Painting big stuff- the philosophy

First of all, painting scenery has very few of the same artistic components as painting miniatures. There are reasons for this, but before I go into those, simply, think about what you want a miniature to look like. You want that space marine to look like the light of the emperor is upon his reflective armor. Every edge highlighed up to the lightest shade of the base color before it becomes white and everything on the miniature describable as "rich."

This philosophy is fine. As far as painting is concerned, it comes from the romantic school, where what you are painting is, essentially, idealized versions of the warriors of the 41st millenium. You're not painting gritty realism. I rarely see a space marine that doesn't look fresh off the drop pod. The armor doesn't look 10,000 years old and dented by hundreds of rounds of bolter fire. No one so much as has mud on their boots. There are no drowned out effects. Hell, what your going for when you paint a miniature is that the miniature looks like the paint is still wet. Look at White Dwarf and you'll see what I mean.

There's nothing wrong with that. Miniatures are meant to be painted as if they could be picked up and examined and someone will raise cries of oooh or ahhh. It's just that you're not going for any of those kinds of things with scenery. Every so often you see someone paint a building the same way they'd paint their war hero, and well...it just looks cartoon-esque. I mean, you're making a hill--does the light of the emperor really fall on hills the same way it falls on Brother Captain Sterne. I think not.

The thing is, scenery isn't painted (generally) in the romantic school. The reason is that you've seen a building, you've never seen a space marine. You can romanticize a space marine much more easilly than you might a building. Most 40k scenery is based off of scenes from the world wars. Again, you can see actual pictures of those things. Objects that have been in a warzone for a couple of days are generally covered in dust, can you imagine what they look like having survived shelling for a few centuries?

The other source that 40k draws its scenes from is sci-fi, but sci-fi is pretty standard stuff. Scenery is either earth tones (Tantoine, Pitch Black, Starship Troopers) or grey scales (Death Star, Terminator, Aliens). --For a good combination of both, see Dune or Universal Soldier--. Most things drawn from sci-fi are HUGE in scale("that's not a small moon"). It is better to think King Kong (the over the top Peter Jackson version) than it is to think Braveheart. Braveheart scenery is perfect for Fantasy, not for 40k. Hell, in Empire they aren't on an icy continent--even Antarctica is too small. They have to be on Hoth--an ice planet.

So big, and rather simple in color. Simple color has the added effect of really making the details on the miniatures pop...and after all, they're the one's you're spending lots of time (or money) on painting, right?Keep in mind the tenants of this philosophy. Quite a few miniatures are already on the verge of looking busy all by their lonesome, put them on a giant checkerboard crazy looking building, and they clash. For Orks this tends to not be as much of a problem. They're kind of supposed to clash. But for imperial stuff, the scene can quickly look like a carnival, and unless you're playing Harlequins, you don't want that.

Keep in mind, however, that when I say that colors should be "simple"--I am refering to the number of colors on the palate, and not on the actual painting. You're still going to have to do a lot of highlighting and shadowing of grey. You're still going to have to pick colors that go together. And, despite what I'm saying, there are still some color choices that you'll have to make. If everything's grey, after all, think how much a single yellow object will stick out. Sometimes, you'll want that.