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So a few weeks back I was at a collector con, buying back my childhood one old toy at a time, and I spotted a Whirlwind in a ziplock bag (plus five of the 2nd edition monopose Tacticals, maybe whoever packed it mistook it for a Razorback) in a sale bin of otherwise unremarkable toy vehicles going for $5 each. I play Chaos Marines so I've got no use for a Whirlwind, and definitely couldn't be bothered stripping the paint off a vehicle, but I'd already blown significantly more money on Xena action figures and a Space: 1999 model kit of Moonbase Alpha, I couldn't pass that bargain up. I figured I'd put it on a shelf somewhere just as something that's neat to look at occasionally.

Then I started contemplating the paint job: it was basic, just flat colours, and the base blue seemed to have been applied with a trowel rather than a paintbrush, assembly was a bit haphazard as well, but it wasn't a mess, everything stayed within its lines, it was all the proper colours, it had its transfers on - I fancied it was the work of some 12-year-old who wasn't a very experienced painter yet, but got a vehicle and did their best to make it look like it did on the box, and was probably pretty proud of having a table-ready Whirlwind at the end. I was that 12-year-old once, I wouldn't have done any better. So I got it into my head to 'restore' it - I'm a novice at vehicles myself, but I know enough to turn a basic flat paint job into a pretty fun one, inks in the crevices, edge highlighting, contrast paint grime on the exhausts and muck on the tracks, glow up the lenses, add a bit of freehand for extra character.

Then I was passing by a newsagent and spotted a few backissues of Imperium - can't think why now, it's been over for ages, maybe they just got lost in a storeroom and they finally noticed them and put them out for sale. And among them were two of the three sprues for the Redemptor Dreadnought - and I'd bought the third sprue when it available during the magazine's run, mainly for potential conversion parts (big plasma cannon), but I hadn't used anything from it yet. So now I had a whole dreadnought - and it occurred to me, between that and the WW that's on the way to the backbone of a 1000pt army (I always play 1K, 2K gets tedious for me). Now without the constant wacky conversions of chaos miniatures to liven them up, I don't have the patience to do the same colours over and over again - nor did I really fancy doing an Ultramarines army, which is what the Whirlwind was - but that wouldn't be a problem if I did a crusade army. So I invented and immediately wiped out the Empyrean Wardens chapter, to justify the Empyrean Crusade to honour their sacrifice and cleanse their territory of all the ne'er-do-wells who were trying to move in after they died to the last man holding off a massive chaos incursion. They had gold armour, so everyone in the crusade has the left arm of their power armour, or left flank for vehicles, done gold in their memory, and otherwise keeps their old chapter colours - like Deathwatch but other way around, and therefore far less boring. I mean sure they'll look like the Power Rangers, but it'll be fun to paint.

So that's the plan - Whirlwind, Dreadnought (I haven't decided on a chapter yet, but it'll be a red one so I can call him Red Dread Redemption), and inspired by an army I fought last weekend, mostly Gravis-armoured squads, because they seemed fun to play, and I wouldn't need that many; I've picked up the Gravis Captain. I've also got a resin Land Raider Proteus - I bought it right before they announced the plastic one, and have been ignoring it out of spite ever since - which I don't know if I'll ever field, since on the table that'd be a lot of my 1000 points in one big fat target - but I've glued it together (not particularly carefully, but it's resin, it was never going to be perfect anyway), and I think I'll do it in the orange/burgundy/black desert camo of the Blood Angels Land Raider from White Dwarf 105, which was my entry into the hobby, and I always thought that particular colour scheme looked cool. Pretty sure I've got some old 2nd edition metal Devastators around somewhere I could repaint too. I've also got my eye on a Stormtalon gunship - I know a lot of people think they're rubbish but I actually like the look, and I'm tempted by the notion of leaving the cockpit 'glass' off so the pilot is just sitting there in the open in his armour, as a nod to the original Land Speeder's 'deck chairs with engines' design.

So that will be the Empyrean Crusade - which for now is just a Whirlwind, but it's a start; I'm pretty pleased with how the glow-up turned out:

Unit two for the Empyrean Crusade, a Blood Angels Land Raider Proteus:



This one goes way back to the beginning of my 40k journey, when I got my first issue of White Dwarf, 105, where the then-new Land Raider was revealed - at the time I knew nothing of Warhammer (my only contact with GW prior to that was playing a bit of Talisman), but right away I was taken with the bottom left version, desert camouflage used by the Blood Angels in the assault on Bantax:



This particular kit - the Forgeworld resin one - I bought when I was getting back into 40k with my Slaaneshi chaos marine army, and now that I had adult money (not a lot, but it's not just pocket money anymore) I indulged my impulsiveness and bought the Proteus, with a vague idea of converting it to chaos as a centrepiece model for the warband, but mainly just for the satisfaction of finally buying the thing child me wanted to buy all those years ago. I never did anything with it though - partly because I very quickly got into ambitious converting on my regular miniatures, and producing a satisfyingly thorough chaos conversion (i.e. not just some spikes stuck on) on a resin kit would be a massive chore (the far smaller Venomcrawler was a struggle to complete, honestly if I hadn't been doing it for the painting contest here I'd probably have put it aside and never bothered finishing it), but also because shortly after I bought it GW announced they were doing a plastic version, so I kind of ignored it out of irritation at my bad timing. But then I accidentally started this loyalist marine army, and when I was looking around at what I had, I remembered oh, there's a whole Land Raider under the table, maybe I'll take a crack at that. The final impetus was the December open month of the painting contest here, combined with my local gaming group also launching a monthly painting event, so I figured now or never, and went and got some superglue.

Assembly was a pretty rushed job, but I was never going to have the patience to make a resin kit fully behave, so I'm not bothered by that - I used so much glue that in some places it leaked out of the cracks before it solidified (I'm now pretending those are hull damage from someone winging a melta shot at the tank), and notably the tracks lined up pretty poorly where the ends joined at the top rear. On the left track I just cut away as much as needed to make the pieces fit, but since that looked a mess anyway, on the right I cut off two whole track links so I could glue them to the front as improvised extra armour for the driver, just like the old Rogue Trader kit had, and replaced them on the track with random offcuts of resin that were vaguely track-link-shaped, with smaller pieces stuck on to look like improvised joins. My headcanon for that awful mess is that the Raider had its track blown apart in the middle of a battle, and the fighting was too fierce to haul it back to a garage for a proper fix so the Techmarine attending just welded scrap together to get it moving - and then it ended up running over a daemon prince and crushing its head with that very track, so they decided the field repairs were favoured by the Emperor and refuse to replace the improvised links with proper parts (I like it when the Imperium operates on ignorance and superstition). The track aside, the only change I made was attaching the multimelta to the rear, with its barrel cut off and a bolter barrel stuck on in its place, to give it a rear-facing heavy bolter like the Rogue Trader ones had. Just for fun - and again because superstitious space marines are fun - I also gave it a bunch of purity seals and a heraldry shield on the front, and stuck a little relic container to each lascannon, to suggest they'd been individually blessed, as well as the vehicle as a whole - all of that sourced off the Intercessor sprue, leftovers from my Rogue Trader marine paint jobs.

Painting was quite a chore, even without the additional work of a chaos conversion to deal with - since the resin kit weighs so much (those track units are virtually solid) I couldn't glue a base to its underside and use a painting handle like I did the Whirlwind, so I just held it by the tracks and left painting the outside of them until last. Luckily it doesn't show in the photos, but if you hold the tank up to the light there are lots of unpainted patches of primer in the recesses beneath the tracks, where I couldn't get my brush in far enough while I was slopping Black Legion contrast paint onto the running gear. I don't have an airbrush, so I got to paint the entire hull by hand (which is my classic labour-intensive form of laziness) - I did at first think I'd try the old 'two thin coats' routine (I don't bother on miniatures normally - again, just lazy) but after the first layer of yellow I couldn't be bothered, so it became 'one half-assed base coat, one contrast paint coat applied way too thick' - I had fun with the weathering on the Whirlwind but tried not to go too hard on it, but I decided for the Land Raider I wanted it to look like it's been fighting non-stop for ten thousand years, so the base colours being messy and the contrast paint pooling in mottled shadows would just be part of the overall wear and tear. Besides using a lot of brown contrast and black ink around the tracks, I tried applying a few spots of Astrogranite in areas where it seemed like the uncovered tracks would kick up dirt and it'd get caked on, although as you can see the dark grey of the technical paint stands out quite a bit - it would've been better to apply it before any painting started, and paint the dirt colour onto it by brush, but I didn't think of it at the time. I toyed with the idea of adding caked-on mud to the tracks as well, but didn't since the bits on the hull didn't turn out like I'd hoped, and the tracks, when I finally got around to them, were looking pretty good on their own; I started out with a drybrush of dark red over black, to copy the colour in the illustration, but then added on a bunch of contrast brown for dirtying, and a drybrush of silver for wear. And of course there's the gold on the left side front, to show it now being part of the Empyrean Crusade - rather than following the frame like I did with the Whirlwind's gold I copied the colour arrangement on Horus Heresy models, since I like how it looks, and decided maybe it's up to each chapter how exactly they interpret 'gold left arm/left flank' when they contribute a unit to the crusade, so I could just do whatever seems best on each model.









Likewise I did more of the little lines of handwritten blessings than I had on the Whirlwind, since a Land Raider's a bigger deal, and it's been around longer to acquire blessings. I just made up the design on the heraldry shield since it's so tiny anyway - I'm not sure if it's the personal heraldry of the driver or the tank itself - so I just gave it an attempt at a little Blood Angels blood drop in the top half, and the tank's number 1 (from the gallery page) in the bottom, divided by a diagonal slash that I assume has a proper name in garbled French like heraldry does. The old art and Eavy Metal painted models of the Land Raider had a fun version of the Blood Angels logo, seen on the photo from the back cover of WD105, which I copied as best I could - I also added on the nickname 'Stone Killer' graffiti'd on by the crew, which I saw on another piece of old art, that one depicting an Imperial Guard Land Raider (can't find it now so I don't know the source, but I'm sure I didn't just imagine it) - it might be a reference to the 1973 Charles Bronson movie (evidently it means a hit man working for the Mafia who isn't actually a member of the Mafia themselves - which actually seems kind of fitting for a Land Raider serving in the Imperial Guard, but back then Land Raiders and Rhinos were used by all Imperial armies, so it's probably just from the movie rather than having a deeper meaning). The most difficult part was the name - I decided the Blood Angels won Bantax, so the tank's called the Conquerer of Bantax, which googled into 'Victor Bantax' (I'm happy using google translate here, since I feel like mangled Latin is on-brand for 40k, but this one seems simple enough that it's probably right enough). I'd meant to just paint it straight onto the hull, like I did with 'Iustis' on the Whirlwind, but that just didn't seem grand enough so I painted on some scrollwork first, and ended up not giving myself very much space at all to fit the text in. Luckily my current fine detail brush was behaving reasonably at the time - I had to blank out the B and try a second time, but that was all.

So that's the Conquerer of Bantax (Victor to his friends), which would just be used as a regular Land Raider in games - although it's doubtful I ever will, since I play 1K (I can only handle a limited amount of gameplay before I start getting frustrated with how much crap the rules expect me to remember at once, and I can finish a 1K game before that happens, whereas at 2K it's usually around the start of turn three when my opponent's doing their movement phase and I start wondering what's the point), and fielding a Land Raider in a 1K game is just an invitation to have one quarter of my army blown off the table in turn one; my Havocs have inflicted the same on opponents often enough. Plus as I said, it's bloody heavy, and I don't drive so whatever I field has to be practical to carry on a bus. But never mind - it took 36 years, but a childhood dream is finally realised (so that's a grand total of one realised dream... well, it's better than none).

In other news I did pick up that Stormtalon, plus a Razorback that I spotted at a decent discount. That Gravis Captain's assembled, and just waiting on paint to see if January's painting theme is something I can justify entering him for, and I've also bought some Hellblasters and Aggressors off a guy in the gaming group who was offloading them cheap.

Small world. That particular BA camo scheme is the one I've always intended for my upcoming army vehicles, so much obliged for offering a reference of how it looks like on a modern Proteus model

Personally, I always thought all the tones in that particular camo would be shades of brown, your take on going redder than that is interesting, I will have to rethink this a bit.

Anyways, thanks for sharing!

Very cool stuff love the pattern.

I like the sound of your project, it gives room for your own creativity around different schemes just as you say. The two vehicles look really good already!

I can sympathise re. 1000pt games - I love getting my Guard out on the table but have no time for the swamp that the rules create.

This is awesome, great patterns

Thanks folks

 tauist wrote:
I always thought all the tones in that particular camo would be shades of brown, your take on going redder than that is interesting, I will have to rethink this a bit.

I was aiming for the hues in the magazine, where the yellow's got more orange to it and the red is halfway to maroon, but I never really know what I'm going to get with contrast paints; I don't really approach this from a very technical perspective, so even when I've used a particular shade before, I often forget exactly what it does and just wing it anew with each new colour scheme.

My local gaming group's started a painting challenge on our discord - nothing about quality (except whatever standard you try to hold yourself to), just pledging certain miniatures at the beginning of the month, and finishing them to at least a basic table-ready status by the end, and you rack up an ongoing score for categories like 'character', 'monster', 'set of 5 troopers' and so on, plus point values of everything you painted - it's fun, good motivation, although I'm keeping myself in check so I don't over-commit to that and the painting challenge here and wind up with unfinished minis and demoralised (it helps that the local contest is so open-ended virtually anything I enter in the contest here will also count towards the month's pledge one way or another). Anyway, I'm trying to pledge at least something for each of my three armies each month, and for January I decided to paint up the Master of the Empyrean Crusade, Imperial Fists Captain Bul Garia:



Given the crusade's multi-chapter nature this is likely the only Imperial Fists marine I'll be painting, so I took the opportunity to try out the 'yellow over pink' technique, starting with a light coat of Shyish Purple (which is so weak it's basically pink) before putting on the yellow - looks good I think, although I maybe wasn't as light as I intended to be with the Shyish so the resulting yellow had quite a lot of shadow in it, and looks like it's been through a considerable amount of battle. I don't mind that, given all the threats to the Imperium, it makes sense that wargear has to be reused until it's literally broken before you chuck it and order a new set from the armoury; the crusade's mission is an honour one, so while everyone's taking it very seriously, the second tier equipment has to go somewhere and better here than the forces keeping Leviathan from just munching its way straight to Earth. I went with the 9th company (light blue shoulder trim) just because I feel like you don't see that much, and they're coincidentally known as The Wardens so when the Fists were deciding who to detach for crusade duty they probably figured that was fate or something. Bul's master of the crusade both for his experience in melding units from different chapters into a unified fighting force, and because the Empyrean Wardens were an Imperial Fists successor so everyone thought it was fitting that an Imperial Fist be in charge of the crusade honouring them. That's also the reason for the inscription on his right shoulder, 'debet', which according to google translate means 'indebted' - so long as you're translating from English to Latin, if you translate it back to English it's wrong, but poorly-translated Latin is a hallmark of 40k so never mind.

Meanwhile the inscription on his right shin is SW19, the postcode for Wimbledon common, because as you may have clued into from his name, there are going to be a lot of Wombles references in this crusade.

I'm not doing my 'everyone has to be a conversion' thing with this army like I do with chaos, partly because I already had the basically stock Whirlwind, partly because chaos just suits conversions. That said, just for variety's sake instead of the heads included in the Gravis Captain kit I used one I got with the missile launcher marine from that set of blind-boxed marines they did a little while back.

First base of the crusade incidentally, since I can't really be bothered basing vehicles - it's just astrogranite for texture then a heavy coat of Blood Angels Red, I liked how the bold red base looked on Brother Dimshade from my Astronomican project, and I feel like it's not going to clash too badly with any of the colour schemes I want to do; the only one that'd look a bit off, I think, would be the mid green of the Mentor Legion, and I'm planning to have them provide the Stormtalon so it won't actually have to be in contact with the ground; there'll be Salamanders as well but I'm going to go for a pretty dark green on them. Blood Angels themselves would look a bit odd too, being the same colour as the ground, but since I did the Land Raider as a BA vehicle (albeit non-standard colours) I don't feel any pressing need to add a Blood Angels squad as well - of their successors I would kind of like to one day get some Angels Vermillion and Angels Sanguine in here, but the Vermillion are much darker red and the Sanguine are half black so they'll look fine (I like Flesh Tearers and Blood Drinkers too cuz they're old school, but they have been or will be included in the Astronomican collection, so no need to repeat their colours here).

Another couple of additions to the Empyrean Crusade finished last month for the local gaming group's challenge.



First up a trio of flamer-equipped Aggressors - I bought them cheap from another player who was offloading some unwanted marines, already assembled, and with dirt and gravel and so on glued to the bases, hence them being fancier than my usual technical paint; I gave them the same contrast red treatment so they'd fit in. Salamanders were the obvious choice for the flame boys (I've now got the five Infernuseseses from the starter set, but at the time these were my only flamer-equipped marines) - of the paints I had on hand I went with Dark Angels green contrast to basecoat them, which given my tendency to go hard on contrast paint for maximum shadow turned out a bit darker than needed (in my imagination Salamanders are very dark green, it's only when I went to check some references I saw they're more vibrant than I thought), and I did consider making them Dark Angels, but I'd already put the black on the backpacks by then and didn't want to recolour them, so I stuck with Salamanders; I picked more vibrant paints for the edge highlighting, and they brought the squad back to somewhere closer to the standard Salamander look.

I probably could've found some Salamanders transfers somewhere in the space marine boxes I've been accumulating, but that's no fun so I freehanded the decorations as always - the Salamander heads are a bit off-model compared to each other, but I can live with that. I chose 5th company (reserves), because I like how the orange looks against the green, and also with Tyranids and Abaddon and whatever all menacing the Imperium, I imagine even though chapters would be honourbound to contribute to a crusade like this, they'd detach reservists and keep their best for the big campaigns. Since the sergeant's got that sculpted skull and laurels on his right shoulder I moved the squad (7th) marking to his knee, flipping the colours so it'd stand out against the green backing; also gave him a little flame deco on the shin, because I saw it in the heraldry page I was referencing and I like little bits of random decoration like that.



And Brother Tobermory, the first of two Techmarines I've got (the second is based on Iron Father Feirros, with the Iron hands symbols filed off, a generic techmarine helmet, and one of his techtacles removed to make him look more like just a regular tech). I picked old school Tiger Claws for his chapter, since their base colour is a yellow-to-orange gradient and this lets me tick off the chapter while only having to paint that on one shoulder pad, not even the whole body; I'm pretty happy with how that and the black 'rips' turned out. Not so much the icon, which is supposed to be a tiger's face but looks more like an impressionist rendering of a confused fieldmouse, but it's really tiny so whatever - glutton for punishment that I am I did the icon again on his knee, which turned out wrong in a whole different way, but not to worry. The chunk of Rhino he's standing on is painted based on an old page of camo patterns - this one's 'desert: iron oxide', used by the Imperial Guard 8th regiment 'The Spiders' in the Siege of Fort Wrath relief force. I don't know what any of that means (except the Spiders, I remember those), I just like pulling visual cues from old lore.

Whle I was painting his eyes I decided to leave them plain white, both because it's easy, and because I decided he's actually blind, and sees entirely through the lenses built into his gear, hence using the same aqua blue colour for the lenses on his head, bolter, the palms of both techtacles, and his axe. Like having squads drawn from reserve companies, I figure it shows that while no doubt he's still very capable, he's maybe a bit past his prime.

These are bloomin lovely paint jobs again sir, love the retro so much

 Ragsta wrote:
These are bloomin lovely paint jobs again sir, love the retro so much

Thanks I did start this with the intention of just painting a bunch of varied Space Marine colour schemes, but as you can see it took virtually no time for me to start looking to old material for inspiration, and that's a trend that's going to continue.

Including this month's contest entry, the Stormtalon Gunship:



I don't know quite what it is about this thing - it's silly and goofy-looking, but the moment I saw the box at my local GW I knew I wanted one (so I went and got it from Combat Company which is quite a bit cheaper, sorry GW but them's the breaks). Nice of it to also include all the spare parts on the sprue for the Stormhawk version, which became base debris to hide the obvious bump of the flight stand's base, which I couldn't be bothered using putty to build up the main base's surface to conceal - recalling a photo in, I think, the 3rd edition Codex Chaos, I did the debris in flesh tones (the codex photo was of a Predator that'd been lightly covered in putty with slices scoured into it and painted to look like flesh with gouges cut out of it, again couldn't be bothered getting out the putty since this is just a base), with blood leaking out of the bullet holes. I decided while I was painting it that it used to be a notorious Slaaneshi daemon engine air ace named, of course, Baron von Dickhofen.



Normally I stick everything together and worry about getting my paintbrush into the awkward angles later, but for this one I painted it in sections - mainly so I could properly paint the cockpit interior and the pilot, but also so I could basecoat the cockpit's white with a separate spray to the green I'd bought for the rest of the hull, rather than having to try to paint smooth white over green with a brush. I gave the pilot Primaris shoulder pads just to fit him a little better into the overall new-miniature range of the Crusade - you can't really see the rest of his armour anyway - and while they're all but invisible now, he does have his chapter and company/squad markings on his shoulders, both of which are repeated on the vehicle itself, the old-school Mentor Legion owl face logo, and dark grey for the 8th Company, again a reserve company; I made the dark grey the colour of the squad type symbol, so as to keep the Mentor green trim on the shoulders. I wasn't until part-way through painting the pilot that I noticed he was red in all the official photos, as an actual Techmarine, but if I had known I'd have painted him in regular Mentor Legion colours anyway just to tick off that colour scheme - given how they're always testing new kit, I decided Mentors could have cross-training with the Mechanicus so they could operate fancy tech without having to be fully-inducted Techmarines themselves.



The old artwork I was using as inspiration - and part of the reason I decided to go with Mentors for the Stormtalon, while it's got differences I feel like when GW was designing the Stormtalon/hawk kit, they may have been intentionally harking back to the depiction on the stained glass window here. I gave the pilot (head from the Hellblaster sprue, I think) the same facepaint as Nisk Ran-Thawll - which is also shown on Captain Tarak Queeg from the old Combat Cards, so it's not exclusive to Nisk - and copied a bunch of the icon details from here, including the pennant arrangement of the chapter logo which I put on the tail; I hadn't noticed the one on the marine in the window, showing the pennant reverses so the points are facing forward which should've also been the case on the Stormtalon's tail, but never mind.





Since this is likely the only Space Marine aircraft I'll ever paint, I went hard on the markings and freehand art - the only idea I ended up not using was the motto "Here endeth the lesson", which I thought would be cute for the Mentors but I worried the hull would start looking crowded if I put that on as well (I would've liked it somewhere around the assault cannons, but there wasn't a surface big enough). The most daunting was a Mentors version of the 'Bug Stomper' nose art from the Aliens dropship, which I went back and forth on a bunch of times about whether I'd actually attempt it (since if I made a mess, using brushes to cover it up trying to match the spraypaint green would be a chore) but in the end I had a day when paint seemed to be flowing off my detail brush in nice thin lines, so I went for it, copying the pose of the Aliens eagle while using the Space Marine image from the stained glass, with his beakie helmet and blue bolter. 'Calcus Insectum' is my half-assed Latin of Bug Stomper, and absolutely a wildly awful translation, but that's consistent with 40k Latin. Besides that there's the A10 Thunderbolt snarling jaws on the missile pods, the pilot's name 'Kal Vilmer' (he feels the need, the need for the Imperial Creed), and in place of the crossed arrows normally used for 'close assault' I went back to an old chart of vehicle markings used by different chapters in which the Ultramarines used red and yellow shapes (square for Assault) and copied that, since it's retro, different, and there was that confused period where we thought the Mentors were an Ultramarines successor. My favourite of all the freehand is actually the 'no step' marking on the left missile pod near the cockpit footholds, along with pronounced scuffing to show that the pilot does in fact step there every time - as close as the Mentor Legion is with the Mechanicus, I can still imagine them getting stubborn when they think some weedy techpriest who's never worn power armour in his life tells them where they can and can't step.

Since I was painting in stages anyway, I left assembly until the very end, even for everything that was green undercoated - main hull, the bottom with the little thruster jets (which I wanted to stick to the bottom of the white cockpit before installing it anyway), and the engines so I'd have a clear run at the sides of the hull for the freehand and edge highlighting. It was a bit more hassle, but with the bottom of the craft being visible (and not flat) I couldn't just glue a 32mm base to it and anchor a painting handle onto it the way I did the Whirlwind, so sticking everything onto my little wooden block handles with blu-tack via whichever surfaces wouldn't be painted anyway seemed the way to go. Given that I'm not sure I'll ever actually want this on the tabletop (I gather they're not that good) I left the canopy unstuck so I could lift it off for good photos of the pilot, and it's still just sitting there - I did initially think about just doing the craft without a canopy altogether, harking back to the original Land Speeder just having its crew sitting out in the open on the front since they're in power armour already, how much more protected do they need to be, but once I decided to use a bare head for the pilot so I could do the facepaint, that seemed to be pushing even 40k's famous indifference to common sense just a bit far.

Gloriously good- it’s a bonkers design but you have done great work on it and the freehanding is great. I LOLed at Baron von Dickhofen Great use of the Mentor Legion by the way!

Thanks!

Another Techmarine done, Brother Wellington of the Executioners chapter:



Again drawing on the Badab War armour gallery, I picked the Executioners for a Tech since the only scheme shown for them is some kind of winter/urban camo, with just the chapter logo shoulder (right back then, since the left had studs all over) in a flat colour, which varied by type: green for Tactical, yellow for Assault, red for Reconnaisance (I guess Scouts and Land Speeders and Bikes and stuff), and for Wellington I chose purple for Support, since he'll probably wind up stood next to a Vindicator or something. I would quite like to do the camo pattern one day, just not five of it, so only having to paint the shoulder here helpfully ticks the Executioners off the list for the purposes of the Empyrean Crusade, and I'll come back to them someday as a one-off Rogue Trader job.

(Speaking of that Badab War gallery, it was only while I was looking up inspiration for what chapter to make Wellington that I was reminded that's what it was - I do have that article in the Compendium, but I do a lot of thinking about what to paint next at work where I'd just googled the page up as 'Rogue Trader Marine Chapters', so I hadn't realised making Brother Tobermory a Tiger Claw raised the slight question mark of "weren't they heretics?" So I've decided Tobermory was on extended detachment with the Mechanicus somewhere far away from where all that went down at the time, and despite extensive Super Enhanced Interrogation from the Inquisiton they've been unable to detect any actionable trace of heresy, and his comrades in the Mechanicus he was working with have enough sway to keep him being executed anyway just to make things nice and tidy; the Inquisition's finally allowed him out to join the Crusade since it's conveniently off in some remote backwater where it probably won't matter anyway, and with luck he'll die gloriously and save them the ongoing paperwork headache. He continues to wear the Tiger Claws symbol because, from his point of view, the Tiger Claws were and are a loyal chapter, it's just that every single one of them except him betrayed the chapter. The good thing about how haphazard 40k lore is is there's no plot hole too glaring to explain your way out.)

Anyway, Wellington - as usual, named after a womble, and based on Iron Father Feirros, since I figured I might want more than one Techmarine with the Crusade being so vehicle-heavy (a nice change of pace since I don't get to use them with my warband because I can't be bothered with the level of chaos converting I'd find suitable), and I didn't just want the same Techmarine miniature twice. To downshift him from Master of the Forge to Just Some Guy Who's Good With A Wrench I left off one of its tentacles and clipped off the spike on the bottom of his axe to shorten it a bit, plus filing off the Iron Hands symbols from his shoulders (the right shoulder has a freehand Mechanicus logo, which isn't my best work but it'll do), and using the helmeted head from the regular Techmarine. Since I'd done Tobermory's robot arm all grey (because I wasn't working from a reference of the standard paint job, just winging it from memory of how I used to paint Techmarines) I left some red on Wellington's supermarket grabber claw arm to add some more 'consistent but different' touches to the two of them; I also used a paler metallic on the decoration on his axe, because I forgot which paint I'd used the first time, but their axes may have come from different batches so I left it as it was.

Besides the old school cartoon axe logo for the Executioners, I decided to try a miniature rendition of their modern logo - a shield outline with two axes back to back - on his right knee, which was very small and one of those bits of painting where I just had to get as little paint on my brush as possible and slowly edge the tip closer and closer to the plastic until it made a mark, and just hope the mark ended up where I wanted it. Near enough for tabletop viewing, I'm content with it. I did a little freehand on the nameplate on his left shin, but it's so small it's just little black blobs over the silver base, nothing identifiable as letters, it just looks like it might be lettering, which is all I was aiming for (although the idea is it says 'Debet', the Crusade's motto to show their debt to the Empyrean Wardens chapter). I don't love how the base has turned out though, I didn't do a good job of covering the 'ground' texture on the sculpted scenery bit with technical paint, so the edge is visible, and the red on it's brighter since I tend not to thoroughly spray bases so the colour under the red contrast paint was the paler plastic, compared to the darker grey astrogranite. Something I'll try to work on in future.

Oh and finally, I painted the purity seals hanging from his belt white rather than parchment-bone - my lore is they're actually printouts from the Sacred Dot Matrix, which for reasons lost to the mists of time produces images of the Omnissiah and His great works in the form of ASCII art.

So that's pretty much it for the Crusade's garage crew - although I do have the leftover techpriest from the Castellan set I may paint him up one day, even though you can't take non-marine specialists in a marine army anymore (feels like something that could've been thrown in with Imperial Agents). More to come (hopefully) soon though, Wellington is part of a little challenge my local gaming group's running - we've had a few new folks join, so to encourage armies to grow the challenge is to paint any character in two weeks (finishing today), the next two weeks any squad (I've just finished assembling three Inceptors), and the final three weeks any vehicle (I've got a Predator waiting - the Heresy-era Deimos one, continuing the 'old hardware pulled out of storage' theme). Assuming the weather improves that is, if I tried to basecoat the Inceptors just now it'd be a 20/80 mix of wraithbone and humidity.

This month's new addition to the Empyrean Crusade (courtesy of the 'May Day' painting theme), Inceptor squad 'In His Unblemished Name' from the Hospitallers chapter (who really go in for devout squad names):



These were a bit of a random collision of circumstances - I had the sprues out for the Terminators from the starter set and my first thought for May Day was to paint them as Marines Errant (because they first appeared in May 1988, in the Badab War article in White Dwarf 101), but among other random projects on the painting table I'd started painting Sororitas to reboot my old Order of Our Lady of the Rose, and had just finished a Zephyrim, which was the first time I'd tackled anything on one of the clear flight stands - and since that hadn't been too much of a chore, next time I was visiting Good Games on my lunch break to cheer myself up I picked up the box of Inceptors. Also at the same time, I'd just got the Black Templars upgrade set, because I'm working on a Templars Razorback and I wanted the big relic sword clamped onto the front of it - the vehicle-mounted multi-melta got donated to the local group's resident Templar player since they're the only ones who use them anyway, but that left a lot of random bits left over and I went looking for other chapters who use the Maltese cross, and found the Hospitallers - who really love the Maltese cross, with it on both shoulders and the right knee, but the six Gravis shoulders in the upgrade pack gave me enough to outfit the Inceptors.

Since the Hospitallers are one of the chapters who believe the Emperor is/was an actual god, I added some bits of extra holy bling to them - a book from the Tempars sprue for the sergeant (which is probably inconvenient to have flapping around on a chain on your belt when you're doing a supersonic combat drop from the stratosphere, but they're fanatics so they don't question it) and on one of the squaddies a keyring of sacred odds and ends, borrowed from one of the skull-faced cherub thingies in the Sororitas box; I actually went looking for Ministorum symbols, since owing to their beliefs the Hospitallers get on really well with the god-botherers, but the Sororitas sprues don't actually have a lot that aren't built into the miniatures in such a way that nicking one would leave a sister without, and I didn't want that. The third squaddie just got a purity seal, both for want of better ideas, and because I liked the notion that it makes the squad kind of cover the whole range, from a rookie who's just got his Day One Purity Seal to a seasoned trooper who's earned some extra trinkets to the sergeant with the sacred book. While I was doing assembly, I also trimmed off the grav booties, since I don't like how they looked - with the chunky jump packs, plus extra rockets on their legs, I figured they had enough thrust to stay airborne, and also even though they're Primaris it still plays a little into the 'old refurbished equipment' theme I've got going for the Crusade, maybe this squad are first generation Inceptors and their grav feet didn't work right, so they fixed the problem for the next rollout of gear while this squad just removed the grav plates and rely on good old brute force of rockets.

I'll admit, the Zephyrim hadn't prepared me for the painting stands in this case - to avoid having to mask anything my approach is to spray the miniatures with a foot blu-tacked to one of the little wood blocks I use as painting handles, while the stand gets painted by hand (which is easy enough since terrain doesn't need to be perfect), in this case a rough coverage of white to emulate the white spray I normally use, then a thick coat of Blood Angels red and you can't tell the difference. Then since the blu-tack's good enough to hold them in place for a spray but not while I'm painting with a brush, I glue the primed mini onto the stand - and that worked fine for the Zephyrim who's nice and light, the only stabilising I felt like I needed was to have a fingertip on the edge of her pistol or sword and they're the last bit I paint anyway, but even though they're plastic the Inceptors are so much chunkier that I worried how much stress was going into the tiny little contact point of the stand to their backpack (even though I lavished plastic cement on the join several times over to strengthen it), so I ended up holding them between thumb and forefinger, on the base of one foot and the top of their 'hood', and doing my best to hold them securely but gingerly so as not to rub any base coat off while I worked. As a result it wasn't the most comfortable painting experience, and I ended up half-assing a few bits - normally I do panel edges on marines (even though I am a bit messy about it) but for these ones I just put some extra pure white on the most prominent raised edges like the collars and hoods, the knee ridges, and the edges of the gunshields, and for the rest just left the contrast paint to do the work by itself. Luckily Apothecary white's pretty forgiving in that regard. I also found the guns a gigantic chore, since they're so fiddly with all their recessed spaces, and having to paint around the white shields - once they had their base grey, and a sloppy coat of nuln oil, I picked out a couple of basic details like metal on the guard rails around the muzzle and on the shells in the magazines and then called them done, without bothering to do full highlighting or anything.

Once they was done though I started having more fun, since small details are more appealing to me. Besides the required markings with the extra Maltese cross on the knee, and the squad type on the other one, the photos on the wiki show a lot of personal heraldry going on; the text says it's typically on the right leg and shoulder (the photos seem like the painters just put it wherever they felt like), I decided to reinterpret it as being on the right leg and right gunshield. At first I went looking at images of the actual Knights Hospitaller, but they seem to mainly have just gone for a nice big cross, so I took the wiki photo's checker patterns and did variations on that, with a sort of vee-shaped pair for the rookie (which in hindsight I think looks best), and fancier halved designs (I love the medieval feel of halved and quartered designs) for the more experienced marines, with half an Imperial eagle on the other squaddie, and a malf Maltese cross for the sergeant, in red so he stands out a bit more. Pretty happy with those.



The other thing I had fun with was the little wingalings on their jump packs - they have nubs to fit them into their sockets at the 'right' angle every time, but I clipped those off to make them free ball joints, and positioned them to try to make it look like they were using the jets to manoeuvre, according to how their bodies were posed like them moving their legs and twisting their torsos is what controls the jets. The sergeant kind of looked to me like he was strafing so I had his wings all turned one way like they're pushing him to the left, the middle one with his legs kind of crouched, and on the lowest stand, I imagined was bottoming out after his descent so I spread the wings out like they're cushioning his deceleration, and the rookie on the right kind of looks like he's twisting to the right, so I had his left-side wings raised like they're pivoting him around. For the sergeant I also positioned his flight stand off-centre on the base, so the gun he's aiming is centred - it was a bit difficult to judge how everything would line up with none of it glued at that point, given how the flying pose has his whole body to the side of where the gun's centreline is I might've been more restrained with angling the base in that case, but it looks okay anyway.

So that's those done, starting this weekend is the final phase of the local group's painting challenge, where we'll have two weeks to paint up a vehicle - the Deimos Predator is fully assembled (in sections, turret and sponsons will be painted on their own), and I'll be going for the Space Wolves colour scheme from the original Predator's debut in White Dwarf 112.

Got that Predator finished - in record time too, I had the spraying done ahead of time (since the weather's been all over the place and I didn't want to lose painting days by having to wait for good conditions for spraying), but it was just 24 hours from sitting down with the sprayed pieces to having a completed tank (including some sleep in the middle).



I picked the Deimos specifically because I used to have the old first edition Predator, and every later version without a dome turret just doesn't look right to me. I tossed in a few nods to my old tank (sadly long gone nowadays), with the cluster of sensor gear on the turret since I'd added a few bits to the old one to make it a 'command tank' (not that that meant anything on the tabletop), and having the smoke launchers on the turret like they used to be in the stock photos, rather than hull mounted like you see them today; the mount for the main gun's too rounded at the sides to have both launchers mounted there left and right, so I just went with a single launcher in the middle, and put the other one on the rear of the hull so it could cover a run-away manoeuvre. I also stuck a tarp roll on the back, which originally came from some random real-world military kit, but that piece was at one stage attached to my old Predator, before being pried off to use for a Gorkamorka vehicle; when I got tired of Gorkamorka (not many people around here took up playing it, as I recall) my mob and its ramshackle vehicles got dumped into the old 2nd edition box, along with a bunch of other junk, and therefore survived moving house and so on because a box is a lot easier to pack up than a bunch of loose miniatures so 'Do I really need to keep this?' wasn't much of an issue, even when I was thoroughly out of the hobby. So the tarp survived, and now links this tank back to its ancestor - I held back from doing any more conversion though, back in 2nd edition the local GW did a one-day tank battle event, where you were allowed one vehicle, and could include any wargear cards regardless of points or quantities provided they were actually modelled onto the tank, so my old Predator got a massive overhaul, ending up with an entire battery of HK missiles in a Whirlwind-style launcher behind the turret (from the same kit as the tarp, I think, some sort of six-wheel missile vehicle), extra and ceramite armour (panels from an AT-AT model, painted terracota), and upgraded to a twin lascannon turret (Millennium Falcon laser cannons). The tarp's enough for now though, I wanted this Predator to be retro, not bonkers.

I did move the turret though, since the new Deimos has the turret mounted much further back than the old one. I've seen a youtube video of the tank being modified by making a whole new top plate to cover up the hatches, since they would've be able to open with the turret as far forward as it should be, but that's a lot of effort and I didn't fancy adding rivets to the new top plate, so I split the difference and shifted the turret as far forward as I could without it interfering with the hatches, then just glued the lower ring of the turret itself directly to the hull. The rest of the turret's not actually attached, just sitting over the base ring, but it still can't turn - but that doesn't bother me, I usually glue guns in place facing whichever way I think looks coolest anyway. You can also see the misaligned rear edge of the ring sculpted into the hull, but it's not obvious, and mostly concealed by all the junk hanging off the back of the turret anyway.



I decided on the Space Wolves colour scheme from the Predator's introduction in White Dwarf 112 - the single headlight's cute but my old Predator had both, so I compromised by painting the portside headlight dark like it's blown a fuse or something. I took a shot at recreating that brushstroke-y look on the original model by starting with a black spray, then gunmetal from the top (although I worked the gunmetal spray around the sides as well a bit, so it's not what I'd call a proper zenithal), then got out my largest makeup brush and gave it a drybrush of pale grey. It's not exactly what I was aiming for, but it's similar, had a lot of texture which is something I associate with the old Rogue Trader era tank paint jobs, and as a bonus meant all the recesses were already darkened so I didn't have to go in with inks, aside from around the rivets. That just left edge highlighting, which I did with Corax White, and the Empyrean Crusade's gold, which in this case I decided to put on that side/top panel, instead of the whole left frame like I did on the Whirlwind, on the basis that each contributing chapter interpreted 'left side gold' however made sense to them without necessarily comparing notes with one another.

Since the Deimos doesn't have the option of the double front plates like my old Predator, I moved the Space Wolves logo to the centre (ish, it ended up not quite centred, as I started from the snout just kind of guessing how far over I needed to be), and moved the '7' to the sides, plus another 7 on one of the top hatches and on the right side of the turret's rear-mounted equipment pods. I do have a few spare sculpted aquila pieces, but I didn't fancy trying to fit them to the curved turret, so I just freehanded that - it ended up tilted a bit, but never mind. If you look closely the old model also has these little yellow markings beside the smoke launchers and sponson guns - warnings to maintenance servitors not to put their heads in front of them I guess - which I carried over (the sponson ones are on the front of the armour on their mount, they're kind of hidden in shadow in these photos). There are also little red and yellow markings on the rears of the sponson lascannons - I don't know what for, but the new lascannons have a sculpted panel in roughly the same place, so that was helpful. Since the main gun autocannon design's changed a bit I adapted the paint accordingly, moving the stripes back to the segment in the middle of the barrel - those were a gigantic pain in the arse, and ended up a bit sloppy, but given how much of a pain touch-ups with yellow are I left it alone at 'good enough' rather then meddling with it further.

And then there's the flag, which was also a chore to get through - I'm glad I've done a fully hand-painted banner now, as part of the authentic old school 'painting uphill both ways in the snow' approach, but I won't make a habit of it since I've got access to adhesive stock printers now. That's actually where the flag came from, in a way - I had thought about photoshopping up a flag to match the old one, but wasn't decided on what to do about the muck on the old model's flags and hadn't gotten around to it, and since I ended up painting this on a Saturday and the printers are all at work I just cut a blank piece out of a page I'd done some other banners on and painted it. That's actually my second version, on the first I tried starting from the back of the wolf head, but got it completely wrong and threw it away; starting from the snout seems to work for me. That still left the question of whether to add battle grime to it, but I dodged that by bringing over the blue background from the version in the ad page's artwork rather than the physical model.



Of course I added some touches of my own, starting with the name Bonem Canem, for 'good dog' - I've been informed that that more literally means something like "of the good dog" and 'bonus canis' would be closer, but I've made my peace with just using google translate for all my 40k Latin, since crappy Latin is true to 40k anyway (it's probably the Mechanicus insisting their machine translation is correct), and last time I tried to understand Latin conjugation my brain went cross-eyed. (Like all native English speakers I don't even understand English conjugation, I just speak by the linguistic equivalent of closing my eyes and using the Force rather than having ever learned anything about how my own language is supposed to work.) Speaking of languages, instead of the usual little squiggly lines suggesting text written on the hull, I thought it'd be fun to look up some authentic futhark runes for insults and the like, but after running into a couple of dead ends (it seems for a long time academics ignored swearing while they were studying old runes to work out what they said, so it's not easy to google up the proper runes for 'screw you and the horse you rode in on') I gave up and just used the inscription from Doctor Who's 'The Curse of Fenric' - which is gibberish, but it's gibberish used in Doctor Who so that gives it credibility in a whole other way. If somebody were to read it and accidentally summon Fenric in the 41st Millennium, who'd notice one more genocidal dark god anyway?

I also thought a pack marking would be fun (not sure if tanks have packs, but whatever), so I consulted my 3rd edition Codex Space Wolves for a pattern, and went with a simple black and white one because apparently black and white is used by Long Fangs and heavy weapons is basically what a tank is. I also had a look at the runestone of the Great Companies in the back of the codex to see which one was most similar to the wolf logo I'd copied from the old photo - the yellow would suggest Ragnar's company, but I wanted something less common so, since the wolf head isn't accompanied by any other devices like a moon or posed in a different way like howling upwards, I decided despite the colour and lack of rivets on the logo the tank's from Egil Iron Wolf's company; they're all about armoured units, it makes sense they'd have a spare tank to donate when the call to form a crusade went out. So the runes from Egil's slice of the runestone, which I assume is his name or something, got added to the top of the driver compartment.



And lastly, since I was in a dog mood (I actually have anxiety around dogs, but I'm fine with them when they're not physically present), I painted my best effort at Steven from Tara & Beverly on the back - he's the actual Bonus Canis. If you're not familiar with the comic (it's mildly NSFW, but also really sweet), yes, Steven is supposed to look like that, that's the joke.

Oh the Nostaglia. I remember looking at White Dwarf Magazine in the 90s and seeing these images. The Mentors aircraft is brilliant, also love the paintjob on the retro Predator. Space Marine tanks should have treads not floaty things. Well done. Paint more please.

 wulfbrigade wrote:
Oh the Nostaglia. I remember looking at White Dwarf Magazine in the 90s and seeing these images. The Mentors aircraft is brilliant, also love the paintjob on the retro Predator. Space Marine tanks should have treads not floaty things. Well done. Paint more please.

Thanks I agree about the tanks, you won't be seeing any floaty ones here - the lore justification is the units detached for the crusade are the reserve ones chapters can spare, so they're old armours and old vehicles, still fighting fit but not the latest models they need for the big do-or-die campaigns. Real world, I just don't like them. I imagine the rationale was something along the lines of wanting the new grav tanks to have the same kind of tabletop silhouette and footprint as the old ones for gaming purposes, but for a supposed 'new' wave of Astartes tech they just look so much like somebody took an existing tracked design and welded grav plates over where the tracks were meant to be that I just can't be having with it. That said, Landspeeders and the like get grandfathered in - I've also got a notion to one day do an Imperial jetbike, maybe using the leftover grav plates from the Inceptors.

Anyway, the Terminators - I assembled these back when 'Slow and Steady' was in the voting for the May theme, put them aside when it didn't win, and thankfully it came up on its second chance; I omitted the teleport homer from the photos for the painting contest, since obviously the actual Terminators are the ones I wanted for the five mini limit, but I painted it at the same time for consistency (I don't always remember later which colours I use when I'm painting; should really be writing it down I suppose). The Marines Errant are another chapter I picked because they're on the gallery of chapters in the old Badab War article - and besides, I don't have any other squads planned using blue as a primary colour, since the Ultramarines are already represented by the Whirlwind (the squads I have pinned to a specific chapter that I haven't done yet will be Iron Hands, Sons of Medusa, and Screaming Ravens).



I've had an idea floating around my head for a while to do five of the old Space Hulk first edition plastic Terminators with all the details of the RTB9 metal Terminator box art (White Dwarf 112), but since they're such low-detail minis I haven't made much progress on them - they're sitting around in their red basecoat at the moment, but so much of the work would be faking detail by painting patterns onto undecorated surfaces that I felt like the final result would be mediocre at best. I'll probably finish them off RT-style at some point, but without the pressure of trying to make them my full-effort homage to the RTB9 look. So the whole thing got transferred over to this squad - hazard striped power fists, the sergeant and assault cannon having their own little heraldry shields (the cannon one I scrachbuilt, by cutting a flat panel out of the leftover enclosed cockpit from the Stormtalon/Stormhawk kit and snipping and filing it into shape as best I could), check patterns on the storm bolters and the assault cannon (even the narrow ring around the barrel - I moved that up to the ring near the muzzle, since the old assault cannon didn't have that detail, and it gave me extra room to get my brush in without the mini's body being so close to where I was working), and the weapon badges on the power fists and assault cannon - since the cannon has a moulded skull on its casing where the badge would normally be, I moved it onto the shield instead.



All those checks were quite a daunting prospect, but they turned out okay - I started out painting a grid on, using black contrast paint instead of normal paint to get the thinnest possible lines (the difference is clear versus the blue checks on the sergeant's shield, which were regular paint), and for the most part my fine detail brush was in a cooperative mood; I managed to get all the grids done in a single session, while I was up watching the French Open final (luckily the Monday was a public holiday, so I didn't have to drag myself to work after getting to bed at 5am), and filling in the black squares later wasn't too difficult, again using contrast. I also used contrast on the power fist hazard stripes, and they needed a second go-over to get proper coverage, but it was worth it for being able to keep the initial lines as thin and controlled as possible. I avoided having to put stripes on the underside of the fists - which would've been a nightmare - by echoing the examples of the Blood Angel and Crimson Fist Terminators in the artwork, where the stripes only cover the back of the fist; having the underside gold, as with the upper arms, avoided there being an 'unfinished' look to them. I decided to keep the gold off the actual shoulders, even though there are no rims as there are on lighter armours and the chapter symbols on the other side anyway, since I felt that'd interfere with the balance between the blue and the white in the half-and-half paint jobs.

I also wanted to try a Crux Argentum for the sergeant - the one shown in the art doesn't have any texturing on the cross behind the skull, so I just had to make do with the ribbed sculpt, but the blend from yellow to dark red was always going to be a messy affair at that size so I think having those ridges actually helped obscure the mess a bit. I didn't fancy paiting tiny blobs of colour onto the skull for its jewels, so I just did the one sculpted into the bottom of the cross in green to carry over that idea. Speaking of the sergeant, I noticed the veteran white stripe on Terminator sergeant only covers the forehead part of the helmet, but I find the stripe extending all the way down the face looks much more satirsyfing, so I decided that's just how the Marines Errant do it.

Incidentally the white sides have virtually no additional highlighting on them - I gave the blues the usual edgte highlighting, but the only actual painted highlights on the white are the edges of the shoulder pads, since they're so prominent. The rest is just grey ink (Soulblight, I think) over the usual wraithbone spray, and I think it did a great job by itself at picking out all the details in the sculpt. In any case, with so much other colourful detail going on all over the minis, I didn't feel like the white needed any extra jazzing up.

New addition, and this month's contest entry for 'Sidekick', Brother Cholet and his medi-CAT:



The beginning of this was back when I noticed the Apothecary Biologis wasn't for sale individually anymore - one of these days I may get around to getting the Heroes Of Whatever set he's in, but for now I thought it'd be more fun to build one, and since the goop tank is what sets him apart visually from his generic Apothecary buddy obviously he'd need one of those. I could probably cobble together a handheld one, but the idea of a hovering goop tank unit alongside the mini seemed more fun, so I picked up the Sanguinary Priest, since I've already got the generic Apothecary (in the works as one of the Boys From The Astronomican collection) and didn't want to do two of the same mini. Then I noticed the Biologis has Gravis armour, so the Sanguinary Priest wouldn't work anyway - but the crusade doesn't have a normal Apothecary, so he needn't go to waste. Then the Sidekick theme got voted in, and it occurred to me the hovering goop tank plan would suit that, and now here we are.

For the priest I picked Angels Encarmine as his chapter, for two main reasons: the colour scheme's not really that different to Blood Angels so I wouldn't feel like I'd missed out on a fun painting experience by having him be mostly white, and also the chapter icon is close enough to Blood Angels that I felt okay just painting the wings black on the shoulder pad I'd already glued on without thinking ahead; the Encarmine's winged blood drop has bat wings rather than feathered wings, but that's a minor detail so I'm not too bothered by it. I had actually been looking through the old Imperial Medics article from Rogue Trader, which shows they were a lot less strict about being all white except the shoulder back then - Dark Angels for instance are shown in their then-typical black with just the torso white, Ultramarines are blue with white shoulders, hands, and lower legs, and so on - but I didn't specifically want to do any of those colours, so I went with the modern all-white look, using the same Soulblight Grey ink over wraithbone spray I'd used for the white halves of the Terminators.

That said I did keep a couple of extra nods to the Encarmine's regular colours, retaining the black rims on both shoulders, and the black backpack, although I left the top panel of the backpack white, since it's where the Apothecary gear's plugged in so I figured that might override the black backpack colour scheme. I kept the mini's original pretty vampire boy head for the bits box and used a generic marine head, to give him an eyepiece, also painted white to suggest it's a specific medical eyepiece, maybe cybernetic, maybe just work over a working eye. Likewise I left his bolt pistol white, to show it's a medical bolt pistol - I know the standard is black for the pistol and arm unit, but I thought white for everything would look neat. Since a generic Apothecary wouldn't have a chainsword I used the holster piece without the sword attached, which actually has the handle of a pistol in it since it's supposed to be used while the mini has his sword in hand; my headcanon is Brother Cholet likes to carry a backup, so if things get really hectic he can just throw the first pistol and draw the second rather than taking the time to reload. While we're talking colours, I used gold rather than red for the helix markings, since that's how they were shown in the Rogue Trader article.

The CAT is a total scratchbuild, using leftovers from various kits. The tray everything sits goes on the side of the Stormhawk Interceptor cockpit, unused since I built it as a Stormtalon, and the 'head' is the targeter from the Stormhawk's chin gun; that kit also came with a bunch of eagles, so I used one for decoration. The grav plates are the ones I cut off the Inceptors, the cable is one of the unused ones from the Eradicators I haven't painted yet - I assembled the two meltaguns with their plug-in power packs, rather than the cable-to-backpack versions - and the central module is, I think, something from one of the Deimos Predator turret options I didn't use. I'm not sure where the goop tanks came from, possibly the Predator again; I did the built with my bits box and a bunch of kits all open at once, so I didn't entirely keep track of where everything came from. The whole thing's 'hovering' on a bit of paperclip painted black - I painted the CAT separately to Cholet, with a spare bit of sprue glued to the bottom of it so I could use that to clamp it in a painting stand them clip it off once it wasn't needed.

I've lately been feeling the red bases for the crusade are a bit lacklustre, so like the Tyranid ones I went for the quick and easy method of spicing them up and bought a pack of grass tufts. Not certain I love it, but I don't hate it either, so if I get used to it I'll go back and add a few to the other minis.

The latest recruit (and this month's contest entry), Brother Gatekeeper:



So technically this is one of the founding units of the Empyrean Crusade, since even before meaning to collect a marine army I'd bought the issue of Imperium with the weapons on it, just to have weapons for conversions, then months later the newsagent randomly had the other two dreadnought issues on sale, so I snapped them up just because having a complete dreadnought for AU$60 is a no-regrets scenario (not actually complete though, because before finding the other two sprues I'd already used the power fist as base decoration for Inaaya Pureheart, but we'll get to that) - having a dreadnought, plus the $5 Whirlwind, got me thinking I was well on the way to 1000 points, so why not? (Although I continue to have a lot of fun using Creations of Bile, so unless chaos does start getting tedious the loyalist marines may well end up just a painting project. But never mind.) That said, I wasn't super enthusiastic about the Redemptor, since I don't like how their front armour looks - I get that it's echoing similar angles on the old boxnought, but the overlapping armour plates on the Redemptor make it much more pronounced, it looks like it's got a beer gut - but then browsing the GW website I saw how the armour could be hinged open to reveal the sarcophagus, and wondered what if you just left that armour off entirely?

I think it's a good look, honestly - I like having the sarcophagus on full display like they used to be, both for nostalgia and to show off all the sculpted detail, and having that comparatively smaller piece as the visual centre of the dreadnought makes the rest of it look massive, and also kind of makes the flat plane of the sarcophagus front and the plates on either side the most obvious feature, rather than the flabby armour belly which draws the eye lower and makes the armour either side look smaller by comparison. Thinking about that also led to the dreadnought getting his personality of Brother Gatekeeper, the guy who hates all this newfangled Primaris stuff and thinks everything was better back in the old days - I decided he'd been 'upgraded' to a Redemptor while unconscious, after getting his former Castaferrum chassis trashed, and was furious about it, and kept shooting the servitors every time they tried to cover up his sarcophagus with the front armour, until the techmarines gave up and let him have his way. I also wanted him to have a banner, because dreadnoughts had banners back then, and ended up using the Black Templars upgrade piece - much smaller than an old dreadnought banner, but again that makes the dread itself look bigger. I decided that's Brother Gatekeeper's own skeleton: since he doesn't need it inside the sarcophagus, back when he was first interred he had the techmarines pull his skeleton out and mount it so even though his body wasn't really doing anything anymore, it'd still be out in the action rather than sealed away.

As usual I sliced off all the alignment pegs on the joints to get a fancier pose. I've had that War Walker since the old days, when I tried to bend its legs to give it a more active pose than 'just standing there', which never really looked good so I doubt I was ever going to reassemble and paint it anyway - as well as half-burying it in milliput I slopped some superglue into the crevices to make sure it wouldn't budge. Since the left foot of the dread has separate toes I had that stepping up, so the toes could 'grip' the wreckage underneath, although they're not really touching it - it's one of the walker's weapon mount plates under there, with the edge sliced and filed down to match the angle of the dread foot for a more stable superglue bond, but it looks close enough. Having the left leg lifted up like that meant the hip piston needed to be cut shorter to fit, but everything lined up well enough in the end. Incidentally I left the 'hip' armour off the legs, to make it look a little more like a boxnought, and also just because I find those relatively thin hip plates actually make the whole upper leg look spindly. Would've been nice if the designers had kept the pattern of horizontal plates running from the back of the hip to the front, even if it was supposed to be covered up; I used a couple of tow cable attachments from one of the vehicle kits to break up the big flat surfaces of the upper legs instead.



I raised the cannon arm up as much as I could, to hark back to the old shoulder-mounted dread weapons - I'm not that fond of how the Redemptor's main gun kind of hangs off the bottom of the arm, I'm sure the arm's very strong but I feel like the gun looks more dangerous raised up like the dread needs to do that to absorb recoil when it fires. I didn't realise it at the time, but that ended up needing the back corner cut off the shoulder plate to make room for the back of the cannon there. The motto 'Metallum Falsum Moriturum' is, I'm sure, appalling Latin for something like 'metal never dies', but it's taken from the article first introducing dreadnoughts in White Dwarf 100 so it's canonical Gothic; that set of artwork also provided 'occidete' (which just means 'kill'), which I used to try to hide the obvious join on the casing of the smaller cannon on the left arm. I decided early on to paint the dreadnought as a red-coloured chapter (just for the joke of 'Red Dread Redemptor'), and once I started coming up with Brother Gatekeeper's personality the Flesh Tearers seemed a good match for his brand of idiot machismo; the two yellow blood drops would make him 6th company - although I can't find the image by googling, but I think the most recent Codex Blood Angels has a heraldry page for Flesh Tearers that have them just using different colours of single blood drops for every company; if that's the case, Brother Gatekeeper prefers his markings to come from the old codex, of course.



The little shield on the left shoulder is just something I stuck on when I was doing decoration, along with most of my spare purity seals - I feel like dreadnoughts should have a lot of bling - but while I was painting, I ended up thinking of using that to have a different chapter's symbol, and settled on the Eagle Warriors, since they're retro (I had a look in the 3rd edition codex for candidates), but their blue-white halves colour scheme is just the reverse of the Marines Errant I'd already done, so it'd have been repetitive and confusing; just having the symbol here lets them be represented without the hassle. I decided the story is that the Eagle Warriors helped out the Flesh Tearers in some critical battle or something, and the Flesh Tearers detached Brother Gatekeeper to serve them to satisfy the honour debt - but because Brother Gatekeeper is who he is, the Eagle Warriors quickly got thoroughly sick of him, and were delighted to have the excuse to send him off to join the Empyrean Crusade so he wouldn't be their problem anymore.



My solution to the missing power fist was to use a leftover chainfist from the Armiger/War Dog kit, since I assembled Natalie with two autocannons. Originally I was thinking it'd just be a non-standard weapon, since the Flesh Tearers seem like they'd be into giant chainfists, but while I was painting I thought it'd be fun to paint it as an actual chaos War Dog chainfist, which Brother Gatekeeper blew off and had attached to himself after his own power fist got wrecked. It's not properly sanctified per Mechanicus rules, but he insists it can't corrupt him because "I'm not afraid of chaos, chaos is afraid of me." Adding the chainfist forearm to the power fist forearm made that limb noticeably long, but I decided to angle the blade down to lean into that look - it's always seemed a bit like dreadnought power fists are too high up, like they'd have to crouch to actually reach attack human-sized enemies, so this limb doesn't have that problem. I did toy with the idea of looking up an oldhammer daemon engine colour scheme for the chainfist, but I decided in the end that I didn't want another completely different set of colours on the mini, on top of the war walker on the base, so I just copied one of the current ones from the GW website's images.

This photo's one where it's actually visible - the effect ended up being far less noticeable than I'd hoped - but while I was assembling the dread I used a blade to score the edges of all the thick armour panels, to try to make them look flame-cut, because I'd seen that on youtube videos about armour modelling and I love the anachronism of the Imperium building cybernetic war machines with WWII manufacturing.

I did think about doing the War Walker in the colours of my old craftworld, but that'd just be bone and that seemed a bit dull - luckily that WD100 dreadnought article also features some Eldar ones, so I picked the colours of the Alai Mercenary Corps from that.



Hot pink knee-pads and underpants are a choice. Not kink-shaming, but it's not surprising Slaanesh came from these folks...

As usual, finishing the painting contest entry this month left me still in a painting mood, but unable to start on next month's entry yet, so something else sitting around waiting finally got finished, an Eradicator squad from the Mantis Warriors chapter:



I actually got these out at the start of October, when the local discord group's painting challenge went into 'squad month' - my main entry was a bike squadron (including the Kaneda bike that was also the painting contest entry here), but just in case I finished them early I also got these out of the grey plastic bin and put some base colours on them (pretty much just the red base, green armour, and black guns), before it became apparent that progress on the bikes was going to be real slow (I ended up only finishing the one during October). But there's done now, so it all worked out in the end.



The reason for getting a box of Eradicators - besides just 'buying miniatures feels comforting' - was to paint the multi-melta marine as Brother Angst, from one of the ad/gallery pages in the Book of the Astronomican (where he and his fellow 'Imperial Space Marines' cost 75p each); Angst doesn't have a chapter badge so far as I can see, nor does he have the yellow face markings Mantis Warriors had in their portrait in Rogue Trader, so probably the painter was just doing a random camo scheme, and I decided Mantis Warriors because they're green and I hadn't painted any of them yet. He's in a weird position being both an Astronomican paint job, who I normally do as close as I can to the original and look specifically to the RT era for additional inspiration, and part of the modern Empyrean Crusade, so I compromised by making the whole squad a kind of mishmash of OG and modern Mantises: yellow shoulder pad on the right with modern specialty and squad marking, but green backpack rather than black, old-style face markings rather than just making the whole faceplate yellow, and the left shoulder with the old chapter badge in a yellow circle rather than the whole pad being yellow. I also did some investigating and found out the Mantis Warriors are White Scars successors, so I googled up a page of White Scars heraldry and took a couple of cues from that: the black rim on the sergeant's shoulder pad to show he's a veteran (using black instead of red to fit it into the Mantis colour palette), and a design on the sergeant's right leg to identify the squad's company (which for White Scars are various different versions of their jagged/lightning bolt pattern, so I went for something inspired by the Mantis Warriors badge to make it their style). And of course there's the gold right arm, which for this squad I kept to the bulky elbow and forearm pieces, rather than the entire arms.

Brother Angst then got his camo, which took a couple of attempts: my first try was dark green, which wasn't dark enough to really stand out, so I went over it with coal black which was more distinctive but still drab, so I added in bright green outlines around the camo patterns, which of course is the opposite of what camo is supposed to do but it looks better. While RT Mantis Warriors have the same green on the backpack as their armour, Angst has a darker green backpack, so I split the difference by using dark green on the add-on power unit, while keeping the backpack underneath it the same green as his squadmates; I also gave him a dark green left shoulder, since with the yellow chapter badge and gold rim it still fits in without messing with squad cohesion. Did a little glowy reactor on the backpack power pack as well, just for fun.

The Necron bit was because I had this mental image of Brother Angst getting right up close to a tank or whatever and firing his multi-melta point blank into it - at first I had his left foot up on top of the ball of the Necron limb, but since the legs aren't actually meant to be one-foot-up it looked awkward, so I popped him off before the glue set and changed the angle so the foot's still propped up but not as high. For the Necron bit I put a black base on it intending to do the usual metal drybrush, but I find metallic Necrons a bit dull so I decided to try something else and put a bunch of markings on instead - I kind of had the Farscape Peacekeepers red and black palette in mind, although the symbols aren't based on anything besides the shape of the plastic. I don't love the result, but I don't hate it either.

I love your work.

Would you mind moving closer, so we can see more of it, more often?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I love your work.

Would you mind moving closer, so we can see more of it, more often?

Thanks Technically I'm moving all the time, for reasons unknown (to me anyway, I don't care about finding out) whenever I'm posting from work Dakkadakka registers my location as Bangladesh, so at any given time I might be a few thousand km nearer or further away.

End of the year, and it seems fitting to post the last miniature painted this year (I'm definitely not going to be painting tomorrow, my hobby time will be all prepping miniatures for the January segment of my local group's summer painting challenge), a Bladeguard Ancient of the Rainbow Warriors chapter:



So as you might have guessed, I managed to find a copy of that Dawn of War board game that had the sprue in it for like $200 cheaper than just buying it the regular way - that involved ducking out of work early and making a cross-city dash on several trains to reach the one EB Games shop that had it in stock before they sold it or closed for the evening; as it happened it wasn't on the shelves, but the store lady found a single copy in the storeroom.

This is the first mini from that set I've painted, chosen because it let me get around the problem of how boring the Rainbow Warriors chapter colour scheme is: just the helmet stripes on an otherwise plain blue body. I definitely wanted a Rainbow Warrior in the crusade, since they're one of the original twelve chapters featured in Rogue Trader, but the notion of basically just doing some more Ultramarines with colourful helmets seemed unworthy of such a cool name. Naturally the pride robes were the first thing I thought of, but I actually hesitated quite a bit: while it's absolutely true that the 'right' way to paint your minis is however you want, since this is part of the Empyrean Crusade rather than a one-off painted purely for display like the Astronomican boys, I wondered whether such a fanciful rendition of the robes would really fit in. For a while I considered making the robes green, after the hull colour of the Rainbow Warrior ship, but green robes over blue armour didn't feel like a great look... and around that point, I realised I was trying to take 40k seriously, and went back to the original pride flag idea without any regrets at all. (Given what space marines - well, everyone else in 40k too - are like, I've decided his name is Homosexualis Esse Scelera Belli Facere - 'be gay, do war crimes'. Rainbow Warriors must go in for long ritual names or something. That's just google translate as always, so no need to tell me it's totally wrong, I know.)

Granted the lines are a bit messy when you zoom in, but I'm still really pleased with how this paint job turned out - I'd just switched to a new fine detail brush (I'm not conscientious enough about my brushes to look after them properly, so instead of going through expensive brushes I just get packs of cheap ones from the local two dollar shop, and swap to a new one whenever the current brush gets too fuzzy to manage a straight line, give or take my ability to paint a straight line anyway) so I was able to get all those stripes done with a minimum of fixing needed. Unfortunately while the shoulder shawl thingy made the perfect shape to put the triangle stripes on, there wasn't room for the purple circle on yellow field (the intersex flag) inside the innermost (white) stripe - I thought about doing the whole flag, triangle stripes and intersex circle and all, on the back robe, but then realised I could just move the missing element to the heraldry shield instead. The helmet stripes were the most nerve-wracking part - I managed those by starting at the outsides with the green stripes, not worrying where the inner edges were, then painting the yellow (actually wraithbone, coloured yellow later with contrast paint) over them, and so on until I just had to do the final super-thin white stripe down the centre. That's wraithbone too, I used to use corax white as my default white, but now I've switch to wraithbone since it's got much better coverage, and against solid colours you can't really tell it's not 'pure' white anyway; the only exceptions lately have been edge highlights of white armour, where I go full white (whatever the whiter-than-corax one is, white scar? I forget).

There's nothing fancy going on with the rest of the paint job, I just did my best to not make a mess, after all the effort I'd put into the stripes. The only point of interest is the little cross hanging off the 'standard' - I know the actual Crux Terminatus is the one that goes on the shoulder pad, but I love the lore of them being made of stone, so whenever I have a mini with one of these mini-crux tokens without a full-size Crux on it, I paint the token version stone.

So that's 2025 in the can - as I said I've already got my pledge of minis to complete during January lined up (with one of them serving double duty as my entry for the painting contest here), including a second Whirlwind and a squad of five Hellblasters, so hopefully they'll be added here before the month is out. (They'd better be, we get +50% Painting Points for completing every mini we pledged for the month.)

That's awesome. Fun and totally retro.

Thanks

Continuing the Empyrean Crusade as it started, with another accidental Whirlwind - back in November I went to a second hand event (Combat Company, Sydney) and came away with quite a haul of oldhammer going cheap, including an old Rhino and Whirlwind. The Whirlwind hull wasn't entirely intact, so the Rhino donated the missing parts (headlights, one missing exhaust, and the little stowage box; I did think about getting some thick wire to bend into shape to recreate the old running handles along the sides, but that'd be a lot of hassle and I don't think it's really necessary for a Whirlwind anyway since it's not supposed to be transporting troops. The hull I was using had the chunky dozer blade, and I decided to keep that.



The turret was another matter - one of the end caps of the missile tubes was missing, but more drastically the support arm had been cut in half by the previous owner, apparently (since there were little holes drilled into the gunner station) with a view to mounting the two arms either side of the gunner, rather than behind. I didn't fancy the amount of work it'd be to attach the arms to a new central section and then mount the whole thing and hope it wouldn't fall to pieces while I was painting, so instead I got it into my head to try to recreate the old Tony Cottrell scratchbuilt Whirlwind turret - the critical component was one of the old monster-sized square bases, which had rows of circles on the underside (so you could drill out one of them to fit the peg of the ogre's foot or whatever, in whichever position on the base you wanted), which I had lying around since I'd repurposed the remains of my old metal War Walker as base decoration for the dreadnought. The build plan (in White Dwarf 117) calls for the top and bottom of the launcher to be made from the two sets of double doors included in the Rhino kit - I had one set spare (with a big hole cut into it for whatever reason, but it'd be covered up anyway) but rather than dismantle the poor donor Rhino further I decided to go off in a different direction, and use the square base as the start of a new scratchbuild, using whatever I had lying around (no shade to old Tony working with what was available at the time, but the original's basically just a box). The halves of a leftover engine from the Stormhawk/talon kit ended up being the main body, with the halves of the old squads base sandwiched in front and back - I covered up the top with plastic card and stuck on a random panel with the Mechanicus logo, and a sensor 'head' from I think the Razorback (I've built but not yet painted a Razorback, but I omitted the sensor targeting system and kitbashed a version of the old manned turret instead). The bottom, like the old scratchbuild, used a spare Rhino front panel, and to lift it up above the gunner's position I added half a bike tyre and some random round bit from who knows what sprue - there's a plastic rod running through those into a hole I drilled through the back of the metal Whirlwind top panel, it's not actually glued on.





Painting required a bit of renovation first, since the bottom of the hull had a set of double doors glued into it, which I didn't want to remove since the dozer blade is attached to them, but I had to cut off the thick lip of the doors at the rear so there was room for my usual trick of gluing a base to the bottom of vehicles, where it can't be seen if you don't flip the vehicle upside-down to look, so it can be mounted on a painting handle. The turret didn't have any such convenient mounting point, so I just blu-tacked it to a wooden block as a handle and tried not to handle it too firmly; for a lot of the finishing details I took it off its 'handle' and just held it at the front and the back, since the metallic paint over black wouldn't easily rub off, and would be easy to touch up if it did.

I generally enjoy edge highlighting vehicles, since they often have nice sharp edges that make it easy, although all the details on the Whirlwind add-ons did take quite a while to get through; ever since I first saw the kit back in the day I have thought perhaps the sculptor might have struck a better balance between the amount of rivets they could get onto a metal piece and the 95%-rivetless plastic Rhino hull they were intended to go on; still, I think they blend in well enough, with the edge highlighting and the painted symbols on the hull distracting from how plain it is. I went low-key with the usual Empyrean Crusade left-side-gold on this one, following what was sculpted on instead of just painting any of the larger sections gold for the hell of it. Since I had the old metal Blood Angels front plate I looked up Blood Angels successors to see if any used the same winged blood drop logo, and found the Angels Vermillion would fit, just needing different colours and a skull painted on the blood drop - I really like the look of the dark red almost-burgundy Angel Vermillion in the 3rd edition Codex Blood Angels that's my primary reference, but this is the colour spray I had handy, and since the Crusade's actual Blood Angels contribution (the Land Raider) is in camo, this let me do a classic bright red Blood Angels-style hull. Some googling showed that modern Angels Vermillion tend to be a bit lighter red anyway, so it's not entirely wrong for the chapter anyway.



I had a real fun time painting the gunner in his cramped little cubby hole (I mean that, it's not sarcasm), getting all the little buttons and screens in there - though it did slip my mind that as a Blood Angels successor he should have a blue helmet, since a Whirlwind would be crewed by Devastator marines (or 'fire support' or whatever they're called now). Since I was really happy with how the helmet's face had turned out, especially considering how recessed it is into the whole cockpit piece, I decided that for some convoluted lore reason there are some Angels Vermillion who do their department colour as a helmet stripe, rather than the entire helmet, which let me just repaint the easy top of the head. On the headlights I tried to do a kind of halo effect, like the edges of the casing were picking up the glare of the lights, but I don't know that it really worked out; never mind. I think the back light worked better, with the same kind of drybrush-around-it glow I use for plasma weapons - that light strip was glued in sandwiched between the top hull's 'claws' and the edge of the bottom (incidentally the hull had been assembled offset, leaving those thin gaps both at the back, and on the underside at the front, but I definitely couldn't be bothered taking the whole vehicle apart to remedy that), and instead of trying to do lights in the circular recesses which are half-covered, I decided to just paint the central part as if it's a convoy light for the vehicle behind to follow when they're travelling in low-light conditions.

My fine detail brush is being cooperative at the moment, so I indulged myself in adding symbols - besides the Angels Vermillion logo painted over the sculpted Blood Angels one, I copied the arrangement of logos on a Predator shown in the 3rd edition codex, with the company symbol on the right and company number in a circle on the left (in this case two blood drops, yellow, for 6th Company), and another number which I guess is just the vehicle's own number (4 in this case, no reason). The 6 and 4 symbols both got copied onto the top of the launcher, which also got the Whirlwind four-way lightning bolts symbol on its side - if I recall the original article it says the symbol is used in variations by different chapters, so in this case I changed the example (Space Wolf) version's yellow and red to yellow and black, so it'd stand out against the red hull. Technically that symbol should be on top of the launcher, since the whole point of them is so titan crews can identify what kind of vehicles they're fighting alongside by looking down at them, but with the sensor eye and the plate with the Mechanicus logo the top was a big crowded, so maybe the Angels Vermillion forgot what the symbol's for, and just keep painting it on their vehicles out of habit.



The big painting challenge this time was the Imperial aquila, the split-in-half version with lightning bolts coming out its butt used on Imperial vehicles since the dawn of time (or the first Rhino kit, anyway). My version's a bit off-model - especially the body, since without realising it I did the edges of the body leaving more of a central gap than intended, so when I filled it in to the sculpted gap between the hatch doors, it ended up being a fat little eagle, but never mind; as always, the appeal isn't to get it perfect, but to have done it entirely with my own brush. I think it's also supposed to be the right head that's got an eye, whereas I painted it on the left, but again, I'm not bothered; maybe the Angels Vermillion have some elaborate flag code thing where the open eye needs to be facing 'forward' when the symbol's on a vehicle or something, who knows.



In memory of those old scratchbuild plans (there were several featured back in the day, including complete plans to build a 40k-scale Baneblade entirely out of plastic card, with only a handful of preexisting parts used as decoration), I put a scroll on the back with Cottrell on it - maybe that's the name of the Mechanicus guy responsible for these off-brand Whirlwind launchers. And finally, using the photo I took of the second hand Rhinos when I got them, I recreated the vehicle's original name 'Motor Breath', copying as best I could the lettering style, and the way the end of 'breath' got a bit cramped and angled up - however this hull's previous owner treated it (cutting the missile arms in half was quite a choice), that's the name it presumably carried onto the tabletop in its day, and I feel like the machine spirit would be pleased to retain it.

Nice work on the update to the RT Whirlwind. Your conversion looks great compared to the original (which was perfectly serviceable, but, as you say, "just a box").

Thanks Yeah, the old version is a good effort while being self-sufficient - I expect you could even get away with cutting the template pieces out of the box the Rhino came in, rather than buying plastic card for them.

Anyway, new unit: Hellblasters of the Death Spectres chapter. I got these lads from a guy in the local gaming group selling them off cheaper than retail, so they were already half-way assembled, and the sergeant had his extra tactical rock base - I gave the rock (actually a bit of cork) the same astrogranite technical paint cover as the flat bases to keep them all consistent. The plasma rifles were still to assemble, so I went with the module plug-in rather than the cables - seemed more in keeping with the plasma rifles I'm familiar with.



I forget where it came from, but the idea of the plasma coils glowing red was something I had from the start - no reason, for other plasma weapons in the crusade I'll probably go with the more common blue (chaos plasma gets spooky green instead), but every chapter has their own armories and supply chains, there's no reason their kit can't vary in appearance. I wanted a mainly black colour scheme to make the plasma red stand out, and initially thought of painting them as Iron Hands, but then I picked up the Iron Hands upgrade kit (no specific reason, I just like having options available) and thought it'd be a shame not to use the shoulder pads, so I went looking through the various incarnations of Codex Space Marines on the shelf and, unusually, ended up with an option from the 10th edition book, the Death Spectres.

Given the bodies it'd probably have been easier to just undercoat them black, but I had my heart set on a really crisp white for the shoulders and heads and chests - not such a big deal for the latter two since bone has good coverage, but even with a bone base then white on top I find that trying to get good white coverage over a dark undercoat is a bit of a mess; probably because I just go for it with paint straight out of the pot rather than thinning them and using fifteen layers, but what can I say, I'm lazy sometimes. So that entailed a lot of careful outlining of the white areas with black contrast around them, then filling in the rest of the minis - large surfaces like the shins and right shoulders tended to get a bit of a dusty incomplete coverage look from just the single coat of contrast black, but I don't mind that, to me it just reads as battle-worn armour. Normally I like bold edge highlights but in this case I wanted to keep the black very dark, so I just left the 'highlights' the contrast paint had created, and only added dot highlights at the sharp corners with paint, and a few little bits of edge on the shoulders and elbows and legs where it'd stand out if there wasn't any. For the bone I used ink (shade) rather than contrast, to get a very pale, smooth bone look.

The chapter icons were a bit of a chore, but I took them in stages to keep them consistent over the five - black underlayer for the skull, then bone, then eye and nose holes, then the scythes behind them; the faces ended up squished down the bottom a little, but I can live with that. I gather Hellblasters are 'fire support' or whatever it is they call Devastators nowadays, so the right shoulder got the proper triangle logo - although in the case of the sergeant, I decided to make it an outline rather than a solid triangle, to make him stand out a bit more. I'd already decided against a red helmet for him since the bone helmet is such a part of their look - the Death Spectres are Raven Guard successors, and Raven Guard just identify sergeants with the skull on their forehead, not recolouring the helmet, so there's precedent (I used actual white to highlight the skull on the helmet, rather than bone, to help it stand out).

For the stripe on the right knee (company colour) I'd been thinking 8th, grey, to keep the body monotone to keep the focus on the plasma red, but while I was reading up on the Death Spectres' lore I changed my mind: their job is standing guard at the edge of the Ghoul Stars, an area right out on the edge of the galaxy that's largely undefined but whatever's in there sounds like HP Lovecraft thought it up and is an Eye of Terror-level threat if it ever wakes up again, so I don't know that they'd really be taking time out to contribute to the Empyrean Crusade which is, in the grand scheme of things, just tidying up an unruly sector. So I decided to roll with that idea, and instead of this squad being a reserve unit they can spare to satisfy a minor honour debt, they're from the badass 3rd company, and joined the crusade for their own reasons, which they told Inquisitor Amnestine and she promptly sealed the file so nobody else could read it (what is the reason? Don't know, I didn't invent one, just the unsettling implication that the guys whose job is keeping Cthulhu from starting a ruckus have decided this crusade needs their help). Bottom line, the knee pad got to be red, which I think ties the minis together in a nice way, not distracting from the weapon glow, but complementing it.

That same idea also gave me a solution to where to put the gold, since again having shiny left arms would undercut how brooding they looked - since they're with the crusade for their own reasons, it's just a temporary assignment (whereas the other squads who joined, if they survive, will refound the Empyrean Wardens chapter once they've shown themselves worthy by completing the crusade), so instead of gold plating part of their armour they just have a little gold crusade badge on their lower leg, which is far more unobtrusive. The actual shape is a bit hazy since it's so small, but I was going for the silhouette of a Spartan helmet (300 Spartans, not Halo Spartans), which I've decided is what the Wardens' chapter logo was - I hadn't thought of one until now, since they're all dead so I wouldn't need to paint any, just that their armour was gold to justify the gold plating on the crusade in their name.

Hellblasters are my favourit Intercessor squad. Hats off for free handing those badges.

This is a very good Space Marine project, thank you for sharing it.

 vim_the_good wrote:
Hellblasters are my favourit Intercessor squad. Hats off for free handing those badges.

A couple of games back I went up against an Ultramarines force with a block of ten of them, led by a lieutenant - I definitely see the appeal (my Legionaries have mixed feelings though, understandably).

 UR-025 wrote:
This is a very good Space Marine project, thank you for sharing it.

Thanks

This month's painting contest entry for 'space marine', Squad Kirsch, 8th company, Genesis Chapter:



I picked these up at Combat Company Mortdale's buy-swap-sell event at the start of February - same place as the Whirlwind last November, they seem to run every three months, and again the day saw me a couple hundred lighter in the pocket, but significantly heavier in old minis, with the highlights this time being a horde of early-2000s Chaos Marines, a bag of ten Terminators that turned out to have thirteen Terminators in it, a Wraithlord and Helbrute (neither of which I particularly plan to use, it's just that they were so cheap), and relevant to today, a lot of Space Crusade minis. Not a full set, but a few 'chaos androids' (totally not Necrons), some Chaos Marines, no less than four Chaos Dreadnoughts, and three Space Marine squads with all their weapon options. (And speaking of Space Crusade, while looking for photos of painted marines to see what the fine details were supposed to be - it's easier when I know what I'm supposed to be looking at to begin with - I noticed the twin lascannon that'd come with the Rhino/Whirlwind assortment last November, which I'd assumed was a turret piece I wasn't familiar with, is actually a Space Crusade Tarantula, so that's nice to have too. Missing its legs but I can kitbash something together easily enough.)



I decided I'd do all the weapons and leave them unglued and swappable - both for the satisfaction of having a 'complete' Space Crusade squad, and because it'd make the chests a lot easier to paint. While I was filing off mold lines and injection points, I also filed around the sides of the weapon pegs a little, not to the point of making them loose, but easier to slip in and out so they could be swapped without having to grip them hard once they were painted - since they're just going to live on a shelf it's not like I need to worry about them falling out during a game. Prior to spraying the bodies got a little dab of blu-tack over the holes in their belt buckles, while the weapons got glued to a spare bit of sprue by the ends of their pegs - once I'd done the painting I snipped them back off at the base then filed off the undercoat wraithbone from the sides, and they fit nice and easy. The backpacks are glued in place though, as are the bases. I thought about upsizing them to 32mm bases, but I figured in the absence of scenery decoration, which I didn't want to do since I don't normally and it'd dilute the oldhammer look, a larger circle wouldn't really add anything.



I did have a reason for painting the blue minis red, instead of just starting with the red ones: I decided the blues really ought to be an Ultramarines successor (since I've already got an actual Ultramarines unit, the Whirlwind), and the orangey-red of Genesis Chapter seemed like it'd go well on the minis, with its bold single colour that'd make the most of the simpler sculpt with strong highlights, no markings needed for the kneepads most of the minis don't have, and the simple chapter logo that wouldn't be too much of a chore to fit onto the relatively small shoulders. How orange Genesis Chapter actually is seems to vary by source, with some images making them look pure red, but it was the orange tinge int he 9th edition Codex Space Marines that'd caught my eye to begin with - I started with contrast orange, shaded them further with crimson ink, then brought the orange back with highlights, one layer of mid orange for all the edges, and a second pass of brighter orange on the prominent corners and tips. The weapons by contrast I kept pretty muted, following the plain black bolter casing shown in the codex - to get what I felt was a retro look I went for dark gray, shaded with nuln oil, and then with a gunmetal highlight on top, rather than a full metallic paint job.



I hadn't planned anything fancy with the markings, but I ended up playing a bit with some of the options, with check patterns on the power fist and assault cannon, and a flame deco on what I thought was a flamer, but turns out it's supposed to be a plasma gun; never mind, plasma guns can have flames painted on them. As usual I did the Crux Terminator, on the leader's knee, as stone - not sure what rank he's supposed to be by the way, you'd think sergeant, but the Space Crusade manual (which admittedly is far from what I'd consider a reliable source) calls him a 'commander'. In any case, when it came time to paint his hair I thought white with white eyebrows would look cool, like Kirsh in Alien: Earth which I've just been watching, so I decided that'd his name. Unfortunately I didn't look it up and wrote 'Kirsch' on the shoulder, and the lettering came out decently (for the size) so I don't want to redo it - so instead of Timothy Olyphant, he's named after the brandy they use in black forest cake. I don't mind that.

The grey trim on their right shoulder makes them 8th company, as usual a reserves unit - I decided to bring the gold on their left arms up onto the trim as well, since otherwise it's pretty hidden from the front. I copied the double-sided Tactical squad type symbol from some Space Crusade marines that appeared in a contemporary White Dwarf, and picked third squad for no real reason. Since Genesis Chapter seem to have a bit of a prim and proper attitude going on, I decided against any extra personal markings.

So that's I suppose a Tactical Squad, if outfitted the right way; I don't know that they can really be slotted into any other role in the modern codex, but as I say I don't intend to use them, so it doesn't really matter (although given a few more squads like this and I could really irritate people by crowding a lot of minis onto objectives). I should note that, while they're obviously a lot more rudimentary than modern plastics, I found a lot of enjoyable detail, and had a great time painting them - having them finished, and nothing else needing doing for the rest of the month, the experience prompted me to go back and put some work into the first edition Space Hulk plastic Terminators I've had at the back of the table waiting their turn for a while.

Quite a while back I dug out five of my original Space Hulk Terminators, with a view to painting them up the way I imagined them back then but didn't have the ability to do (same time as I did a single classic-style blue and purple Genestealer) - but with one thing and another they got put on the back-burner, and stayed there. Painting the Space Crusade squad actually got me to return to them at last, since I found working with the old sculpts to be quite a lot of fun. I'd originally meant them to be Blood Angels per the Space Hulk box art and they already had coats of contrast red, but I decided like the Space Crusade boys they could join the Empyrean Crusade, which meant they needed a new identity since Blood Angels are already accounted for with the Land Raider - I had a look through various codices for red chapters and, from a recent one for once, picked Flesh Tearers, since the white face stripe and white chest wings looked like they'd be visually interesting despite the limitations of the minis I was working with.

I'd already put them on Necromunda bases, appropriate for Space Hulk missions, but I decided to keep those rather than transplant them onto the Crusade's usual dusty red - I wasn't keen on a red-on-red result anyway, and crusades need to board ships from time to time, so why not. The only other build change was to add the sergeant's flagpole - naturally all the originals were long snapped off, so I used the bottom of a spear from some Sigmar sprue I had lying around.

The paint job's nothing particularly exciting, although I did find the sculpts more detailed than I first thought, especially the helmets; less so the chest eagles, I didn't want to darken them too much with a heavy wash, so they ended up a pretty flat white, but never mind. My original plan with these minis had been to give them all the extra painted detail of contemporary Terminator paint jobs, but I used a bunch of those designs when painting the new-sculpt Marines Errant Terminators, so I gave myself more leeway here, for instance not bothering with the specific badges marking power fists, since the surface is pretty small to begin with. I did insist on freehanding a Crux Terminatus on every mini though - what kind of Terminator doesn't have a Crux? - which was a bit ambitious, but they turned out alright, starting with a grey base then carefully painting on pale grey 'highlights', followed by thin lines of contrast black on the undersides where there should be shadows, if they were actually sculpted. I omitted the ring around the central skull to keep things simple, which has the effect of making the cross more prominent - not really what I intended, but I didn't want to go back and risk messing up a decent paint job by trying to modify it - and the sergeant got a fancier Crux, with a jewel and diagonal bones added. Also gave them checker pattern 'casings' on the storm bolters, just to try to tart up the woefully basic sculpts there.



And just to disprove what everyone says about scale creep, here's the squad sergeant next to his newer Marines Errant counterpart - see, the older Terminator is actually taller.

Great work on those Space Crusade marines. Those were the first Warhammer minis I ever painted, way back in the Dark Age of Technology. Basically Space Crusade was my gateway drug.

And hat tip for painting all the weapon options. Good show!