

You can see in the image above how the basic armour scheme came out.  After that, I started experimenting with battle damage and weathering.  I wanted to do weathering exclusively using what I had to hand.  I ended up using Calthan Brown (foundation paint) heavily watered down.  I also found that it helped to wet the whole miniature with clean water before applying the watered down paint as it helped it flow into the crevices.  The look I'm hoping for is less something that is actively covered in dirt, but has been roughly cleaned with only dirt remaining in the crevices.  I may apply the "dirt" more strongly to the lower parts of the legs also, but haven't decided yet.  For battle damage, as ceramite isn't a metal but rather a metallo-ceramic, I wanted grey rather than shiny metal.  In the image I've used black covered with Fortress Grey, but I think I'll tone it down to Codex Grey (Adeptus Battlegrey was too dark).

Thoughts?

Well I quite like the paintwork - yes it looks a bit like Dark Angels, but I hope that the different contrast colours and lack of decoration will be enough to separate it from that.

In real life, the line highlight looks a bit too bright on the clean portion of the model, so may need to be toned down a bit, however, once the weathering has been applied, I think it might need to stay so bright to show through.

For future figures, I think I'll paint the chest decoration in the contrast colour just to lift the whole colour scheme a little from its very dark current state.

Its also pretty quick to paint.  Including the time I spent thinking about changes, it didn't take me more than an hour or so to paint this figure, and that included drying time for the washes.

I don't like the battle damage as it is.  Its too big, and just doesn't look realistic enough.  I think I need to reduce its size, make it more only along the edges, and if it is on the main armour pieces make it more like scratches/scuffs than the current chunks of paint missing.  I may also model some of the damage into points on the model.

The metals/plastics aren't very convincing, I'll have to experiment with that.

I'd really like to hear what you out there think and what changes you think I should make?  I'm going to be asking for as much feedback on this guy over the next few weeks/months till I'm happy with the overall scheme and style, before going ahead with the main force.  I learned from my wolves, each squad looks very different as my painting style changes/improved with painting them and now they just don't look like a cohesive force.  I'd really like these guys to be different.

Please comment, and especially criticise!  Cheers - Andy