Here’s a great tutorial on how to paint Adeptus Custodes miniatures, with tips on painting as well our recipes for red and gold.
When you paint your Adeptus Custodes miniatures one of the keys to painting is starting with the gold side of things, and then moving on with how you want to paint your red colors. That way you can get the main colors done easily, then fill out with whatever little extras you want. Plus it also cuts down on metal flate getting on your reds which is super hard to clean up.
That being said with the new Army Painter airbrush paint it is way easier to get into areas with metals and avoid flake overspray on your Adeptus Custodes.
An Easy Recipe To Paint Adeptus Custodes Gold
We will start with a black undercoat primer. One of the biggest things to remember when painting gold is to start off with a black primer. The black will have a stark contrast with your golds and make them pop as you can see above. You can more or less use whatever primer you want, but for paints, Army Painter Golds are super easy and can help cover up mess-ups since they have a 100% color match.
It doesn’t matter if you are using an airbrush or paintbrush, Army Painter paints in general really make hobbying easy!
You Only Need a Few Paints
When it comes to painting Adeptus Custodes miniatures, the key paint colors to get your golds to look shiny and awesome are as follows: True Copper is your base color, followed by Greedy Gold, and then followed up with Bright Gold. As a final touch-up, a mix of Bright Gold and Plate Mail will get your fine edging done to a premium gold sheen!
To start Rob breaks out the airbrush, and mixes some Flow Improver and some True Copper into the pot. He sprays the whole model with this color. A few quick layers are all you need, just make sure to get good coverage. Once that’s done move up to Greedy Gold to help match existing paints with your previous colors and do a top-down spray in more of a highlight. If you feel like you need to, go even brighter to get your gold right where you want it. It’s all about where you want the light source to come from. Just keep your layers thin and try to get the gold from a top-down angle to leave some shadows.
Highlights
Next up move to the Bright Gold and do a final highlight with the airbrush from a top-down angle. You want these to flow with the previous layers, so don’t go too thick and make the transitions obvious. You just want this color at the point where the light would be hitting the most, or just where you want it brightest. Then, to finish it off, take the brush with a mix of Bright Gold and Plate Mail and do a final edge highlight.
Lastly, take a flesh wash over all the gold to tone down the super shiny parts. if want a darker gold, mix purple with flesh wash 1 part to 3 parts. And it’s really that easy if you have an airbrush, just basically 4 layers. Now, let’s check out the red.
Red Paint Recipe For Adeptus Custodes
The awesome Ixion Hale, The show-only model, from Forge World features some awesome flowing robes. Like many of the latest Custodes models and almost every Space Marine hero, these robes can be a nightmare to paint! Rob is going to show us how to paint a great-looking red color to accent all the Adeptus Custodes gold!
Paints Used
We went over the golds we used above for painting Adeptus Custodes, but here are the reds: Chaotic red as your base coat, Pure Red as your second coat, and Dragon Red Paint for your highlights.
Basecoats
First up is a basecoat of Chaotic Red with a brush, he says Mephiston Red in the video, which can be used as well but for all his other minis he likes the Army Painter Red better (both recipes turn out the same, except Army Paint paints are better, cheaper, and come in a dropper bottle).
This covers over the light gold base really well and provides us with a solid foundation to start with. Just make sure to get good coverage here, nothing too crazy to start.
Unfortunately, sometimes this can be too light for many of the darker deeper folds on this model’s cape. To correct this Rob uses a Burnt Umber lightly applied through an airbrush to darken the folds- which is totally optional…
Airbrushing
Now that the base coat is applied and the shade is completed, it’s time to begin highlighting! Rob uses Pure Red to brighten the raised areas of the cape. This is just to the higher parts of the robe, so leave some deeper parts without much color.
Highlights
Finally, Rob uses a thin liner brush and some Dragon Red to apply an edge highlight to the sharp lines on the cape. just be sure to have good thin paint here so it builds a nice transition. And that’s it, really that simple.
Finished Red
With these tips, you can get all the main colors for your Custodes fast and easily!
For the bases, Rob used the Hellfire hobbies Urban Bases tutorial that you can find by clicking here.
Have you started painting your Adeptus Custodes yet?
