This time in our Warhammer Kill Team Diaries it's time to check in with Jonas, who is painting up the Skitarii from the Kill Team Starter Set

Painting Skitarii- In Theory

It’s tempting to write about painting my Skitarii Kill Team as if I had planned it methodically and in all detail. I don’t think I really did. I started with little more than practical considerations and unjustified preference: make it a simple, economic paint job using a limited palette, and use orange. However, I did put a little thought into the project before even picking up a brush. In this entry I hope to outline that thought process, show that it’s simple and doesn’t require much expertise, and share first results.

I’ve never used much colour theory, but I enjoy trying to improve my painting and figured I’ll give it a shot. The colour complementary (or ‘opposite’) to orange is blue, so I’d use that. However, there’s little more than greatcoats and bare metal on the Skitarii, hence not too much choice what to use blue for. I decided for a most heavily oxidised bronze for the metal parts. Basically, I’d paint all the metal blue or blue-ish. (An alternative would’ve been to paint the coats blue and all metal parts a bright rusty orange, but I didn’t like the idea of blue Skitarii at all.)

At that time my wife and I were watching the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale. She suggested I’d paint their bases like a nuclear wasteland. She said, make it like the colonies in the Republic of Gilead. In the series they’re a steaming hellhole of dirty ochre and yellow tones. Picture for reference.

I used a colour wheel app to confirm I was on track. (There are lots of free apps on Google Play. If you’re in front of a workstation or laptop, try the colour calculator on www.sessions.edu. Also, check out colour combinations that go well with each other) With just a bit of tweaking I zeroed in on a split-complementary paint scheme: oranges, blues, and yellows. Basically, the colour wheel says that this is a good choice in terms of colour theory. It offers a high visual contrast, but is less ‘loud’ than a simple complementary scheme. Of course the colour wheel doesn’t say you should like it.

I went to work on a single model first, then extended the scheme to a first batch of five, my Alpha included. I didn’t try too hard to match the exact colours on the colour wheel. I felt close enough was good enough. Where I felt that my minimal choice of colours was a bit too simple, I broke it up with accents of black and white – which are considered ‘neutral’ in colour theory –, yellow, and very limited accents of silver. Here’s what I produced so far:

Overall I’m actually really happy with them. It took me a fair bit of trialling in the beginning, but eventually they came out close to how I visualised them and turned out to be reasonably straightforward to paint.

I’ll write in more detail about the actual painting in my third and final entry. Stay tuned.