OhDeadly: On Painting the Imperial Guard: Memory Lane

In lieu of fresh pictures, today's post will describe the techniques I have developed as I learned to paint my army. As you probably have noticed, I am not a 'pro painter'. That being said, I have come a long way since my first model.

It all started back in 2002. After talking to my good friend Chris about this Warhammer game we decided that the Imperial Guard was the faction for me. My first model was the infamous Sly Marbo. Buying him taught me the most fundamental skills of Warhammer modelling: buying your model and gluing it together. At this point in my hobbying career I had no time for silly things like undercoating or basing. My brother and I also learned quite quickly that 'black ink' was not like the other GW paints we had bought as it took a lot to get a nice even coat. Instead of investigating this further we simply ignored the subtleties of painting and stick to the basics.

A Catachan from the first batch. Pretty gross by today's standards, but it did the job.

After I had acquired and painted around 25 guardsmen, a basilisk, a chimera, and a gryphon my brother and I decided to try out this newfangled 'undercoating' technique. This was somewhere on the tail end of 2003, so this matched the timing of the second 3rd edition IG book. I started actually working towards a functional army, with emphasis on the drop troops doctrine and lots of flamers.

The second batch. You will notice that I try to stay in the lines now.

Now we can fast forward to 2009. The new edition of the IG codex rekindled my interest in this army, and I had gained some practice by painting space marines and dark elves. I also started to use some fancy techniques like highlighting and the excellent GW washes.

The third batch, with vast improvements.

Finally we reach the present day. My models had their bases painted in a nice shade of dark angels green so they would be useable in the local tournament scene, and now they are graduating to actual basing material. Also, all of my models are being standardized. Those ten year old models that are mostly 'Scaly Green' are being painted over to match the newest batch, so hopefully my pot of 'Catachan Green' holds out.

To end it, here are some work in progress shots of the men I've been working on today.