Hello, everybody! I’m here to introduce the official Crucible Guard color scheme today, (in case you missed the guerilla livestream Dallas rocked from AdeptiCon)!

When coming up with a color scheme for an entirely new Faction, there are a lot of factors to balance—from ease of painting to the Faction’s history in the fiction. In addition, we had the potential to introduce a series of new Formula P3 Paints, so making sure those get their time in the sun was also a factor in our thoughts.

My first set of color passes leaned very heavily into metallic armor plates over colored leather, as I first imagined the order using lots of alchemically treated materials and unpainted, corrosion-resistant alloys.

The reaction to these schemes was fairly positive overall, but we pretty quickly decided we didn’t want the main armor plate color for the Faction to be bare metal—that would quickly become overwhelming on the many mechanikal models in the Faction (especially the Railless Interceptor!). With that in mind, though, Scheme H felt pretty close to us.

We went back and generated a new set of colors using H’s green coats as our base and worked from there. You may notice a couple schemes with metallic armor still—at this point, I was considering the idea that we might invert the colors for the warjacks in the Faction, which was abandoned when we realized that it would muddy the lines between different material types.

At this point Art Director Mike Vaillancourt had the idea to use the green that was showing up in most of our combinations as our armor plate color, which would eventually be incorporated into the final color scheme.

To make sure that we hadn’t failed to consider other options, Matt Wilson sent me a big pile of color reference, and I worked up a few extra schemes that purposefully diverged from the direction we were starting to settle into.

I also started applying colors to the ’jacks at this stage to make sure the colors we chose would also look good on our more mechanikal models. There were a few in this batch that we liked, but of the finalists, option X was the one that was the most unique from our other Factions. (It also happened to be my personal favorite!) Just to double-check that it was going to work across the range, I applied the color scheme to a few more models, testing some metal options and accent color swatches while I was at it:

With a few final accents (deciding on a primarily orange glow, for instance), our color scheme was ready for primetime.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at our colorful journey (and perhaps picked up some inspiration for your own Crucible Guard color scheme)!