Tabletop Standard Marine...

Yup, you read correctly, 'tabletop standard'...

The bunch of guys Toosh and I paint with are all recovering wargamerholics and I have been spending a lot of time recently coveting their beautifully painted armies. The one thing I struggle to do these days is paint multiple miniatures to a decent standard, but I would definitely like to, but I get a bit bored of batch painting, and find a whole army a daunting prospect.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel - when we were up at the Golem studio there were a number of small personal project around the room which turned out to be a 'Tale of X Gamers' type thing. I remember this sort of thing from White Dwarf a few years ago - those involved would start a new army and set monthly targets of a number of points to complete. This number of points always seemed a reasonable amount to tackle and I think the Golem guys had settled on 250pts of a 40K army of their choice.

I think we are going to take on a similar challenge, and in advance of that, I wanted to try my hand at a very quick Space Marine. I intend to do a small Grey Knight force so have painted this marine in grey with steel and brass details. He is a normal space marine, but just a test so it doesn't matter too much...

I got my Airbrush out for the first time to lay down the initial colour - a grey gradient - but painted the rest by hand.

here are a couple of photos:

As a test piece, there are a few things I'd do differently for my actual army. I would leave the head and backpack off, and possibly the gun (although with Grey Knights there are only a handful of models holding guns across their bodies), and I will also be making some more interesting bases for them. They'll never win an award, but its a start and hopefully should help me learn to paint faster and understand where I can cut corners most efficiently.