Hobby Progress for Week 3

Week Three – saw me move away from Primaris models and back to the old classics. I also wanted to continue to increase my paint speed, which I hoped wouldn’t cut into over all detail. The goal though has always been about getting an army that looks striking on the battlefield, but doesn’t have to be close. So the models I tackled this week was 15 shotgun scouts.

Going back to the ancient plastic sculpts of Space Marine Scouts was really jarring at first; after painting the clean lines of the new Primaris lines, even the easy to build one. On top of that you have the scale of a Scout, which is almost comical in comparison to full grown Space Marines at this point. 

The biggest problem with the scouts was picking the leather colors to go along with the darker skin tones of the White Scars. Adding to the dilemma is Space Marine Scouts have terrible head options, leaving me to pick up few viable heads from the Biker Scout kits for at least the Sergeants. As for the colors to think about exactly how much White I wanted in relation to the amount of realism, so ended up with the White standing out when you are looking down on the model. 

I went with Cygor Brown Contrast for boots, belts, holsters, and pouches, then Snakebite Leather Contrast for pants, shirt, faces. I chose these two colors, because I wanted to minimize the yellow pigments found in many of the other contrast “browns”, but most importantly I wouldn’t I chose those two so any touch up would be minimal. 

I then follow much of the same techniques I used on the Storm Reapers, for the shotguns by using black, orange, and grey. I brought in Blood Angels Red contrast for the eagle crest. 

I was very happy how the Blood Angels Red Contrast worked with the Gryph-Hound Orange, I was fearing a color clash, but the warm tons of both the paints really complemented each other. It also made me excited to use the Blood Angels Red Contrast on the rest of the actual White Scar units in the army, as one simple coat really does the trick. Thanks to the Scouts natural mold lines the contrast paints had places to pool leaving me with very little touch up required.

Once I had all the Contrast paints applied I used my standard dry brush paints of Dawnstone, Praxeti White, Necron Compound. I added in Golgfag Brown to lighten up the browns and only Fire Dragon Bright and Evil Sun Scarlet for line detailing. Finally, I added some transfers found on the White Scar Upgrade pack to add some more red to the models.

The results can be seen below…

As you can see this was quick and dirty application, it took me on average about 12 minutes per model which included drying and transfer time for about a 3 hour process. Since I had to use a lot more base colors than before, and for the first time, I felt the time dedicated was about right. The Scouts with the rest of the army look great taken as whole and doing these Scouts, will make the project task of Scout Bikers that much easier, now that I know what colors to use.

My only regret is not getting the skin tone right, which means I might have to go with a standard painting approach on future models.