How to paint SATURNINE’S Death Guard Praetor
The Death Guard have one of the most recognisable colour schemes in the hobby — and one of the easiest to overdo. Over weather, and you end up with a mud puddle on your legs. How many examples of great Death Guard armies completely robbed by the indistinct, sloppy application of weathering?
Bone and cream is the baseline, not the sickly yellow-green of the Plague Marines, but something reminiscent of the artwork found in Visions of Heresy. Most people use variations of yellow cream, but I thought I’d try something different with this army.
The risk with a desaturated palette like this is that it goes flat. So the shadows are doing serious work here — deep purples and greens pushed hard into the recesses, giving the surface a sense of something underneath the bone.
The OSL on the mace gives a much-needed pop of colour to offset the greyed-out tones used on the armour. I pushed the hell out of the saturation on the face to draw attention.
The shoulder pads were a bit a leap of faith and I fully expected to repaint them. But as it turns out with these things, I think it’s part of the strongest elements of the paint jobs. Something that’s in keeping with the style of the army, but stands out.
New edition, new army, new approach — and every stage of how this was achieved is over on the Patreon if you want to follow along or lift the recipe entirely.
