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4 Paints That Make Painting Salamanders Secretly Easy

Kenny with Next Level Painting is hooking us up, once again, with a sweet painting tutorial. This time around, it’s for Salamander Space Marines!

Kenny has done all types of painting tutorials, but today he’s gonna give us the rundown on painting Salamanders well and efficiently. He’ll give us his personal advice and some tips along the way to getting a crispy fresh salamander marine ready for tabletop.

The three Army Painter paints we are using on our base coat are Crypt Wraith, Jungle Green, and Greenskin.

Salamander green 1Start with a flat black primer coat, and follow it up with our darker green as a first coat. This takes a few light layers, so take your time.

Salamander green 2Following fast behind that, we can hit it with three more coats, slowly transitioning to the lightest green and mixing a tiny bit a Moon Dust in on the last coat. It is important to remember that with each coat you want to cover less and less of the model always aiming top-down to give the effect of glow and shadows.

If you find the yellow from the Moon Dust is a little too obvious, you can take some more of our light green and add more flow improver and water than normal to make it extremely light. Make one last pass to saturate the yellow a little bit and get the shading just right!

Salamander baseKenny took advantage of the drying time by adding his basing. Just a simple mix of texture paint on the base plus a piece of stone to give it some character.

Salamander detailsAfter the model is dry, Kenny jumps on it and does all the details in one swoop! Black knee pads and shoulder pads, Silver gun with red plasma, gold chest, and red eyes.

Salamander liningAfter the base coats for the details are done we move onto the tracing of the plates. Take the yellow and light green from earlier and mix them 50/50. Don’t worry about all the lines, just hit the sharp edges.

Salamander plasma coilsUp next we are touching up our plasma gun. This is relatively easy and doesn’t require any science of thinking. We are going to go from our red base to orange, to yellow, to white. All we have to do is make sure to keep our coats thin and progressively get closer and closer to the top leaving previous layers showing through to get a nice heat effect.

Kenny does a quick grey lining over the pads in this step.

Salamander washHere we take our dark tone Army Painter wash and hit up the gun’s metal, his chest, and the pouches.

Salamander base washNext use Mr. Hobby multi black oil wash, that you can pick up from Spraygunner, and cover the whole base, no priming needed. Also, throw some of the wash on his eyes and face. Then, highlight the lines on the plasma gun with a silver.

Salamander finishedLastly, up hit the base with a quick and easy white dry brush on the rocks and statue piece. That’s it, our model is done and it took less time than you might think. Salamanders truly are Secretly easy!

You can support Kenny on his Patreon page, and stock up on all the great Chaos gear over on his Heretic Swag store.

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About the Author: Andrew Schrank

Andrew Schrank

andrew schrank headshotJob Title: Staff Writer

Joined: 2018

Socials: Facebook

Bio: Aspiring diplomat, Lord of Fluff, and Master of Ice Hammer. Andrew joined the Spikey Bits team in 2018. He mainly covers releases from Games Workshop, along with some previews and hobby posts. He loves Star Wars, Chaos Undivided, and Gundam.

During his free time, he hunts Platinum trophies on PS5 and reads international news. On weekends, he can be found playing commander and cEDH games, often with unique strategies that push the limits. He believes that each day presents a new opportunity to grow and be challenged.