The Beginning - Act 5 Scene 1

In which the first volleys are fired

The universal guidance (and perhaps the only thing every tutorial seems to agree on) is that the first step in painting miniatures is the undercoat and pray paint still seems to be the way to go. I did a lot of undercoating by hand in a bygone era; it took forever and the results were never great, so I'm going with the general advice and using a miniature-specific spray. I'm planning to follow as many of the Citadel tutorials as possible to get the basics back, and I'm starting here.

Step 1: choose your paint. Oh dear, I'm already diverging from the tutorial and I've not even picked up a spray can. The tutorial suggests using a black undercoat for my space marine guinea pigs, but I've decided I will use grey - the better to see the model as I'm painting it.

Step 2: set up a spray booth. It being a couple of days after Christmas I have a surfeit of cardboard boxes to hand - 10 minutes with the packing tape to cover any holes and we're away. I've added a turntable to facilitate easy spinning of the miniatures (the Snudda from Ikea - £6.50 and I plan to use is for product photography when I actually have some painted models worthy of display!).

Step 3: spray away. Ah yes, I remember this noxious odour so well... Despite a filter mask and some heavy-duty extraction fans, some of the smell still gets through to stimulate those sense-memories. I'm giving the marines three very light coats to retain as much detail as possible in the model.

After the 1st coat...

After the 2nd coat...

After the 3rd coat...

No obvious sign of the original blue plastic from the front or above - except perhaps in the deepest recesses - but looking from underneath there are some areas that haven't been fully covered.

Lesson 1: A turntable is great for ensuring an even coating all around, but to get into all the nooks and crannies it probably is better to go with some sort of stick that can be manoeuvred in 3 dimensions.

As these are practice models I'm inclined to proceed to the next stage, rather than spray again and risk obscuring detail and having to start over.

Next - selecting the first model to paint!