Get a blazing army to battle ready standard over the weekend. Paint a 40K Ultramarines army with this easy to follow tutorial.
Combining some speed painting techniques and our favorite bases, this is a surefire way to get your 40k Ultramarines’ army fully painted in no time.
Speed Painting 40K Ultramarines
Strength in numbers, Quantity is a Quality its own… no matter your idiom of choice, this is the true strength of this technique.
Don’t get too derailed in every little detail of every miniature. Aim to make your whole units cohesive and let volume will do the heavy lifting.
Step 1 – Base Coats
Unlike more classic painting tutorials, our first order of business is to get one solid base coat on every surface.
Our color choice is based mostly on ones that cover well in a single coat if possible.
For the blue, we are using The Army Painter’s Ultramarines, because it is available in a shaker can, which saves an insane amount of time over a large quantity of models.
Gold is Balthazar Gold. Retributor Gold is also very nice, if you want a brighter gold result.
Pouches and belts are painted Skrag Brown. It looks a little weird, but don’t worry, it will work out later.
Silver is Leadbelcher, but really any silver you fancy will work. We paint the weapons and most of the accessories like grenades and chains with it.
For the armor joints, we use Dark Reaper or any off-black. We don’t want pure black for this because our plan is to shade the entire model, and that doesn’t work with black.
Purity Seals and the likes are painted Zandri Dust. I like that bone color because of how well it covers, but it is on the darker side. The Army Painter Skeleton Bone is a lighter alternative.
The seal part of purity seals and some details, like the sergeants’ helmets are painted Mephiston Red.
Everything that should be white is instead painted Ulthuan Grey. This is done because of the shading, and we can work on bringing out the pure white look at a later stage.
The only parts we are not painting up to this point are gems, lenses and otherwise glowing stuff, like plasmas or power weapons.
Step 2 – Shade
Once every part of the mini is in the appropriate base coat, we are ready to shade.
You have 2 options here, either Agrax Earthshade or The Army Painter’s Quick shade strong tone.
The end results are very similar, the Quickshade works the best over a large quantity of models, ideal if you are doing a full army in one sitting.
We shade the entire model with your brown mixture of preference. I prefer to paint the Quickshade on rather than dip the model. It is not much longer, but you get a lot more control over how much Quickshade is on your Ultramarines.
Once that’s done and dry (can’t stress how important it is to wait until the wash is fully dry) we spray the models with matte varnish.
Step 3 – Glow
Don’t be fooled by the varnish, we are not done yet. We very well could be, but the result would be a little bit too drab all over. We want something to pop!
Lenses, gems, lights, and power weapons are the perfect place for this. Althought traditional Ultramarines’ are red, we painted our bright green with Moot Green and a Flash Gitz Yellow highlight.
Step 4 – Base
All our Ultramarine needs now is a base. Doing the base separately is a great time saver. This one is on an urban base, but any brown or grey would look great.
Just be sure to make some extras when your 40k Ultramarines army gets reinforcements!