How To Paint Ultramarines

You want to basically start by an undercoating the whole figure black, which is this Chaos Black made by the Games Workshop people. Just put a little bit of black onto the palette. You don't want to water it down too much or it won't stick to the plastic.

But basically you would do 2 different undercoat colors. If you're painting, if you're doing dark colors, the Ultramarines being this dark blue colour, there are figures that are painted yellow and light green and red, you will undercoat that with this color which is the Astronomican grey. Some people tend to undercoat, if you're doing a big batch of figures, you can undercoat it with a black spray paint but I find it that, just it the paint is too thick.

I'm going to show you how to use, do a technique called a "dry brushing". Basically, you want to use an old brush which is pretty much the opposite of what you want a good brush to be. So if you look at a good brush, you see that it's got a very fine point on it, whereas one of these old brushes is just coming in pow, it's quite sort of furry.

And you want to take the Ultramarine blue color, give it a shake. Now, what you're doing with this is you putting the paint on the brush, like that, and you're taking most of the paint off the brush and drag the brush across the figure and what's that doing is highlighting out the ridges. You got to be careful, don't do it all in 1 direction or pull down or cross ways because you're landing with streaks.

You'll find that this comes with practice. You'll find that when you first start doing it, you might have too much paint on there or not enough. It's really so much bad to not have enough paint on there and ended up sitting in doing it many coats of this than just doing it in 1 go and having too much.

By the time the paint, this blue paint is from the brush, onto the figure, it's dry, so you don't have a drying time with this technique. You just literally put in that blue on there and you will gradually. I'll show you one that I've got here.

You can see the blue with this one which is nearly completed. You will keep doing layer after layer of this dry brushing until you get, it's basically turned blue but you, areas that are indented, like this little grooves on the legs and on the face have stayed black. So, it's just literally a case of going over the figure with this blue.

Okay, once you've dried brush, the whole space marine with this ultramarine blue color, you need to put highlights on the armor. I'll show you this one which has been finished, which is basically the areas where the lights will hit the armor and reflect back so, on the top of the knees, the hands, the head. I'll show you how to do that.

You need to get a really fine brush but not finer than, I think this is a 50, so that is a very fine brush. There are very different techniques and there are very different colors that you can use, so I'm going to show you just how to do this top leg bit. And there is literally, just put in a line of paint on the very top edge of the leg like that, bearing in mind that these things are actually a sort of 2 and a half centimeters tall, and well, likely not be viewed from a couple of feet.

You are literally highlighting that area. I've put a thin line of ice blue on there, another technique would be to put a thin line of white on there and wash that with blue. If you make a few mistakes, because it's such a small area where you can get away with putting a bit of the dark blue on to get rid of those mistakes.

But that's just showing you how to highlight. And that's how to paint Ultramarines. .