Hey Jungle,

this week's tutorial voting was close in bringing us the garbage tutorial, but just close and it was not enough. The winner with 27 votes was the Marine Step by Step. Next time garbage maybe to really get rid of it? We'll see :D



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Allright, Roman will take over with the article now. We hope you enjoy!

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INTRODUCTION
While this world is going up in flames we spent our time with the following step by step of a Imperial Fist Space Marine, painted in a little unusal way.


This article will take you through my steps and thoughts. Sometimes I might miss a photo and I want to excuse myself. During teh process it is hard to push yourself to make a photo in every step.

PREPARATION
I started preparing the plastic bits out of my bitzbox that I wanted to use for the Marine build up. I like to start with something I often forgot in the past when it comes to Marines: Drilling my guns!


I even did it from the side to the bolt pistol to have her look truely nice and 'realistic'.

While preparing my plastic miniature I took my blade and drill and added true material damage to the plastic armour.


With details like those small cables ...

Next I wanted to create some rivets on the armour. A easy to do so is using PVC glue and a toothpick. Take the toothpick, pick up glue, place it, let it dry, do it again if you want to have your rivets more obvious.


THE PAINTJOB
While going into the paintjob and my thoughts on it I want to keep the article very precise and clean, without further ado and blablub that might distract you... oO stop.

Allright, primed white and black.

Next I decided for a basic color for the main parts on the model. Of course this is the armour and as painting yellow can be a pain in the ass sometimes I tried to find my own way once again with this. I used VMC Japan Uniform for the basic color. Why? Because I am able to paint stronger yellow highlights on top with a lot of saturation powers later on.


... and I still wanted it even more desaturated. I added tiny drop of purple to it. Yellow and Purple are complementary colors and mixed they turn desatured.




I used the airbrush to spray a first layer of this color to the model, mainly focusing for an opaque look on the legs and lower torso part as this will be a shadow tone later on.



On top of this I used my pure Japan Uniform tone via the airbrush in several takes to ...

... recieve an opaque look. Did so mainly from a 45° angle over the top of the the miniature. I am doing this to keep my prepared, desaturated shadows from the step before still available.

Ok colors used so far. Now I add Golden Yellow from VMC.


Of course not pure. Here you can see my basic color (base), my first spray of my main color (1st) and now I add a tiny amount of  Golden Yellow to my 1st to brighten it up.

I am again at the airbrush, hitting the model again mainly from a 45° angle and not from below. this brigthens up the shapes and volumes of the model and I am getting prepared to paint my highlights much stronger.

I am done with airbrushing for now and go over to the brush.

I am adding more and more Golden Yellow to my mix until - that's the plan - I am painting only with it. Increasing stronger highlights on the armour volumes.

More and more to recieve a clear look on my light situation. I am painting a strong zenithal light here.

Now I am using Army Painter's Soft tone to go back to some shadows again. I thin it rather well and do about 3 layers into the shadow areas.

It helps me to seperate different areas and get a dark line to wrinkles, bullet impacts and such.  Mhyeah, I painted the base in some grey. Staying neutral until I know what I want to do with it :D

Now is a good step to make the miniature more readable for my eye. Pushing highlights and shadows in the yellow only will not lead me to a better understanding for the model. So Metal Parts painted with Scale75 Black Metal, red parts, leather parts and handgrenade.

I now can understand the model much better.

... and added a wash to the base.
I think it was Army Painter's Dark Tone with a drop of green color in it.

Next step again brings me back to the yellow armour. Now with everything seperated well I am able to add some white to my Golden Yellow to search for smaller areas of highlighting.

In this stage I often suggest to check back with a black and white photo of your model to see if there is enough contrast between dark and bright. For example, here it works fine, you can now imagine this guy as a blue, black, green, red, orange Marine, I am just talking about the contrast dark/bright. Sorry for the blurry photo.

Working more and more on the brighter yellow, putting them in contrast to darker areas. Going in for edge highlights.

Working on more detail here and there. Also taking care of all the true material damage to show them, but you can see that I mainly push the contrast in the upper torso area. I told you I am up to paint a strong zenithal light. Added highlights to the metals with a brighter metal tone.

 Pushing, even forcing the contrast to paint my light situation.

Roman this is no yellow anymore?

Right. What I did next was using yellow and carefully glazed (tinted/put a filter on top) my bright surfaces more back to yellow. I also used a drop of Tank brown in some of the glazes.

I also decided to make the base a bit more powerful and to paint an athmospheric bounce light to the whole model. I like this stuff recently and do not mix it up with OSL. For this I used tourqouise.

I never think about OSL here, for me there is a whole planet looking like my base and that guy is fighting on it. The light of the sky hits the ground and bounces back to the marine. In fact it would influance everything standing there, even a soccer ball.

I worked on some more edge highlights and did a 'freehand' to the shoulder pad that looked not like an imperial fist, but somehow the shape of Bart Simpson.

I really enjoyed painting up this fella and loved how the true material damage came out.


I hope you enjoyed the article!
You can find more photos on Putty&Paint.

Keep on happy painting!
Best Wishes
Roman