First Combat Squad

My box of stuff from Games Workshop showed up! I had ordered online their starter painting set, some super glue, and a can of black spraypaint. The starter set comes with a small oddball collection of paints (no green!), a cheap-ish brush, and 5 snap-together bolter-equipped soldiers. Because I'm weighing the pros and cons of entering the hobby of painting lots of little guys, this set of materials is a kind of 'test run' to see if I enjoy painting them enough to do so regularly. It's a bit of a costly test tho: I've gone out and gotten a small painting table and a stool too, so I got to work right away.

First I took them outside and spray painted them black. I used a cardboard box, placing the sprue on its side leaned up against the interior. We have an empty parking space, so I just did it there. Quick short bursts on both sides until the sprue was covered.

After the sprue'd dried, I brought the sprue inside and took the marine bodies and shoulder pads off the sprue. I touched up the removed models with black where the sprue had connected them, and attached the bodies to their bases.

The snap-together aspect of these models is really dumb: the pegs don't really fit right, and the joins between parts are quite loose. Thankfully, the 'non-starter' models are much more poseable and professional looking. For these models I'm sawing off the snap-pegs and just using super glue.

After they dried, I confirmed that I really just wanted to practice technique on these marines. They are supposed to be painted blue, but Dad already has an impressively painted collection of these smurfs; since I'm likely going with a darker-colored army anyways, I'll paint these marines dark with white shoulderpads.

Now, I had a small Blood Angels army way back when, and I remember how hard it was to paint white on black: it's always an uneven, brush-strokey, blobby mess. So I resolved to do something fancy for my first painting bit: paint the shoulder pad white. I mix 2 drops of white and black 1:1 to get a dark gray, and add 3 drops of water from my drinking cup to make it a bit more liquidy. After applying it to the shoulder pad and chest emblazonment, I added another drop of white to the mix, and gave the shoulder pad another thin coat. Repeating, it took several thin layers to build up a semi-respectable light-gray foundation. Only then did I use the white alone (2:1 paint/water) and finish the white shoulderpad. I then did a bit of half-hearted highlighting with my leftover light gray.

This had taken a while, seeing how I had done 5 shoulderpads with 5 thin coats each, so I wanted to practice brush control a bit. Towards this end, I painted the omega symbol on the right shoulder pad white against its black background, and trimmed both pads with a gold metallic paint. It took lots of fine motor skill I've not used in a long time, but I got it done with minimal touch-up work.

A brief complaint: the black shoulderpad, for some unknown reason, has to be snapped onto the model. The peg is completely wrong: I had to saw it off on each model just to get the shoulder snug to the model.

After this, I mostly dinked around trying to highlight a few things on the model by coloring them. Here's the back after my efforts (eyes are a *pain*!):

And here's the front:

By this point, it'd been a couple hours, and I needed to go to sleep. I'll revisit these (prolly with a wash on the shoulderpads and some highlighting) later.