Sticking it to the man... or the woman, or the machine, or...

Today I'd like to share some success I've had with a project that's been on the back burners for about 9 years.

When Warhammer 40,000 Dark Imperium came out, I decided it was time to start a new Space Marine army in the larger scale of the Primaris marines that the new box had introduced.

Space Marines are the poster boys of Warhammer 40,000, so Games Workshop puts a lot of thought into their design. I knew I wanted to have my own unique custom chapter, so I figured I'd do the same. I sat down and started to consider the following details:

• Colour scheme

• Name

• Backstory, progenitor chapter and specialisation (if any)

• Chapter badge and markings

Once I'd had a few thoughts on the above, I drew a concept sketch of what I thought one of my marines might look like, then turned it into a mock cover of one of the codices of the time. (You can see the image and read about my chapter, the Vexillators, in my previous blog post.)

But this is when the trouble started. When I came to actually paint my first miniature, I realised that the last item on the list, the chapter badge, was going to cause some serious problems. I really didn't want to paint a tiny, complicated marking on every single model in the army, so it would be much better if I could somehow get hold of a transfer sheet with my design. I thought about various options, and their cost implications, and the army soon found itself on pause. I really didn't want to spend a small fortune on this, so I went off and started playing with other toy soldiers that weren't nearly as needy. Mainly Orks.

But eventually I found the above product. It's a pack of waterslide decal sheets that you can print your own design on, using an inkjet home printer. There are a few different brands now, but these are the ones I used. You get twenty A4 sheets in the pack, so plenty of space to create all the markings and badges that you might need. You simply stick a sheet in the manual feed of your printer, and you can print whatever design you have prepared. Using Adobe Illustrator I lined up a starter sheet that had a bunch of designs that I thought might come in handy.

A home printer can't print white (as that is provided by the substrate, the white paper that you are usually printing to), so this method only really works for darker designs. In fact I've found that anything that is roughly darker than a mid grey tone seems to be okay as long as you are positioning it on a patch on your model that is roughly lighter than said mid grey tone. So red decals on yellow background will work fine, but a cream coloured icon on a dark blue background will be a non-starter. More on this below.

Once you have your printed sheet you will then need this vital can of spray varnish. You might be able to use other brands, but this is the one that eventually saw success for me. After letting your freshly printed sheet dry for a few hours, you are meant to give it a single all-over coat of this. But that didn't work for me, as the decals curled up and folded in on themselves when I tried to use them, so I ended up giving the sheet an extra two coats of the stuff – leaving about 24 hours drying time between each spray. All those coats of varnish gave the decals more rigidity, but now they look a little too thick on the models. I think it might be best to try just two coats next time.

The other issue I encountered at this stage was to do with the clarity of my printed designs at such a tiny scale. I found that the spread of ink filled in the smaller negative spaces, meaning that the symbols and markings became blurry and indistinct. I fixed this by going in to every design, and increasing the size of the white areas. So things like the gaps between feathers, and the corners of the Crux Terminatus crosses all got a bit bigger, wider or thicker.

Once everything was dry it was time to improve my application method. I've always soaked Games Workshop decals in a beaker of water to remove the back paper, then applied them to the model with a paintbrush. But as I mentioned earlier, these homemade decals were initially curling up and becoming unusable when I tried that. So instead, after increasing the amount of varnish on the sheet, I used a thin tray (actually a cavalry base turned upside down) with just a millimetre of water in it. I only let each decal soak for between 30 and 60 seconds, then used the large tweezers to remove it, brush it lightly against something absorbent like a tissue (to wick away the bulk of the water) then place it roughly on the model, in an area that I had just given a light coat of gloss varnish. I then used a blunt wooden tooth pick to push and pull it into a much more accurate position, using the varnish as lubricant. The varnish soon dries and becomes a decent adhesive, so at that stage another coat of the stuff on top gives the whole thing some staying power.

I decided I wanted to try a couple of test models, to see what sort of improvements I could make, so I revisited this yellow truck and these riot-police-style Arbites Enforcers.

I knew I didn't want to be limited to dark decals on light backgrounds though, so I thought about a work-around for the problem. The decals could be designed as negative spaces, sitting against the darker background colour. So instead of printing the symbol, you actually print a patch of the background colour, with a symbol shaped hole in it. The area on the model where you are intending to place it can then be painted the proposed colour of your symbol or badge, and it will show through the hole in the decal. You may need to tidy up around the edges a bit, but that's infinitely easier than painting the symbol by hand.

The yellow A15 badge on the door of the truck below was actually a dark green decal of the surrounding colour, stuck over a yellow patch on the door.

I don't feel that I've perfected the process yet, and I'm definitely going to experiment with the Micro Sol and Micro Set liquids shown in one of the above images, but I do think I've found a way to finally move forward with my Vexillator Space Marines. More on them soon.