How to: Paint Dark Angels Tactical Squad (Chapter Symbols & White)
Hello and welcome to the continuation of my posts on how to paint Warhammer 40,000 Dark Angels. If you haven’t been keeping up, you can read the first post here.
Today’s post looks at how to get a nice white colour on the Dark Angels chapter badges and other assorted iconography. Many people worry about painting white, and consider it difficult, but hopefully this post shows that it doesn’t have to be.
There are two main tips that I would suggest. First, make sure that your water pot is completely clean. Any dirty water in there may off-colour your white. The second is to thin down the paints well enough; it is always easier to build up coats that to try and redo the colour.
The first stage is to do a basecoat Citadel Celesta Grey on all the parts you want to be white. It is best to thin this and do two coats, as a nice solid basecoat will really make the white stand out and look good:
After that you need to shade the basecoat. This picture is of a Citadel Nuln Oil shade, but I would actually suggest using Citadel Drakenhof Nightshade. It may look a bit weird at first with the shade, especially the blue, but it will help the white have depth, and the blue will give it a cool white look:
After that, I would carefully layer Citadel Ulthaun Grey. Again, make sure that the paint is thin enough and apply two coats if needed. As you can see here this gives us a nice white, not-quite-white colour, but that cane be fixed with the highlight. This is after I went back and redid the basecoat and shade with Drakenhof Nightshade:
The final stage, and the part that really finishes it off is the highlight. The main problem people have with trying to paint white (and also black coincidently) is trying to make it too white. This may sound odd, but look at anything around you that you would consider white, and you’ll notice that it isn’t actually pure white, and the whitest part is where it catches the light. To do this, paint an edge highlight of Citadel Skull White. As you can see in the pictures this gives a nice cool-tone white, that is both consistent, and stands out. So the main colour is actually Ulthuan Grey:
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