Black Templars are one of the most iconic chapters in the 40K universe. Don’t let black and white scare you away from this beautiful army!
Black Templars make for a very striking chapter, combining a black armor with bold white shoulder plates. Their special units are also adorned with tabards and cloaks and highly intricate weapons, making them stand out even more.
Speed Painting Black Templars
While they are not usually the easiest colors to paint, we can use the bold contrast of black and white to our advantage. This allows us to keep the scheme simple and to the point, perfect to get your whole army qiuckly on the board!
It’s a good idea to leave the shoulder plates unglued if you are painting Black Templars. This is not always the case, like for the miniature used in the video.
Black
We are starting over Matt Black from The Army Painter under coat. This comes in a can and provides a very thorough coverage. This is important, you don’t want any of the plastic showing through.
We highlight our black with Dark Reaper from Citadel. This is a dark grey with a hint of blue. It will leave our black looking black, and complement cold grey color that will be the base of the white.
If you go too heavy with this highlight, you can add a thin coat of Nuln oil over your model.
Because our aim is to save time, we don’t bother with edge highlights now. Once the whole army is done and playable, then you can come back and add these to your miniatures.
White
Our white base coat is Celestra Grey. We use this one because it covers black in one coat, two at most. Of course, if you left the shoulder plates unglued, you can spray this on to save even more time.
Over the parts we can’t airbrush, like the knees, we highlight first with Ulthuan Grey. This makes the transition from grey to white easier with a brush.
Our final highlight is the main one, Air Matt White from The Army Painter. Even the brush parts were done with the airbrush-ready paint, because it is easy to blend.
Now is a good time to touch up the black, specially if you did any part with the airbrush.
Metallics
Usually we try to stick with a single metallic color for speed painted models, but this one has both silver and gold. The reason for that is that a lot of Black Templar units have prominent gold features on them, and those would look odd if there was not any gold elsewhere through the army.
Silver is Gun Metal, with which we painted the gun, joints in the armor, and backpack.
If the back pack is glued to your model, don’t bother painting it all silver. This was really done only to save time and make the back of the models interesting.
Shade the silver with a generous coat of Nuln Oil. You can save a lot of time by saving this step for later and doing the shading on multiple colors in the same step.
For the gold, we are using Retributor Armor. It covers smoothly with a single coat, and makes for a vibrant not too yellow golden tone. Shade this with Agrax Earthshade.
For golden-clad characters, you can use Shining Silver to highlight the gold before the shading, or take a page from our Minotaur tutorial.
Brown
Brown is painted in Rhinox Hide, highlighted with Doombull Brown. It is then shaded with Nuln Oil.
The goal is to keep these details dark and not make them stand out too much, as they are not the main feature of our models.
Seal & Robes
Our model does not have a robe, but a lot of Black Templars do. It’s a great feature of the army, so knowing how to paint them is key.
Start with a base coat of Steel Legion Drab, which covers like nobody’s business, even on our black under coat. Next, highlight this with Skeleton Bones or Karak Stone.
Lastly, shade this with either Seraphim Sepia or Agrax Earthshade. Sepia will make the robes more vibrant, Agrax will make them darker.
You can spend a lot more time on robes, but this method is straightforward to keep in line with the speed painted aspect of this tutorial.
Base
Because this scheme is pretty drab overall, we have a lot of options for the base.
In this tutorial we used a classic city fight base, but something colorful like desert yellow or mars red would look great and add a lot to the otherwise simple scheme.
Black Templars Chapter Symbol
When it comes to the shoulder plate details, you have a lot of options. 3D Printed bits are a great time saving options, and so are decals.
That being said, the Black Templars cross is fairly simple to freehand without taking much time.