Heresy & Heroes

Hello hobby fans! G-Dubs were good enough to send me a copy of the New Legions Imperialis and I thought I’d give you a few tips for painting your tenny tiny Space Marines. As someone old enough to have played Epic in a GW store (where are my Werther’s Originals and dentures…?), I have a little history with painting very small minis, and I wanted to pass on a few pearls of wisdom that might make your first forays into extra tiny dudes go a little easier.  

Paint The Little Dudes On The Sprue

I remember this trick from years gone by – painting the mini-marines (and other factions) on the sprue is the best idea. Take the Space Marine sprue here as an example. You do need to do a little prep – most models are just connected at their feet, but some have a few other connections to the frame that you need to remove. I also put the Missile Launchers on the marines that heft them, and tidied up a few of the more obvious mould lines, but with all of that done, it was way easier to paint them like this. If you base them before painting, you will have issues getting them completely covered, and taking them all off to paint is inviting the black hole beneath every hobbyist’s desk to eat up at least a few of these teeny minis. This is actually why, those of use old enough to remember, really liked the long thin bases from the Epic 40,000 era, but in the era before that, with square epic bases, on-the-sprue painting was really a must.

Contrast Paints Are Your Friends

When Contrast Paints came out, we were all told that they didn’t work best on Space Marines. They were at their best on flesh, cloth, or other organic materials. Well, at this tiny scale, they work great on Marines! With the tiniest amount of preshading (I literally sprayed them black, and then gave them a quick spray from above of White) they look amazing. What’s more, one quick drybrush over that, and you’ll be down to picking out those tiny details. It feels like Contrast Paints were really made for this scale, and even using them to paint the larger tanks works a treat. It saves a hell of a lot of time too! I really wish we’d had these around all those years ago. I have used them on some of my older models, and they look great on those too, but for the new stuff, they are just perfection.

Magnifiers Help

Now, I happen to have excellent eyesight, so when I say a pair of magnifying spectacles is a worthy investment, I relaly mean it, especially if you’re planning to do any freehand at this scale. But even just picking out the finer details, it’s a good idea to have some of these to hand, even if it’s just to give you a confidence boost. By the same token, I’d recommend some of those tiny brushes that we all go through a phase of using – the ‘000’ sort of brushes. These are really only useful when your vision and hand movement is limited at 28mm scale, but at Epic scale, when you’re trying to hit tiny things, they genuinely have their place. Just get yourself prepped to deal with teeny, tiny details.

You Can Go One Step Less On Metallics

So the normal Citadel method for doing metallics is Base – Wash – Highlight. Honestly, at this scale, you can just go Base – Wash and leave it to that. Now if you do want to highlight, I would recommend using the base coat you used again, but really, I don’t think there’s any need. if you tried to put in a highlight of a really bright silver, I think it will look out of place unless you spend a lot of time blending it and glazing over it, but honestly, unless you’re trying to win a painting competition, it’s not worth that amount of hassle. Those bright highlights work great at 28mm/Heroic scale, but at Epic scale, they look a little too cartoonish and overbearing.  

Don’t Fear The Freehand

Now if you know this site, you know I like to talk Freehand a lot. And yes, I’ve done some relatively elaborate freehand at this scale already. I couldn’t help myself. 😉 But if you’re just getting into freehanding, this is quite a nice scale to try things out at. You can be a lot more “representitive” than “exact”. You can focus more on getting the right shapes and colours than the perfect blends and finer details, so I do urge you to give it a go. What’s more, because you can do things as more abstract, it can save you from having to worry about transfers and I have many memories of using those back in the day on Epic things. Those memories are usually full of swear words and tears, so I’m happy to avoid that with this newest release.

I hope that this has given you some useful advice and/or ideas. If you have any other pearls of wisdom yourself, do pop them in the comments below – I look forward to reading them. Onwards!