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The Salamanders are one of my favorite Space Marine Chapters. That’s why when the indomitus box with new Primaris space marines Outriders was released, I wanted to get the box to paint them.

In this first tutorial, we will see how to customize the miniature and how to paint the armor of a Salamander Space Marine. Do you want to see how I have customized and painted this miniature?

Well… Let’s go! How to paint Primaris bikes from the Salamanders chapter:

Customization

As some of you already know, I love to customize miniatures to give them a unique and original touch. For these bikers I thought Spellcrow ‘s customization bits would come in handy, so I got to work.

For all the customization I used the Spellcrow bits which you can see below. For the helmet I used the dragon crests . I also used a custom dragon scale shoulder pad.

For the bike, I placed a small shield with fire flames on the top and some dragon heads on the sides.

Below, you can see one of the customizations I made with these bits.

Primer:

First of all, I separated the torsos from the bike so I could easily prime them. For this I used Surface Primer Gray 70.601 or Hobby Paint Spray Gray 28011. I have decided to use a light primer as I want to achieve intense colors faster.

Armor

We will paint the entire armor with a mixture of Game Air Sick Green (72.729) and Game Air Dark Green (72.728). The mixing ratio will be 4 parts of Sick Green to 3 parts of Dark Green .

Game Air Escorpena Green (72.732) is applied selectively in the areas with the highest light .

As you can see in the photo, we will create a contrast in the folds of the bike’s armor, generating a metallic effect. Therefore, there will be areas that we do not want to paint with this lighter color. In my case, to do it quickly, I used a small piece of paper as a masking tape, placing it while using the airbrush. If we want to do it more calmly, we can also use masking tape.

To finish with the airbrush, Game Air Light Livery Green (72.733) is used, this time in a very controlled and diluted way , focusing only on very specific points of the miniature, where the maximum light will be . Thanks to this final step we will obtain a great contrast saturation.

My special wash recipe

Now comes one of the magic touches that I like to use, my special wash recipe.

I like to use this custom recipe as it allows us to bring out all the details on the miniature quickly and easily, but without sacrificing all the airbrush work done previously. These are the proportions of the mixture:

– 2 parts – Game Wash Black Wash (73,201)

– 3 parts – Game Wash Green Wash (73,205)

– 6 parts – Thinner Medium (70.524)

– 8 parts – Flow Improver (71,362)

All those products are mixed and applied in a controlled way over the entire miniature. Thanks to this mixture, you will get a fantastic wash that will settle only in the nooks and crannies in a simple way.

Advice: When the mixture is being applied, it is recommended to use another brush with only Flow Improver over the maximum light areas. That way, the wash disappears from the higher areas and remains only in the nooks and crannies.

Here we can see the result after this step:

Edge Highlighting

Once the wash is dry, we will begin with the edge highlighting of the armor . For this, the Artis Opus brushes of the M Series are great as they allow a very good control when edge highlighting.

In this specific case I have used the size 0 brush from the M Series .

It is also highly recommended to use a wet palette to be able to correctly dilute each color. In my case I use the RedGrassGames wet palette .

Thanks to this profiling we will be able to highlight all the details of the figure. We will carry out this edge highlighting in 2 steps . First, we’ll outline all the armor for both the space marine and the bike, using Model Color Lime Green (70.827) .

To finish with the armor, we made a second or more selective edge highlighting , this time focusing on the corners and edges, using a mixture of Lime Green Model Color (70.827) and Ice Yellow Model Color (70.858). We could use a little point of pure Ice Yellow in some points of maximum light, , creating the contrast that you can see below.

And here we have reached the end of the first part of the tutorial In a second tutorial we will see how to continue painting this Primaris Salamander on a motorbike, painting the rest of the details.