Painting Plague Marines still am I.

So the last few days I have been on staycation while my mom was in town. We had a heatwave so it was tough painting to start but I managed to finish one purple plague marine and I’m almost finished a more classical looking Diseased Son. I used some old techniques and some new techniques. I also used some old and some brand new Citadel Contrast Paints so I’ll try to recollect basically what I did below and include both WIP and a finished miniature photo.

If you’ve been following along you’ll know I’m painting both purple and green plague marines and for the lone purple plague marine I decided to try priming it with Wraithbone and using Shyish Purple as a base. It was not an overwhelming success but painting secondary parts of the model like the tabard are much easier. Of course for the black base coated model I went back and painted a bunch of things like skulls, tubes, and yes the tabard with Wraithbone so I could once again use Contrast Paints to try and speed things up.

My problem with Contrast Paints is I can’t just do one coat and done. Usually I put a wash or some edge highlights or sometimes I go crazy and use washes, glazes, contrast medium, and highlights on some minor piece like the tubing or the pustules. But I’ve seen people do this bruised skin looking tubing and I thought it looked good so I did my attempt at it. Not sure I should have painted the tubing inside red though.

I do like Contrast paints for bones, some odd skin tones, and cloth so I’m hoping to use them extensively when I get back to painting Chaos Cultists and then I’ll have to resist temptation to keep highlighting and shading.

On the purple model’s tabard I used the new Garaghak’s Sewer but it came out pretty close to Snakebite Leather over Wraithbone. I added some highlights and washes but there isn’t much difference between the two. One paint I did use a lot was Mortarion Grime, it isn’t too strong, when I want more browny green or greenie brown I reach for Baby Poop.

The green plague marine has a Basilicanum Grey tabard and I just realized I didn’t paint a unit marker on the purple plague marine, he is supposed to be a member of the Scarlet Fevers. It has been a long time since I added a new model to an existing squad, I thought I was done with plague marines purple or otherwise.

I spent a lot of time on the metallics using Tinny Tin, Gun Metal, and some GW metallics including a pretty old pot of silver, the new pot I bought seems to work less well, it is not mixed well and no amount of shaking seems to fix it, maybe I’ll have to try using a tool. I’m even tempted to get one of those paint pot shakers.

Tesseract Glow was used on the slime. You have to put it on pretty thick, but then I put an old green glaze, the ones with the red lids over it, that seems to have yielded good results quickly. Nurgle’s Rot is more yellow and less opaque so I use it over other paints to tint them. I also use bright coloured paints and I have some fluorescent ink I’ve yet to try.

Both these models are mounted on resin bases but I bought them long ago and I’m not sure who made them, but one may have been from Dragon Forge Design, I’ve ordered a lot of bases off Jeff over the years.

I am almost done painting the unit markings on the plague marine with the blight launcher, the first new plague marine I’ve painted. I want to paint a bunch more blight launchers, I bought the the bits so we’ll see how easy the conversion turns out to be. I want to put two into Gangrene squad and then I’m not sure which squad I’ll add one to, possibly Jaundice or the AXE gang.

The last step is taking a picture and posting it to the Internet, specifically Flickr, but I often miss bits and I like to seal my models, so sometimes I take a picture before sealing it, in case the colours are affected, but generally the lights and the digital tomfoolery affects the colours more than Citadel sealant, that is the brand I tend to use.

If you have thoughts on painting plague marines and whether a black base coat is better than a lighter one, or if I should just switch to coloured primer and simplify my paint scheme, you can leave your thoughts below.