I was recently asked to make a tutorial about painting the white armour for the Luna Wolves Space Marine Legion from the Horus Heresy. This tutorial shows my way of painting them.
Light colours, especially white and yellow can be tricky to paint and for me I like to start with the shadows and layer up to the lighter colour. Painting them this way means that your basecoat is a very important step as a nice smooth basecoat will make the whole process a lot easier. For this example I used my airbrush to basecoat the model in Minitaire Base Grey. If you do not have an airbrush or Minitaire paints then two thin layers of Ulthuan Grey over a white undercoat should provide you with a good basecoat.
The next step is to apply a thinned wash of nuln oil into all the recesses of the model. This is to provide deeper shadows. The Luna Wolves armour is not pure white and the shadows and joins are almost black on the armour.
As the white of the Luna Wolves armour is not a pure white I used Palid Wych Flesh instead of White Scar to paint the armour. This may still be too white depending on your taste so you may wish to add some Ulthuan Grey into it. The trick now is to apply several thin and even layers of this colour. Don’t worry if the first couple of layers look terrible. I recommend thinning your paint to a milky consistency using an acrylic thinner is possible rather than water to get a good flow. I used a detail brush to carefully apply the white around the recesses as you want to keep the shadows showing through. This is my model after the first layer.
However after 3 layers the white looks a lot more smooth and clean.
That’s essentially it. I painted the boltgun on this model black despite them being white in a lot of the artwork. I just wanted there to be more contrast on the model.
