How To: Paint Dark Angels Tactical Squad (Chest Eagles)

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.

This time I will be demonstrating how to paint the chest eagles for some Dark Angels Tactical Marines. Usually I paint Space Marine chest eagles in gold, but for my Dark Angels, I fancied something different, as there would be plenty of gold on the model anyway. So, I decided to go for the bone colour, which would also help them blend in with the Deathwing elements of the army.

The basecoat for the eagles was Citadel Ushabti Bone. As this is a layer paint you will have to be careful to make sure that the eagle is fully covered. Use a few thin coats until you are happy with how it looks. It should look like this:

Next, as usual, is the time for a shade. Shading helps bring out the three-dimensional nature of models, and is no less important here. It is often best to shade second and then highlight afterwards as then the shade will not stain the highlights.

To shade use Citadel Seraphim Sepia:

Once the shade has dried (roughly 45 minutes, but make sure that it is completely dry), it is time to revisit the Ushabti Bone. Using a thin layer, go back over the feathers of the eagle, leaving the shade in the recesses. Be careful, as you do not want to go over the shading. However, you can always re do the shading stage if you need to. It should look like this:

Next, continue the highlights with a lighter shade. Try to cover slightly less of the feathers, and this will give the illusion of light reflecting from their surface. For this, I used Citadel Screaming Skull. Again, making sure that it was thin enough to work with:

Finally, you can either leave it there, or apply a very final highlight of Citadel White Scar. For this highlight, just paint onto the very tips of the feathers, as this shows the most extreme point where light is reflecting. For this I would use an XS Artificer Layer brush or size 00:

Of course, this method can be used for your entire Dark Angels Army, as well as other eagles that you need to paint.

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