From the brushstroke at the forge to the first die roll.
The ultimate color companion app for tabletop gamers and hobby painters alike.
Explore a universe of color, forge and manage your painter's hoard.
Supply Depot - The Quartermaster's Vault
No warrior marches to battle without the proper instruments of war. Here you will find every weapon of the painter's craft — paints, primers, brushes, and tools — gathered from every house the Imperium's supply lines can reach. Step forward, painter. Your war gear awaits.
Acquiring your war gear through these channels sustains the Forge. The Emperor provides — but a small tithe keeps the lights on.
Miniatures
In the beginning, there is the model. Grey plastic pulled from a sprue, resin cast in the likeness of a warrior, metal poured into a mould a decade before you held it. Before any paint is mixed, before any brush is raised, the miniature must exist — and it must call to you. The hobby is not sustained by efficiency or practicality. It is sustained by the compulsion to do justice to the subject on the table. Plastic, resin, metal — the material matters less than the model. Choose what makes you want to paint. Everything else in the Quartermaster's Supply Depot exists to help you do exactly that.
Acrylic Paints
Much like the bolter of an Ultramarine — wielded with equal conviction by a fresh recruit and a Chapter Master — acrylics are the weapon of choice at every tier of the hobby. Award-winning competition painters work in the same medium as the first-timer on their kitchen table. They dry swiftly, forgive the trembling initiate's brush, and yield to water when the purging hour comes. The great Codex of painting begins here, with a single entry: acrylic. Begin with a starter set from one of the great houses — Army Painter, Citadel, or Vallejo. The colours your legions truly need will reveal themselves through battle. The ceiling is not the paint — it is the hand that holds the brush.
Speed Paints / One-Coat Paints
The grey tide is the true enemy — not Chaos, not the Xenos, but the endless unpainted regiment on the shelf. Speed paints were forged as the answer. One coat over a light primer and the paint does the work: pooling in the recesses to shade, thinning on the raised surfaces to highlight. Speed paints are a weapon optimised for volume — hordes, infantry regiments, bulk production. On a centrepiece model where every highlight is hand-blended, their advantage is less clear. Know which campaign you are fighting before you commit your palette. The great houses have answered. Their formulations differ; the outcome does not. Choose your allegiance and march.
Washes & Shades
There is a rite known to every painter who has served the Forge: the wash. A single pass of thinned, dark pigment across a basecoated surface, and the recesses claim their shadows by right. No steady hand required. No years of training. The paint obeys gravity like a loyal battle-brother. Apply it. Walk away. Return to a model transformed. The sacred minimum: a brown wash and a black wash. Together they serve Khorne's red, Nurgle's rot, the cold grey of Imperial armour, and the dark steel of a Space Marine's boltgun. Between these two pigments lies the shadow of almost every surface a painter will face. The great houses each field their versions. All serve the Omnissiah.
Metallic Paints
The gold of the Emperor's chosen does not come from a single pot. Metallics demand respect — and in recent years, the great forges have answered that demand with true metallic mediums that behave like regular paint yet dry with genuine reflectivity. The old approach — coarse metallic flake suspended in pigment — has been largely deposed. The new mediums blend wet-on-wet, layer cleanly, and catch light the way the armour of the Adeptus Custodes was always meant to. Your foundational requisition: a silver, a gold, and a copper. These three serve every Chapter's iconography, every daemon's blade, every Imperial eagle, and every corroded fitting in the underhive. The rest of the metallic range is expansion territory — useful, but not required until the campaign demands it.
Primers
The first commandment of the Forge: thou shalt not skip primer. It is not a recommendation. It is the sacred covenant between paint and plastic — the mechanical bond that keeps every layer above it from peeling, chipping, and failing under the first touch of a finger. A model painted without primer is a model that will humiliate its owner within a week. Prime everything. No exceptions. No heresy. Grey is the universal rite — it forgives mistakes, accepts any colour above it, and reveals surface imperfections before the campaign begins. Black primer serves dark armies and shadow-heavy schemes. White primer serves the bright colours — yellows, whites, and the blazing oranges of flame and glory — that struggle to achieve their true hue over a darker foundation. Know your army before you choose your primer. The Quartermaster will supply the rest.
Brushes
No piece of war gear in the painter's arsenal is more personal than the brush. It is the instrument through which every decision of colour, shadow, and highlight is transmitted to the model. A brush with a dead point transmits nothing useful. The point is the measure of all things — a fine tip that springs back to centre when wet is a weapon in service. One that splays and forks is fit only for drybrushing and basing. The foundational loadout: one medium brush for coverage, one fine brush for detail, one dedicated brush for drybrushing. The drybrush is a martyr — the technique strips bristles by design. Assign a worn brush to this duty and protect your sharp ones. Wash with brush soap after every session. The Emperor's finest did not paint their armour with blunt instruments.
Inks
Not all dark pigments serve the same master. The wash is a servant of shadow — it finds the recesses and dwells there. The ink serves colour itself. Transparent and saturated beyond what opaque paint can achieve, inks alter the hue of everything beneath them without obscuring a single detail. A glaze of yellow ink over bone becomes aged ivory. A pass of red over silver becomes the reflected light of a furnace. The ink does not cover. It consecrates. Inks are the advanced requisition — tools for painters who understand that what lies beneath the pigment is as important as the pigment itself. They dry with a sheen that betrays their presence on a matte model. Varnish seals the evidence. The effect remains.
Basing & Special Effects
The 41st Millennium is not clean. Its warriors carry the evidence of every world they have fought on — rust blooming on neglected armour, blood dried into the joints of a chainsword, dust from a desert campaign still caked in the treads of a boot. Replicating this truth on the painting table is the domain of special effects: a range of compounds, pigments, and texture materials forged to simulate the physical reality of endless war. Basing grounds the model in a place. Effects ground it in a story. Together they are the final argument between a miniature that looks painted and one that looks like it belongs in the world it was designed for. Apply them last. Apply them with restraint. The difference between weathering and ruining is the hand that stops in time.
Airbrush Setup
The airbrush is the greatest force multiplier available to the miniature painter. An entire regiment primed and zenithal-shaded in the time it takes to base coat a single model by brush. Power armour gradients that would take an expert hours by hand resolved in minutes. The tool is not a shortcut — it is a different weapon entirely, with different capabilities and different demands. Those who have crossed into airbrush territory do not return to brush-only as their primary method. The entry tithe is threefold: the airbrush, the compressor, and a spray booth for any indoor deployment. Cans are not an adequate substitute for a compressor — they cannot sustain consistent pressure and fail without warning. The fumes of airbrush-thinned paint require ventilation that a cracked window cannot provide alone. Invest in the full setup. The machine spirit rewards those who equip themselves properly.
Auxiliaries
The 41st Millennium runs not on courage alone but on the supply chains that support it. At the painting table, auxiliaries are that supply chain. They do not paint the model. They ensure that everything else used to paint the model performs at its highest capacity — and that the result, once achieved, survives contact with the real world. Varnish is the final covenant. Mediums are the alchemical keys that unlock techniques the paint alone cannot perform. Thinners are the discipline of the airbrush stage. Flow improvers are the invisible hand that guides pigment where the brush cannot. Requisition them alongside the paint range. The campaign cannot be sustained without them.
Tools & Equipment
Every campaign requires equipment that defies easy categorisation — the tools that support the work without belonging to any single stage of it. This is that section. What the other requisitions did not claim, the Quartermaster has gathered here.
