How to Choose The Colours For Your Army

You should include a spot colour when selecting a paint scheme for your army. You use the spot colour to paint all the small details which are unique to individual models, such as gems, lenses or trinkets.

The spot colour should be a different colour temperature from the main colour of your army, to help it pop.

If you were painting Space Wolves, a cool blue/grey, we would use yellow or red as a spot colour. Both of these are warm colours.

For our Blood Ravens that are red, a warm colour, we used green, which is a cool colour, as a spot colour throughout the army.

Click here for a TLDR on cool and warm colours

A spot colour will reduce the time it takes to paint an army and ties an army together. The army will be painted faster as you spend less time deciding what paint to use, since you have chosen your spot colour.

Using a spot colour will bring your army together as fewer colours are used, making your army look more uniform.

When painting our Blood Ravens army, we used green as a spot colour. We painted the purity seals an olive green and the eyes a bright, saturated green.

When painting our Apothecary Biologis we used the bright greens that were used on the eyes to paint the fluid in the tanks, screen and the search light. Wraithbone was mixed in at some points, as this was used on the armour. Using a spot colour ties the different parts of the model together.

If we used different colours for each part of the model, there would be too many colours and the model would be too busy.

The greens already on the model were used to paint the plasma pistol and power sword of this Bladeguard Veteran.

Wraithbone was also used for the plasma pistol and power sword, as it was already on our palette from when we painted the shoulder pads.

Using the colours already on our palette saved us a lot of time when painting the army because we didn’t spend 5 minutes deciding which colour to paint each detail.

The same colours were used to paint five different items on those two models, and it doesn’t look strange. The small pops of green throughout the army bring it together and adds a uniform look to your army.

Any other miscellaneous details throughout the army were painted in an appropriate shade of green.

This post is part of the Notts Hobbies 30 Day Army Painting Accelerator, Click here to get your free copy.