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Painting Ultramarines: Basecoat

There are plenty of how to guides about how to paint space marines, they are after all the most popular faction in Warhammer 40k, and they come in a large variety of flavours each with their own unique colour schemes, and you can of course decide to paint them with your own unique scheme. Here is a guide to how I paint my Ultramarines.


However you are going to paint you marines, there are a few steps that I find important with any miniature before I put brush to model.

Step 1

Look at your miniature and identify the different areas that require different colours. If we look at this Primaris Lieutenant from the Dark Imperium boxed set, you can identify several distinct areas. The armour obviously makes up the majority of the miniature, however there are pouches, weapons and the armour trim to name a few areas. Once you know what is on the model, you can...


Step 2

Pick your colours. It's important before you start painting to know what colours you are going to use. If you are painting to an already established scheme this is fairly easy as the hard work has for the most part been done already and you can just reproduce what has already been done by others. I paint to painting recipes as i'm almost totally colourblind, and my wife tolerates me to an amazing extent when I ask for help. 

Step 3

Prime/Undercoat. Generally speaking, acrylic paint doesn't adhere well to plastic or metal, and this makes it harder to paint models, and its easy to rub paint off whilst handling. This makes priming or undercoating quite important, but not strictly necessary. Primers will adhere to plastic and metal, and paints will adhere to the primer. There are different colours you can use as a primer, but the most common ones will be white, grey and black. I prefer to use grey for most models. 

Regardless of which colour you choose as your primer, you can apply it using a brush, a spray can or an airbrush. 


Games workshop and Army painter have a range of spray cans you can use, but it generally comes down to personal preference.

For this specific model, I used a Citadel Macragge Blue spray can to apply the undercoat. This also doubles as the basecoat so will save you time as the majority of the miniature is blue. I have found that the colour from the can is almost, but not quite the same colour as the what you will find in a paint pot, so I also applied a thin coat of paint all over. this also helped to cover any parts that were missed by the spray can. 





Step 4

Fill in the other colours. Having identified the different areas earlier I picked the following colours to apply as the basecoat. I keep a record of what colours are on each model so I can use it as a reference, even if there is a gap of months or years between one model for a force and another. I know from experience that remembering specific colours can be tough if you don't touch an army for a long time

Armour - Macragge Blue
Under suit, weapon and belt - Black and Leadbelcher
Pouches  & Weapon Strap - Rhinox Hide
Imperial Eagle & Trim - Retributor armour
Purity Seal - Zandri Dust & Screamer Pink
Face - Bugmans glow
Hair - Scrag Brown




When you apply your colours, try to be as neat as possible, and work from the harder to reach areas first. You will be able to identify these when you first look at your miniature. When painting Ultramarines, it's easy to fix any small mistakes you make. Blue is an opaque colour, so will cover any mistakes you make, its very easy to touch up. If you go for a lighter scheme, for example white or yellow, you will need to be a lot more careful as mistakes on these colours can be very hard to fix.


Basecoated Miniature



It only took me about 30 minutes to apply the base colours, and with the exception of the models base, this makes it totally a totally adequate tabletop standard in my opinion. If i was to change one thing it would be to make the bolter and bolt pistol red. All my intercessors have black weapons, so a red one will make the model stand out from the crowd. This isn't necessary  though.

The next steps will be shading and highlighting

I hope you find this useful, and I will share the next steps shortly
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