How to Paint Crucible Guard Green

The Three-Paint Cheat Code

I’ve found the cheat code to this Crucible Guard green, and it’s just three easy paints. You could probably do it in two, maybe even one depending on your zenithal. The secret combination is Tyrant Navy, Plasmatic Bolt, and Thunderbird Blue.

Starting with the Brightest Highlight

We’re going to start with Thunderbird Blue over just a white zenithal highlight. If you did a bit more contrast between the white and black, you might only need this one color. I did a pretty standard zenithal where there wasn’t much black left on the model, but if you left more black—especially on these shoulders—you could maybe get away with just this color for tabletop quality.

This is our highest point, and we’re working backwards. By airbrushing these speed paints, it’s actually pretty hard to go over a darker color. So we’re starting with our brightest point and building up shadows on top of it.

Building Up the Shadows

It is a little nerve-wracking because it’s harder to do, but just go slow and ease into it. This is Plasmatic Bolt—just building up the shadows, coming up from the bottom, staying very far away from the top of the model. I’m making sure I’m getting up in the shadows, underneath this breast plate, working it up the side of this central panel.

This footage is at 2x speed right now, and it’s still that slow. I’m just being very intentional with where I’m putting these shadows. You can see me building it up. There still wasn’t as much contrast as I really wanted. If you’re going for a subtle effect, you could probably stop here, but I really wanted to create that textbook box art transition from black to bright green.

Going Deeper with Tyrant Navy

This is when I realized I got to go crazy and grab that Tyrant Navy. This is super nerve-wracking because if you mess this up, you’re going to mess up the whole paint job. I’m just easing this transition in, going very slow—I’m barely touching that button and working this in.

The contrast here is so high that it’s blasting out even with barely any paint on it. This will dry smoother than it seems. When you airbrush these speed paints, which I love doing, they’re very transparent. I just treat it like a very transparent ink.

The Key Advice

Go slow. I keep saying that—go slow, be careful. You’re saving a ton of time by doing it this way, so just don’t mess up. Work in the transitions and you get this really cool box art effect for actually very little effort.

Because we’re spraying from the bottom up, we still get that almost edge highlight effect on the model, which is always cool.

Fixing Mistakes

We’re starting to speckle—that’s not good. It wouldn’t be one of my videos if I didn’t show you how to fix the mistake. I’d been airbrushing for a while at this point and the airbrush was clogging, so the black speckled on top of where we didn’t want it.

To fix this, I’ve gone back to our initial highlight color with a very small amount of white ink in it, and I’m just blasting it on top. It’s going to look a little different than the other areas, but it’ll smooth out the transition and cover up our speckling.

What’s Next

Tomorrow I’m going to start cutting in details and hopefully finish these jacks up, or at least make a ton of progress on them. Hopefully this cheat code works for you!