Painting Salamanders is one of my favorite Space Marines Chapters, and it’s super easy to make them look good! Let’s learn how to paint Salamanders!
This model, like all marines painted for these How To articles, was painted live and took around 1 hour and a half, start to finish, including some breaks to chat and/or spill shades everywhere.
This step by step, and the techniques in the video are perfect to paint a whole army to a standard that will make them stand out at any tournament or gaming club.
In the meantime, here’s how to paint Salamanders.
How to Paint Salamanders Space Marines
Green
There are many ways to paint the Salamanders’ Green armor, but in my opinion, a bright green is the way to go. Start over Caliban Green, or Angel Green if you want to use a shaker can for this and get a smooth and opaque base coat.
Next, using an airbrush, we apply Warpstone Glow over our basecoat, making sure to leave plenty of the dark green showing through, specially on the lower parts of the model.
Then, we spray some more highlights using Moot Green. Don’t go overboard with this, you want a few highlights, but the model should remain mostly Warpstone Glow looking.
This is enough airbrush for now, and we can paint a few highlights with Moot Green on the armor to make the edges look crisp.
Black
There are a few areas we want black on the model, and we’ll paint them all the same way. This saves a lot of time and adds consistency through the army.
Pick any black you want and basecoat the shoulder pads, gun, joints and cables.
To highlight our black, we will be using Stegadon Scale Green. The green hue of this dark paint ties in really well with the green of the armor. You don’t need to make the highlights super smooth, as we will wash the black surfaces with Nuln Oil next.
The wash tones down the Stegadon Scale Green quite a lot, and ensures these parts look black and not off grey.
Brown
Much like the black, every belt, pouch and strap will be painted using the same brown. Over a basecoat of Rhinox Hide, highlight using Doom Bull Brown. Doombull is a dark and reddish tone that won’t make these details stand out too much.
Details like this should be painted and given care, but should not contrast so much as to become the focus of the model.
Gold & Silver
Metallics are done in a fairly simple way that has a great finished look. Highlight both the gold and the silver with Shining Silver. Then, gold is shaded with Agrax Earthshade and silver with Nuln Oil.
Flames
Flames are an important part of Salamanders, and lucky for us, they are easy to freehand. Now, I’m a firm believer that less is more when it comes to flames, but you do you.
The trick with any freehand is picking a starting color that is opaque and wont require more than one coat to cover, like Mephiston Red.
Highlighting flames is basically a reverse highlight. The lighter colors go towards the inside of the flame, and the outer parts of the flames stay red. Then, you can either blend in orange and yellow, or simplypaint lower and smaller flamers the lighter you go.
Base
This base is as simple as it get: brown rocks with a matching tuft of grass.
This is another scheme that works well with almost any style of base. The only color I would avoid is green, because we don’t want to detract from the bright armor. They look very good on lava bases, that tie-in with the iconography.
