Painting Imperial Fist

I have just started on an Imperial Fist Space Marine army commission. The commissioner wanted their chapter to have a deep yellow colour rather than the usual bright canary yellow that he has seen around the place.

So I took to the internet in search of some colour recipes or some ideas and funnily enough ran into a brick wall. He was right, there was a lot of canary yellow Imperial Fists running around which don’t seem very intimidating to me.

I had only seen a few examples of deeper yellow Imperial Fists, and they seemed to look more ‘darker’ and ‘ominous’. Now that I had found the right look, I couldn’t find a descent recipe for the colour scheme. So after several attempts I think I successfully made a descent yellow for the commission work.

Here is how I did it:

It starts with under coating the miniature in black. Next is base coating the armour plates in GW Taupest Ocher. This is a foundation pain and really only needs one or two thin coats to cover the black undercoat fully. Make sure none of the black is visible through the yellow as the next few highlights are to light to cover it up.

Next highlight up with a 1:1 mix GW Golden Yellow and GW Iyanden Darksun (add more Iyanden Darksun if you want to blend it more into the base coat). Highlight the ridges of the plate armour and at the peaks of the shoulder and knee pads.

Add a small amount of white to the mix above to make the next highlight and keep adding more white as required to make lighter highlights. Again apply these highlights to the more extreme parts of the armour.

For shading, take a small amount of GW Dark Flesh and mix it with GW Taupest Ocher – water down the mix and apply it very lightly to the underneath of the plates or anywhere else shade may fall on the miniature.

Finally, coat the entire miniature in GW Lamenters Yellow Glaze to move the miniatures colour from the more ruddy yellow to a brighter yellow.

NOTE: be careful in handling the miniature, I notices that the glaze tends to pick up the oils from your fingers really easy and makes a more dirty dark stains. Best to blu-tac (plasticine) the miniature to a paint pot and hold the pain pot for future painting after glazing to avoid these dark smudges.

Here are some work in progress shots after the miniature has been glazed: