Space Marines

Recently I painted some space marines for my Rogue Trader campaign, and I wanted to put down some of my thoughts about space marines as a concept.

I've got a lot of plastic and metal marines, mostly from the 2nd and 3rd edition era including a lot of Dark Angels upgrade sprues, which were the first plastic bits I ever owned, so I decided to build Dark Angels. I didn't actually use all that many of the upgrade bits, since I like my marines brutal and workmanlike. Any super-ornate bits will be saved for any high command figures I make as if to represent parade uniform. Anything beautiful and ornate on a space marine is in contrast with their morbid reality, and I want to call attention to those conteadictions. I think, to me, that's largely the essence of space marines - they're like roman statue profile picture guys on twitter.

Anyway, I built a squad mainly picking out all the MK6 armour I could find and using bodies from the old finecast Armour through the Ages set. The next thing was to choose a paint scheme. I have a ton of nostalgia for Dark Angels in forest green; I never collected Dark Angels as a teenager (my marines were Iron Hands) but my dad collected them and really loved them and for that reason I have a lot of affection for those colours.

On the other hand, I am of course a huge fan of Rogue Trader and its black armoured Dark Angels which, frankly, I've always thought to be the nicest marine scheme in that book. I want to emphasise the brutality of my marines, to make them read as the fascist death squad that they are, and black livery reminiscent of swat teams and spy planes I think evokes repression really well.

Doing a bit of research as to how the Dark Angels got their green, I came across the story that it was a misinterpretation by the painting team. An iconic Jim Burns piece (with more than a little Al Pacino about it) from the cover of the Epic Space Marine box set depicted a green tint to Dark Angels armour, a natural result of yellow light reflected on glossy blue-black plates, an effect exacerbated by reprographics. The story goes that this deep, dark green colour was so beloved that it became the 'Eavy Metal standard, and Dark Angels have gotten greener ever since.

So I decided to try and emulate this scheme! I wouldn't make my marines glossy, although maybe I'll change my mind on that in the future. The first step was to prime them in black, drybrush with Citadel's Incubi Darkness (and then tidy that up with some edge highlights), and then an edge highlight with Citadel's Kabalite Green, and that was the whole of the armour! It was super quick and easy and I love the result. I could have used Caliban Green or some other forest green closer to the traditional colour, but I found the Kabalite green to be a much nicer transition from black. I only realised after I'd finished painting them that this scheme was actually more-or-less exactly the Rogue Trader era scheme for the Salamanders.

Oh well.

After adding details in muted yellow and red with quick and dirty highlights I tried a bunch of weathering techniques to finish them off. I'm used to painting fantasy models and doing so fairly traditionally, with many layers of gradated highlights, so it was really fun to not bother with those steps on these and to try something completely new. I applied chipping on the armour with a sponge and Vallejo Gunmetal, applied a burnt umber oil wash all over, and tried to do some weathering using bright rust-coloured pigment powder around the lower half of the figures to sell the idea of the red iron oxide sand kicking up and lodging in the nooks of their powered plate. I sealed all that in with a matte varnish, and will never touch them with a brush again.

The other essential detail was armour graffiti, a staple of Rogue Trade space marines.

I adore the character that this gives the marines. It resembles photos we've all seen from brutal wars of conquest like those in Vietnam and Iraq and makes the sense of cruelty all the more real. The most famous fictional example of this stuff is probably Pvt. Joker's "Born to Kill" helmet from Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). This crude humour perfectly captures my image of a space marine. These roided-up thugs are crayon-eating, ice-chewing, psychopathic one-man war-crime machines (much like real marines). They have absolutely no empathy for the innocents they may be employed to massacre, nor even much respect for their own comrades - if ordered, they'll fire on the regular army without question. The horror of the space marine chapters is that they have zero accountability to the imperial state, and at any point may decide that their interests are not the same as high command's. This is another point of inspiration my conception takes from war films; Colonel Kurtz from Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) is the perfect example of a space marine general, resembling for example Lufgt Huron from the original Badab War campaign.