Temple guard painting step by step.

Hey all, strewart suggested i put up my temple guard here so I will, always happy to oblige.
I apologize ahead of time for the quality of this article, my 1st one ever so bear with.

Ill post step by step, then some pics at the end if thats okay with all of you.

Note: if you did't know, do NOT glue the arms to your models before painting, its just easier that way, trust me =S

step 0: base coat
chaos black.

step 1: skin/scales.
I wanted the skin and scales of my temple guard to be a darker hue than i did for my saurus(you can view both through the fantasy link in my signature) so instead of using the lighter shades of my skin/scale colors, I just used the flat GW paints they're based off of. The skin is done with Hawk Turquoise, scales is Enchanted blue. Initially it was intended to use these colors as a basis for all the saurus models(characters, TG, riders etc) as is done in the army book, but after looking at 60 saurus models to paint, i decided to speed the process up a bit.

step 2: wash the model
Wash all the skin and scales with the new GW blue wash. I'm a huge fan of the new washes, even though i only started using them with my lizardmen and Tyranids and not my Tau, my own loss there it seems.

step 3: base coat for Gold
next step is to base coat your gold. I went with beubonic brown after looking at some Privateer press stuff they noted that brown is a good base for darker gold colors, though if you want lighter, go with yellow.

step 4: gold
pretty easy just paint gold over your brown, the best part here is that if you miss a spot, as long as its small, it wont show up vary well, as the gold and brown kinda mix well. Use burnished or shining gold, burnished is understandably darker, i went with shining because of how i was washing it.

step 5: wash the gold
I used GW's old chestnut ink wash, though you really don't have to do it, it works with my army's scheme to have certain models gold painted this way. It gives the gold a kinda bloodied look as opposed to a flat gold color, which is very shiny.

step 6: bone/claw/teeth
Bleached bone, pretty easy. Anything that was going to be "living" bone or claw was left with a small black rim to the "growing" part, where the bone initially protrudes from the model. It should be mentioned that you should clean up any of your claw/teeth areas with whatever basecoat your using, black or white, beforehand.

Step 7: wash bone
devlan mud wash on any "dead" bone, but not claws/teeth.

step 8: stone
i went with a 90/10 mix of codex grey/chaos black for my stone, and just painted the halberd heads.

step 9: eyes
I seriously didn't want to do the eyes of my guard, but after thinking about it, i just went with watered down blood red, be very careful you don't splash the model with it, it doesn't clean off of any bone you get it onto well.

step 10: highlighting/cleaning up
oddly, and i know it would look better if i did, no highlighting went into any of my brick models at all. if your going to highlight any of the washed sections, i seriously suggest just using the underlying color, bleached bone for any bone or a mix of that and white for any claws/teeth, though that's just for any showcase quality painting you want to do. Also remember to clean up any messes you did to the model, the halbard haft being the likeliest culprit.

shields
gold and bone are the same as above, but the shields core colors are straight out of the book.
basecoat with scab red. drybrush with beubonic brown, wash with GW red wash.

straps
Any and all straps are painted with snakebite leather, then lightly washed with devlan mud

there you have it, I painted 60 models in about 10 days, spending generally 2 hours or so a day at it, though only 20 were Temple guard.

Temple Guard Champion


Rank of Guard


comments/ criticisms and tips are welcome, I'm not a very experienced painter so any tips help.

also, GO LIZARDMEN!

 

Pretty cool - good work!