Painting Alpha Legion Snipers 1. Airbrushed Basecoat

The next few posts from me will be featuring a (semi-) live blog series of how I'm going to go about painting my Alpha Legion Snipers. For a very long time, I have been experimenting off-and-on about how to get the paint scheme that I want for my growing Alpha Legion forces and I'll be sharing it in this series of posts, step by step.

The models I'm going to be using for this are my Reconnaissance Squad -- a squad of five Alpha Legion snipers armed with prohibited necron weapons that I've kit-based and converted from a variety of sources. What makes these models stand out even before any paint has been applied to them is their load out: a series of necron death mark gauss-based weapons coupled with Dark Angels hooded heads. Perfect for what I'm envisioning here.

Links to several of these models can be found here: [ One | Two | Three ]

Although I thought about painting these guys in dark / blend-in or camouflage colours, in the end I decided to opt for core Alpha Legion colours and let the capes do the job for "blending in" or "camouflage". I have a particular plan for the camo that will be coming later on in the series.

Here, the first two steps are done using an air brush. They're relatively simple in essence:

(1) undercoat using black;

(2) base coat using silver.

I use an airbrush as it provides a nicely thin layer that preserves the details of the miniature's sculpt very nicely and allows me to control the paint being dispersed much more accurately. If you've never used an airbrush for painting miniatures before (and I hadn't until 2014), then I thoroughly recommend it.

For the under coat, there are multiple options available of course. I've seen many people use grey spray cans and the like, but I still prefer black these days since as long as it gets in to all the recesses the job is done. Moreover, it also means that the next coat need not be 100% perfect or 100% coverage - the black in the recesses will serve a shading purpose if nothing else.

For the base coat, there are lots of different options in sliver these days. Here, I've used a combination of rune fang and lead belcher from citadel paints. The first base coat was simply a combination of these two paints all over the model. The second part of the base coat featured using pure rune fang steel (a very bright and vibrant silver) over the upper parts of the models. This effectively provides an azimuthally bright region for the next coat to go on top on and is something that I feel is essential to pulling off a metallic looking Alpha Legion layer in the next step. The image below shows the models at this stage. More later!