glossary
A glossary of the hobby’s vocabulary — OSL, NMM, drybrushing and the rest, explained briefly.
Daemon prince
A mortal remade by a Chaos god as a reward for service, given a warp-built body and a very long life to spend on more of the same.
Drybrushing
Wiping most of the paint off the brush and dragging what is left across raised detail so it catches only the texture.
Edge highlighting
Running a thin line of lighter paint along the raised edges of armour and cloth so the shapes read at arm's length.
Forge World
Games Workshop's specialist studio, which sculpted the primarch models in resin over roughly a decade, and the source of most of their design notes.
Mould line
The faint seam left where the two halves of the steel tool met. Not a fault in your kit, and not removable at the factory.
Non-Metallic Metal · NMM
Painting metal with ordinary matt paints, faking the reflections by hand instead of using metallic pigment.
Object Source Lighting · OSL
Painting the glow a light source in the scene would cast, so a plasma coil or a torch appears to light the model itself.
Perpetual
A rare human who simply does not stay dead, inherited from the Emperor's own make-up. Among the primarchs only Vulkan is confirmed as one.
Primarch
One of the twenty engineered sons the Emperor built to command his Space Marine legions, each made from his own genetic material.
Psyker
Someone who can draw on the warp to do things minds should not do, at the constant risk of what lives there noticing them.
Slapchop
Zenithal priming followed by thin contrast paints, letting the underlying greyscale do the shading work for you.
Space Marine legion · Legion
One of the twenty original armies of the Great Crusade, each numbered, each led by its own primarch before the Heresy broke them apart.
Sprue
The plastic frame your model arrives attached to, and the channels that carried molten plastic into each part of the mould.
Terminator armour
The heaviest suit a Space Marine wears, built for boarding actions and reactor rooms, and unmistakable on the tabletop for its bulk.
The Horus Heresy
The civil war, ten thousand years before the current setting, in which half the primarchs turned on the Emperor and lost.
The warp
The parallel dimension a starship crosses to travel faster than light, and the place the Chaos gods and their daemons live.
Wet palette
A shallow box holding damp foam under a membrane, so acrylic paint on top stays usable for hours instead of skinning over in minutes.
Zenithal priming
Priming black, then spraying white from above, so the model arrives with light and shadow already mapped onto it.