Boarding Action Terrain | Warhammer 40,000 How To Paint

The first step we took was priming the terrain in Chaos Black, after a thorough clean up of course! 

We chose black as if we missed painting any shadows in later, it would look intentional – just something to speed up the process. 

First Basecoat-

Lawrence airbrushed everything with warlock bronze through the airbrush (thinned out with vallejo airbrush thinner). 

If you don’t have an airbrush, you can use an overbrush (a heavy drybrush where you don’t remove as much paint from the brush). 

First Basecoat Highlight-

We then mixed Sycorax Bronze and Warlock Bronze in a 50/50 mix and applied a generous zenithal highlight with the airbrush (spray the terrain pieces at a 45 degree angle from above).

Again, if you don’t have an airbrush, you can overbrush the top 2/3rds of the wall pieces with this mixture.

Second Basecoat Highlight-

To finish off the main wall, we airbrushed pure Sycorax Bronze from directly above the walls. 

If you don’t have an airbrush – same deal! Drybrush the top 3rd of the wall with Sycorax Bronze

Lawrence then used a sponge to dab Vallejo Air Steel on the raised parts of the walls, making them stand out a little more (you can use Citadel Runefang Steel as an alternative too).

Beard blocked in all the pipes / extra gubbins with Leadbelcher, and proceeded to wash them with Nuln Oil. 

We also experimented with the awesome Dirty Down rust product in some recesses of the walls and across random patches! Remember to use the hair dryer to immediately dry the wet paint after applying it. We also applied Agrax Earthshade randomly in the recesses.

Finally, to finish off the extra details we used Vallejo Dark Red Ochre pigments neat from the pot and smashed them into the bottom of the walls with an old brush. You don’t have to seal these with anything – just smush them into the terrain nice and proper! 

I was in charge of painting the glowy screens. The easiest way to learn my glow technique is to check out my Farsight Painting Tutorial On Demand HERE, where I show how to paint the lenses, which gives the same effect.

As for the colours used-

Blue screens: Vallejo White Grey and Talassar Blue Contrast
Green Screens/lights: Vallejo Ice Yellow and Warp Lightning Contrast 
Red lights: Yriel Yellow and Blood Angels Red Contrast 
Yellow Lights: Ice Yellow, Iyanden Yellow and Gryph Hound Orange Contrast

The transfers we used were taken from the standard Astra Militarum sheet.