TLDR: I finally have my Space Marine chapter decided, I just need help with the greens…

Yes, I’m still here. I tried to start this site with a lot of gusto in the hope that it would give me the motivation to get projects finished and share it with you all. Alas, it has not materialised in the way I hoped, BUT I think finally I can really get started in earnest with the Space Marines I have been trying to get painted over the last year.

Anyone that has been following my Instagram over the last year will have seen various intermittent posts as I try every possible permutation of colours I liked under the son for my Primaris marines. Originally I wanted to do something akin to Sons of the Phoenix, but with black armour and a green arm, then I decided that I really liked the Jade colour made by Kabalite green so wanted that to be my main colour with some other secondary arm but something still wasn’t quite clicking how I hoped. I was ideally looking for some sort of homebrew chapter that would give me enough scope for conversions, certainly not a mainstream chapter at least.

Then, quite by accident, I stumbled across Richard Walker’s Sons of Medusa the tutorial for which can be found on Siege Studio’s patreon. I had never come across them before so started having a look at the lore and background online. For those uninitiated, the Sons of Medusa are an Iron Hands successor chapter, specifically three of the Iron Hands clans that splintered off to form their own chapter. While most armies I see online show them as a lime green similar to Salamanders, technically their armour is described as emerald in the lore, and that was absolutely the colour I wanted to do mine. So that’s it, right? I just use the jade/emerald colour I used in my original test models and move on right? WRONG! I discovered actually that Kabalite green was just that bit too dark that I didn’t think there was enough contrast between the black and the rest of the armour. The search was narrowed, but it does still continue.

Pick your fighter

So I bit the bullet, and rather than stripping and repainting the same 5 space marines over and over, I figured I would finally just try painting a Primaris marine, three in fact! So I need input: forget what the Sons of Medusa should look like, and instead just tell me which green you prefer. In the image at the start of this post, from left to right we have VMC Emerald, VMC Park Green Flat and VGC Jade. I think they all have their merits, and it’s particularly hard for me to decide. I think the Emerald and Jade are very similar anyway and think that the Jade is just a bit richer, but Park Green v Jade is the toughy. That said, I am really happy with all of them, and may even go as far as to say they are some of the best minis I’ve painted - lockdown has given me a long time to watch painting videos!

There are some still minor details that I want to sort with the colours, in particular the colour of the chest Aquila, and I might play around with the tone of the heads a bit more. Finally, there are the transfers to add as well, along with the black knee caps, but I don’t think that will massively affect anyone’s preference so I’ve left it for now.

Emerald

Jade

Park Green Flat

I’ve also been trying to refine my miniature photography a bit too to try and improve the quality of the images. Annoyingly I haven’t been able to hit the sweet spot with the colour correction so my physical favourite (by a slim margin) is not the same as my favourite picked straight from the images.

Either way, let me know your thoughts, I’ll be putting various polls up on all the socials over the next week so tell me what you think, and hopefully, soon you’ll see a whole squad. Once I’ve settled on the scheme and got a few more done, I will eventually get round to putting a tutorial together for them too.

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