Painting The Court - Paints Plastic

Deciding on a paint scheme is truly one of the most difficult things ever.

If you’re running a particular Chapter of Space Marines or faction of Drukhari then your paint scheme is already planned out for you, you likely even have tutorials on the exact scheme you need to use.

Coming up with one from scratch is MUCH harder.

So, here’s how I did it for “The Court of the Abnegant King” my SM renegades/Chaos force that I’ve been working on for a long time now.

First of all, we need to come up with some basic lore for our force, as that will likely help inform our later decisions.

So for The Court, I decided that I was going to lean into the word “Abnegate” which means “to renounce or reject something”. So my army is a collection of SM that have “renounced or rejected” their previous lives to join forces with The Abnegant King.

OK, so they have rejected something. In this case their Chapters and previous allegiances. How to symbolise rejection? My first thought was just to simply strip the armor of any symbology or colour tying it to another Chapter or Legion.

As you can see, just by focusing on one aspect of the army we’ve already got the start of a paint scheme going, we’re looking for something quite bare, so we’re likely looking at Beige-ish white to represent bare ceramite, or a dull grey/dull metal to represent scrubbed down armor.

So we’ve narrowed our base colour right down, and we can make a further decision on this, because white/light colours are a nightmare to paint, so going for the dull grey is going to be far easier to paint across a whole army*

* always bear in mind the amount of models you’ll have to apply paint to when considering your paint scheme. All well and good to do Harlequinn style checkerboards, but can you do it another 50, 60, 100 times?

Cool, so based on the name of my main character, and the ease of being able to paint the chosen colour, we’ve got our base coat sorted.

We could actually just leave it there, but I wanted them to have a mark that made them mine

As I’m writing this I’ve just gone and Googled thunderwulfens Soul Haunters, and realised I’ve fully ripped them off without being congnizant that I was using them as a template.

I even have the red hand print on the shoulder pad.

Here I thought I was being clever, oh well, I’ve got this far so I might as well continue.

ThunderWulfens Soul Haunters, for those who haven’t seen them before

LORE TO THE RESCUE!

I’ve decided that the hand prints aren’t just going to be red. I’m going to paint them on with “blood for the blood god” by Citadel, which will make it look like an actual bloody hand print and not just red paint. I’ll likely be doing them free-hand as well, so that’ll help sell it because I’ll likely struggle to replicate them exactly.

To make it “mine” I’m also going to splash a bit of the same on each of the Marines left hands, hopefully if I get it right it’ll look like some sort of ritualistic thing they do before battle. Daubing their shoulder pads with their own blood, ala the old Samurai who would nick their hand deliberately as they drew their blade to ensure that it would never be drawn without spilling blood (which is apparently a trope, but it’s a cool one so I’m going to pretend like it’s real!)

Going to work on a test mini this weekend, got some old Dark Angels that I don’t mind messing with in the interests of science, I’ll post it HERE WHEN ITS DONE