Quick base-coating

Since my drybrushing tutorial I've been planning to paint a new squad of tactical marines, and this proved to be the perfect opportunity to show how I actually did my sargeant WITH PICTURES.

So, the basic idea would be to create armor plates that are of a certain color without obstructing details and having brush strokes all over.

First, I primed my model Chaos black and did a drybrush of Knarloc Green, making the models look something like this.


Then , started mixing Camo green (the final model color) with the Knarloc green pool, and drybrushed the models in a few stages as I added more and more Camo green.
This accomplishes the following things:

• Mixing a normal color with an undercoat color results in a color whose pigment is close to the normal color but retains the coverage properties of the undercoat color.
• Applying several layers of similar paint means brush strokes and other imperfections will be hidden by the previous layer of paint.
• Applying several layers of thin paint is better than one layer of thick paint as it doesn't obscure details.
  
• It's easy to do some shading to models by brushing the destination color only on "lit" surfaces"
• Mixing paints will always result in darker tones of normal color, which means you can use your final base color to do really smooth highlights.
• It's extremely fast!

Here are some intermediary steps for painting the marines with this method

As you can see, the camo green begins to show more and more each stage. During the last stage I brushed a Camo green-ish color from the mix only on the most lit surfaces, which gives the model more volume.


And here is how the final squad looks coated with this method. Notice that the details are all alive and well, there are no brush strokes and only minor touch-ups are needed. Oh, and it took 1 hour and not too much wasted paint to do all 9.