Painting Ultramarines: A Guide For 5-Year Olds

My newest project for the kids is to let them assemble and paint two space marines each with the least amount of intervention or assistance on my part. Naturally, I cleaned the parts for them and help them by holding the model glue, squeezing paint out of bottles, and mixing paints, but I'm trying to stay hands off as much as possible.

We started with the basic bolter-toting space marines from the boxed set, which came with the Goff orks and gretchin and space marines. I can't remember what the set was called, but we found a bunch of the plastics at my Mom & Dad's house during our last trip to Los Angeles. I thought this would be a good start for them.

We're painting them in a basic Ultramarines pattern. Why? Because I happen to have a can of Ultramarines Blue spraypaint. So there you have it. And now, on to the step-by-step.

1. Snip out all of the pieces and clean up any mold lines with a hobby knife and file. Note to CPS, I did this part.
2. Assemble with model glue and insert into the bases. Here's Benjamin diligently slotting Tab A into Slot B

3. Inspect the miniature to make sure everything looks OK.

4. Prime the figure with Citadel Colour Ultramarine Blue spray. I did this part too, though the kids inspected the miniatures to make sure I had covered everything.
5. Mix a little bit of Citadel Ultramarine Blue with Citadel Space Wolves Grey and dry brush the entire miniature.

6. Basecoast all of the metal VGC Gunmetal Metal and the pistol holter Citadel Bestial Brown. Paint the eyes Citadel Blood Red. You will probably have to touch up some areas with Ultramarine Blue.

7. Mix some Liquitex Glaze Medium, Water, and Liquetex Paynes Grey and wash the entire miniature. Here, I had to help out a little bit to make sure the spots they missed got washed, though overall, they did a good job.


At this point, here's what our Ultramarines-in-progress look like. The washed version (still wet) is on the right. The basecoasted marine is on the left.


8. Paint a little bit of red gore for they eye lenses and hit the shoulder pad trim with a layer of Space Wolves Grey followed by Skull White.

9. Starting to work on the bases.

10. Dirt and grass added. I did have to help out a bit with scraping some of the errant dirt off the sides of the bases, hence the blue patch where the black pealed off with the sand. Also, the static grass was a little tough for them, so they added the glue and I helped them sprinkle grass over the base.

That's where are are so far. More later as we make more progress.