Quick Tips: Keeping a Painter's Journal

Welcome to another installment of Quick Tips. When working on painting a unit or army for 40K, one of the most important things to keep in mind that a lot of people forget, is to keep a consistent color scheme throughout your entire army. There is nothing worse than adding a new unit or vehicle to your army and having the base color not match. This generally ceates a rather garish affect and makes the new unit or vehicle seem out of place.

Not even Games Workshop's celebrated 'Eavy Metal Team is safe from painting different units of models different colors.

Take a look at this picture from the Blood Angels Codex. The Baal Predator and the Tactical Squad at the top are different shades of red from the other Tactical Squad in the foreground. Also, the Sternguard Veterans look like they are sporting a third shade of red!

I'm sure the 'Eavy Metal Team keeps a painting journal of everything they do (in fact, I would bet on it). The picture above is probably more of an issue of wanting to update the color scheme with a new Codex, but the models look odd and out of place no matter which way you slice it. We want coherent models on the table. Not a hodgepodge mess!

So how do you avoid this? If you want to make sure that when your Codex is re-released and new models are introduced you can paint those models to match, you need to keep a Painter's Journal. So what's a Painter's Journal? A Painter's Journal is like a cook book, but instead you write down how you paint every part of a miniature.You can keep a Word document, write it out in an old notebook, whatever. Just make sure that you do it!

I can't remember how many times I've asked someone how they painted something and they have no idea. To me, this is one of the most basic things about painting and it's always overlooked. Out of the dozens of people I play 40K with on a regular basis, I can't think of a single person that does this.

One other thing you want to do is keep a list of materials that you normally use for basing. What brand and color of static grass did you use? Did you use sand, granulated cork, ballast or maybe one of the new Citadel Colour Texture Paints for your bases? Remember guys, write everything down so that when you need to duplicate it in the future your army stays consistent and looks great on the tabletop.

I've added my own Painter's Journal as an additional page on my blog here. I'll be updating this on a consistent basis as I continue to work on my Blood Angels army. If you have a Quick Tip, pass it along to me and I may feature it on my blog in the future.

Till next time,
–The Harrower