 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we've got something very, very special. Today, we're gonna paint some Alpha Legion space marines, but not just any Alpha Legion space marines, beaky marines, because it's time for the heresy. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci-V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci-V style. Games Workshop was nice enough to send me the heresy box and make me part of the whole heresy week-ender. And many of us got both legions and Primarks, and you're gonna see painting on the Primark coming up real soon, but shh, on that. I was given the Alpha Legion, which is great, because I really like the Alpha Legion. I think they're super cool, because are they good guys, are they bad guys, are they loyal, are they traitors? Yes, is the answer. I just love how mysterious and weird and strange they are, and how sneaky. I originally thought about basically not painting anything for this, and when everybody else sent in their painted miniatures, I was just gonna tell them that all of my, all of those were actually mine, they were just Alpha Legion infiltrators in disguise. But I didn't, and I buckled down, and now I'm gonna take you through my recipe for how to get some really, really great-looking, Horus heresy era Alpha Legion space marines. How we go from everything that comes in the box to this. So, this is a lot of stuff. The box is pretty impressive, it comes with 40 regular attack marines, 10 terminators, two heroes, the Dread and the Tank. As a side note, this tank is one of my favorite tanks that's ever been built. I really, really love this tank. I love tanks and vehicles in general, this tank is awesome. So, that's just a personal note for me, doesn't really have anything to do with anything. I don't know who sculpted it, but whoever you are, you did an awesome job on this tank. So, let's get into how exactly we go about painting up some Alpha marines. Alright, so we're gonna start by priming them. Here I'm just using a Krylon All-in-One outside. It's a beautiful gray 50-degree day, 40-degree day. I don't know, snow started falling right after this, so it's fine. Primers warm, figs are warm, spray them, take them inside. Once everything was dry, we're gonna lay down a little quick base coat, but only from straight on and above of Vallejo Metal Color Magnesium. I'm effectively gonna use the black as my low tone here. Magnesium is one of the darker tones in the range. It also has just a hint of blue to it, which I like. That will be very handy later on. But the goal here is just to get them, I don't shoot that metal from below, only from straight on in the top. Speaking of from above, then I come in with Vallejo Metal Color Silver, which is extremely reflective and we're gonna shoot from above. Effectively creating a nice zenithal mapping over all of the marines up to an extremely reflective metal, but not quite bright enough. Here's where I make a mistake. I'm getting out Molotow Chrome, which is really, really bright, and I don't love my application of this. I should have gone a little heavier with a second coat of the silver. My goal is to place this Molotow just in the highest highlights where things are reflecting. But it's so much brighter. It's like a mirror when you apply it with a brush like I am here, that it in some places makes the extremely smooth base coat I have a little more chunky. We're gonna cover it, but it's unfortunate. If I was doing this again, I would double coat with the silver. So that's just a tip for the future. So as I bring in the Tamiya clears here, this is a three to one blue to green. The goal here is to work extremely thin because that whole mix is thinned one to one with Tamiya thinner. And I'm using this specifically as a glaze effectively over these metals because I want to be able to control my shine and the opacity of the colors. Now why the Tamiya? They are very transparent and they are very glossy. And after about two glaze coats, as you saw, you get this look right here, which is this wonderful bright still mostly blue metal. With all that metal done, it's time for our friend, the decal. And so getting this is really pretty simple. I have this awesome set of Alpha Legion transfers. It is an amazing set of transfers, totally worth it. And I was able to do the whole box easily and still have like a bunch of amazing transfers left over. And you just soak them in water to loosen them up. Now I prefer micro set and micro sole. Micro set is what you start with. You just get the area nice and wet. Once the decal is soaked for about 30 seconds to a minute. I just get the paper next to it. And then you slowly work that bad boy off right onto the shoulder. Now a note about decals on shoulder pads. Curved surfaces like the shoulder pad are going to create creases in the decal. There's nothing you can do about it at first, but we can fix it in the long run. So as I put it on here, there's a lot of liquid because I have so much micro set in the area. And that surface itself is extremely glossy because of both the Tamiya and the metals. So it's the nothing soaking in there. The water is just sitting and beating right on top. So I can easily move the transfer around with my brush or with my tweezers if I need to. But what I'm doing afterward as you see me wiping it is just carefully smoothing it, removing every crease I can and then wiping the liquid and repeating that multiple times to get it as flat as I possibly can. There will still be a crease or two. That's where the Microsoft comes in. Microsoft basically melts the the decal itself into the surface. And unless you let it sit there in a big drop, it won't hurt your paint. I did not varnish first. There was no need to. And so I just apply a couple rounds of the Microsoft and I go back and really with that Microsoft after it's applied, I then soak up all the excess and smooth it out. They will be completely flat and smooth. But just to make sure I take a nice mix of gloss with just a little bit of satin varnish and varnish over them. They're now completely integrated into the armor. No gaps, no anything like that. The armor is basically done at this point, which is so much of these models. And it really it feels great to be able to do so much of it now. Applying those decals does take a long time, but that's all right. My next step is everywhere that I want to be either black or metallic. I'm going to have to black that back out. Now the metals I'm going to use here are strong enough that they could that they would cover over everything that's here. But I actually prefer to go over everything in black first because that ends up being my occlusion shadow, my little dark line in between the colored areas and the metal. So as you can see here, I painted the edge of this little backpack vents next to what I'm going to leave in this blue color. Once all the little black is applied, which is a time consuming step, a quick edge highlight on the gun will pop that out. This is just, I had some black, I had some ivory, mix them together, bang, you get gray, it's like magic. And I just traced the interesting edges around the gun. Again, we've got 40 of these guys to do if you're doing the box. So, you know, let's be reasonable. It's one beaky marine. We're not going to take each of these guys to display quality. So we put some nice edge highlights around all of the relevant edges and we call it a day. Easy. Getting the eyes. The eyes on space rings are so important. So here a nice sharp brush and some very smooth flowing ivory paint that's been thinned down about one to one with water. And we get that applied. Now, I did black out the eyes before I put the ivory in because I want a nice dark shadow around the eye to make it stand out. Don't try to go straight to the red. Don't try to take the white and fill all the black. There should be a thin ring of black around. Once that ivory is dry, you can apply any red you want and bada-bing, bada-boom. There we go. The red will seem very bright and have a really nice saturation to it over top of the ivory. Back to the metals just as we started is how we will not end, but how we continue. Again, I'm going to use the exact same progression I did with the marine itself going with magnesium and just coating all the areas that I think are supposed to be metal. No big deal. I will leave some of the black where I want a shadow or I'll thin the metal down. As it works off my brush, it's getting thinner and thinner. And so in some areas, I'll let it get super thin and then kind of work it into the black, almost like I'm pseudo dry brushing, but with the normal brush. The important part here is to just for the most part lay down the base coat. Notice that I'm trying to leave, say, like in between this little buckle situation on his chest or belt or whatever it is. I'm trying to leave those strong black lines to separate it, not just painting the whole thing metal. Once again, for our highlight, we go to a nice silver to make sure that we've got those real bright reflections where they should be. This guy is so bright, his armor is so shiny and so reflective. If we don't put in that extra work with the regular metal and make it silver as well, it will seem flat and dull and uninteresting by comparison. So once you make one area of a miniature have an extremely high shine, if you have other things that are supposed to be a brighter, more reflective material, i.e. steel, then you've got to go to that level. Alright, here comes the super fun trick. When you're dealing with this kind of lacquered sort of armor where you've got these transparent glossy coats over steel, one of the ways you can pop them up and make them interesting in the sort of heavy metal-ish style is by edge highlighting them with pure silver. It makes sense that if they're this bright, you can see where my painting lights are actually reflecting in his shoulder pads and see how white that is. It would make sense then that in scale in his world, the reflections off the edges of his armor, light gathers around metallic edges, would be more or less a pure white reflection. And so the silver is going to allow us to do that. So I carefully trace the edge around all of the primary parts and create some nice edge highlights. My last major step here is going to be to turn the ground brown. For that we use some gold and so flat brown. Kills all the shine out because it is ultra ultra ultra ultra matte and we just put a nice coat on it. I also water it way down and run it up onto his feet. I want to jump in here and say if you don't have the exact paints that I'm using or the exact stuff, don't worry about it. Anything close is going to work. A lot of this was really me finding things that I thought were going to be well aligned to this total process. But I don't want you to ever feel hemmed in by the products I've decided to use. If you've got access to GW colors only or stuff like that, there's always going to be equivalents out there for what you can do. I use this particular suite of products because I think they're the best for the tasks in hand. But when especially when it comes to things like the reds you see me using on some of the ancillary parts for the termies, you don't need to worry about those. Anything like that would work. So don't get too hung up on the individual stuff. Have fun when painting these guys because there's a lot of them and you've got to have a good time with it. Now our Terminator friends have some extra accoutrement that the little Marines did not have. Namely they have these little leather strips coming down all over them. So for that I went for something like a red brown. And so I started with this, well it's royal brown from Camero, but it has a nice red tone to it. And this is where we get into sort of color theory. When I went for a bright saturated red, it would draw away too much from the blue, from the attention. When we want to use colors like this, a bright red and a blue, it's important that something be desaturated. And since the blue is so absolutely face-kickingly intense, I make sure that this red is extremely desaturated, both starting from one with heavy infusions of brown and black, and then ending with some that has an infusion of gray as my highlights. Really killing a lot of the color to make it look more like a very weak red brown. To further strip that away, I'm going to edge highlight all the little straps, for lack of a better term for what they are, and make sure that they're popped out and I'm doing this with basically an extremely gray red. I just mixed in my normal gray tone I had made from white and black into the red tone to get something quite neutral. And the goal there was simple, to take away some of the red, make it look more worn, weathered, and appropriate for the heresy campaign, which where things are often rough, even the Alpha Legion, who I like to look really, really shiny. After all that edge highlighting and coloration, my dividing lines weren't quite as clear as they should be, so a little trace with black Templar or anything down black paint restores that. The ground of course can't stay just regular boring brown. We want to continue that red theme that I've hidden up in their eyes and in the leather and in a few other places like lenses and stuff of guns into the ground. But here it needs to be highly desaturated. So I grab an off red desaturated pigment and I'm just slamming that into the base. The question will come of what do you varnish this in? No, I do not. I just work it real hard into the ground, tap it off, blow the rest off, and then wipe, wipe, wipe until only what's left is there and is going to be very stuck on. This is my little fun time lapse footage of me doing all the Marines. You can see I keep working from the pile that I shake off. But I'm working it into the ground texture really, really hard and then tapping hard, blowing it off, brushing it off, etc. So all that's left is that brown that's been very, very worked into the pigment. Assuming he doesn't get wet or something, then he should stay fine. Last step. Oh, this felt so good. It feels so good. It feels so right. The end of a long project. 53 miniatures, the entire box set. Setting up all of them in a row and just black rimming that base. Boy, I'll tell you what. Is there any better moment in life? Maybe a few. But this is one of the best. So there we go. The Alpha Legion ready to go. I'm going to, of course, roll pictures here of all of them close up so you can see exactly what's going on with them. This was a lot of fun. As I said, thank you to Games Workshop for sending this box along for involving me in this project. I thought it was really cool and I was very proud and feel very lucky to be a part of it. The Alpha Legion is really unique, but honestly, a lot of the techniques you see here, you could use for most any of the various legions that you would have. Remember, when you're working on a big project like this, the key is always just have those steps down. Keep your workflow and your palette as limited as possible, which will let you move through everything quickly, efficiently, and without any time spent worrying or creating unnecessary variation. So with that, I will say thank you very much for watching this. I do appreciate it. Check out everything related to this. I know a lot of people who are involved in the Horus Heresy Weekender are also putting up content related to it, so go check out all of their related videos. Give this a like if you liked it. If this is your first time here, hey, why not subscribe? We have new tutorials here every Saturday. If you want to take your hobby journey deeper, we also have a Patreon focused on review and feedback, helping you take your next step in the hobby journey. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one. And we'll see you next time.