How to paint Imperial Fists--- by RipperOk, so, first thing first: this is how to make your Imperial Fists not look like a bunch of floofy dandelions. In my view, marines should look large, imposing, and like they are about to rip your head off, no matter what color they are. The way I had been seeing Imperial Fists done just wasn't cutting it for me, and after reading the history for them in White Dwarf, I really wanted to put some together (WD#258). So here is how I painted my down and dirty, city fighting, battle damaged, gonna kick your head in and show it to your mother Imperial Fists. To start off, I'd like to make a public service announcement. If you don't shave off mold lines and flash, your hair will fall out, you will get running sores all over your face, and your eyes will explode. Thank you. I'm going to be explaining how I painted my assault marines here, but the principles will be the same for any marine you paint. Also, since I wanted to have my marines to look like they had been in the thick of it for quite some time, I attacked them with my exacto knife after I had finished assembling them. I gouged slash marks, bullet holes, dents, and scrapes into their armor and tried to make it look like they could take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. After that, I primed them white, this is fairly essential and if you are in the habit of priming everything black because you are too lazy to black line your miniatures, you need to either get over your fear of getting better at painting, or stop reading this, 'cuz you gonna do a lot of it. If you DO decide to be a lazy weakling and prime them black, then you are making more work for yourself anyway because you'll have to paint the whole miniature white first (well, not the whole thing, the armor parts), as straight yellow over black looks icky.
Stage 1:Having my nice clean white miniature, we'll call him Rond, I then painted all of his armor fiery orange. Don't worry about being too neat at this stage, just concentrate on getting a nice even coat and making sure that there are no streaks in the color. As a fairly steadfast rule, several thin coats are better than one thick one, and I find that thinning the orange down with healthy amounts of yellow ink to be beneficial.
Stage 2:Again thinning down my paint with yellow ink (you'll need a lot of this stuff if you're gonna paint an army…) I dry-brushed all the orange with golden yellow, being fairly liberal. In case you're just starting out painting, or you've suffered massive brain damage, dry brushing means that you dip your brush in the paint (the bristles, not the whole thing, putz) and then wipe off all the paint on a piece of paper or a rag, then you should be able to lightly draw the brush across your skin and see all the little cracks and lines and details in it, after you have it like this, use your brush to paint the raised areas of the miniature. What this will do is pick out the details of the figure without obscuring your shading. At this stage, it still doesn't really matter if you're neat, as long as you are consistent with your color coating.
Stage 3:Now, do a lighter dry-brush of sunburst yellow. This time, try to stay towards the edges of the armor plates and leave some of the darker colors in the recesses of the armor.Stage 4:Use bad-moon yellow as a final highlight. Use a very light dry-brush around just the edges of the armor. You may need to go over it a few times to make sure that all the plates are defined and dynamic, but it's worth making sure.Alternates:If you are doing a more important model, like a sergeant or other character, it's better to spend the time to actually paint the varying shades of yellow on instead of dry-brushing. This is far more time consuming, but it looks a lot better when it's done. The most important part of this technique is to be VERY neat, and make sure your paint is fairly thin. It will take several coats to look right, but the end result is worth it. I've included a picture as an example, just using the same colors as the dry-brushing method. When I do my sergeant, I will be mixing the different stages together into about a million different shades of yellow, this will take me forever, but hopefully it will look good. Another thing you can do is add white into the bad-moon yellow for a more pristine look, but be careful, because if you do it all too neat and make it a very pastel yellow (which adding white will do) you run the risk of making your marines looking like pansies. If you do use white, try to keep it restricted to corners, like on the edges of the plate on the back of the hand. If you are painting just regular marines then, I wouldn't bother with either of these alternatives, unless you are going to Games Day, in which case, you probably don't need to be listening to me.
Stage 5:Now this is the part that will take the longest of all. The black. At this point, I painted everything that wasn't yellow black. This includes, straps, grenades, weapons, shoulder pad rims, eyes, battle damage, carapace, and the ribbing in the joints of the armor. Then, using my handy brush made from one whisker of a cat cut into thirds and glued to a toothpick… ok, not really, I just use the finest brush I have, and use that. You should always try to have one really really good brush that you take care of for doing ultra tiny detail. Never ever dry-brush with this brush, as dry-brushing is hell on the bristles and will destroy brushes faster than your puppy will. Anyway, using my super tiny ultra detail brush, I went back and I painted a thin black line wherever two pieces met. This means around all the edges of the armor where it meets a plate under it. Any large crack you see, paint black. The newer plastic marines (well, they're not new, but you know what I mean) have lots of extra panels and studs sculpted onto their main armor plates. I painted all these black as well. If you want your mini's to have a more clean cut look, leave them yellow, but outline them. This can be really frustrating at first, but it is a technique you can use on all of your miniatures and will really make things stand out. Also, this is where you should put squad insignia and chapter markings….I didn't, and it caused me a little trouble because when I went to do them at the end, I had to paint them over cool looking battle damage, when, in reality, the battle damage would damage those markings as well.
Final:If you want, you can actually just stop there and come back another day, black and yellow is striking enough that it doesn't look half bad with just the two colors, plus, if you put your marks on already, you have your squad identification. However, more detail never hurts, so I kept going. For the battle damage, I added three stages, first, a dry-brush of dwarf bronze, this can be pretty sloppy, if you get any bronze on the yellow, it'll just look like blast marks, so don't worry about it. Then, a little brown ink in all the bullet holes and scratches, this shades it and makes a much more dirty blasted out look. Finally, add a dry-brush of boltgun metal to highlight it a bit. Then, I slopped lots of brown ink around Nord's boots to make it look like he has been stomping heretics in the mud. For the weapons, I just dry-brushed the metal parts with boltgun metal, and gave the bolt pistol casing a highlight of codex grey, I also did this on the straps holding his jump pack on and his chest emblem. (note: I will be doing the same color for shoulder pad rims and chest eagles to signify what company the marines come from. If you don't know what company gets what color, pick up the old Ultramarines codex, and it has everything all laid out. FYI Black is the color of the 5th battle company.) Then, I painted the little skull in the middle of his chest and his eyes white, then red, then highlighted them with blazing orange. Do up the base however you want it, and you're done!
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