The Battle of the Artemesium Strait

Alasdair - Month 2 - Ultramarines

Month two has actually seen some paint get onto a miniature, but more on that later. First of all I wanted to spend a bit of time discussing my approach to painting this army. As I mentioned previously, my style of painting has become increasingly focused on painting single miniatures or small war bands to the highest standard I can. Whilst this is great for my development, it has seen me increasingly become disheartened by the idea of painting a whole army.

I am a big believer in speaking to people with experience when attempting a new approach, so as such I turned to Dan Porter and Alex Morris, two players local to Leicester who very much focus on painting impactful armies. I’ll throw to their advice:

Dan Porter

I always say I’d never win a best miniature painting competition but I might just win a best painted army award. That’s because I’ve always tried to paint armies rather than models. What do I mean by that though? Simply put, I paint things with the view that it’s the impact of the overall army I’m going for rather than each individual model being a masterpiece. 

There’s many things to consider when approaching a project like this but the basics are simple. You’re aiming for a consistency; a repeatable set of steps and processes that produce the same quality of output each time. This requires a bit of planning and preparation of course but I like to apply the Rule of Five so  a core five colour palette across a whole army and five techniques to master for the project. As an example from my Iron Warriors these would be:

The main armour colour, the black, the yellow, lenses and leather for the colour palette and hazard stripes, oil streaking, plasma glow, pigment bases and pin washing for my techniques.

The key benefit for nailing these things down is that it stops you thinking about each model you’re going to paint. Instead you start approaching it as “painting the black on this squad” or “making the bases for my infantry units”.

Alex Morris

The key to painting my armies quickly is finding a method that I’m happy with and is easy to replicate. I knew I wanted to paint my Ultramarines to be dark and dirty, due to fighting on Calth.

I was inspired by a technique I saw online and used a combination of a dry brushing and stippling to achieve the look. The results are a striking contrast between the highlights and shadows. This technique isn’t the neatest but the small individual mistakes are largely unseen when the army is set up together. I enhanced this technique on the characters and elite units, as well as spending more time on the details, to allow them to stand out from the crowd.

This army is never going to win any awards for painting but its something I’m happy with and i was able to complete it in a short time period.

Overall, I think I can take three key points from their advice:

1. Focus on the visual impact of twenty models, not one
2. Find something that is easy to replicate each time
3. Limit the number of techniques and colours across a whole army

With these things in mind, I have completed my first test model. Overall, I’m fairly happy with it. I think I can probably make the highlight colour on the blue a little brighter, but there aren’t any major issues. I had previously ended up with some very Night Lord looking models after working on the blue, but now have got it to a place I am happy with. Once I am happy with the method I will post a bit of a how-to guide.

I’d love to get the two tactical squads and two support squads (thirty models overall) done for the next blog post, but we’ll see optimistic that is!

Bit of fluff for the end

On a final note, I’ve started to sketch out the lore for the Artemesium Strait. The battle between the Scars and Ultramarines will be set in a rare stable corridor out at the very edge of the Ruinstorm that engulfs Macragge, the aforementioned strait. The traitorous White Scars have been sent to guard two space stations that sit either side of the strait, battle stations Kleos and Timae. Eager to exploit the potential weakness, a small task force of Ultramarines have been sent to try to take control. As for their fate? You’ll be finding out over the next year!