Do you find it easier to paint the Temple Guard with the shield arm glued on, or paint the shield+arm separately and then glue it on?
they are a nightmare to paint assembled IMHO. I paint as much on the sprue as possible. makes it much easier to reach all the little corners. just my 0,02
I always worry that when it comes time to assemble you will ruin the paint with glue or always have to retouch up bits, especially if things don't align up right and it needs green stuff. With something like a shield it wouldnt really matter but an arm where the shoulder is clearly seen, is this an issue when it comes to gluing?
I say cut it off the sprue and then paint it up. I did this with my saurus cavalry and some temple guard models and it worked great. Plus it's a lot more fun to glue completely painted pieces together.
i paint the shields on the sprue usually, only porblem i had was the grey part where it was attached to the sprue had to be painted after gluing and sometimes there would be a little unpainted area where the arm conencts to the shoulder because i don't want to paint where i will glue because usually that means glueing paint to plastic/paint wich reduces durability. i pained skaven clanrats with shileds glued in place when i 1st started warhammer and now they look badly painted even for slaves
Definitely a potential problem. Since the TG are plastic and just a flat bond chances are you will not need GS so thats ok, superglue can melt paint so you need to be careful to use only a very small amount. A small amount of touchup paint around the joint actually turns out to be a lot less effort than gluing it first and trying to paint underneath and around the arm. Probably more effort than its worth but I wanted a bit of practice with the technique, I used rare earth magnets on the shield arms of my TG so they are easily detachable and easier to paint.
I did a bit of a test with both and I decided painting separately was way easier so that's what I'll be doing.
I paint after it's all been put together. I don't know why, but I find painting easier that way, it also allows me to paint as i'm looking at the complete model, which means that any areas I can't see or are blanked out by shadows aren't painted, saving me time (I could always just do a quick basecoat if I wanted, as there no point in being pin-point precise with areas that aren't going to get looked at in detail).