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kraken88 wrote:Did you use all brushes on your free hand or did you use some pens or something?

It's all done with brushes. I find they're a little easier to use on curved surfaces, which is important because a space marine is basically all curved surfaces.

Thanks for all the kind words, guys. I'm officially done feeling nervous.

Bloody hell mate, I'm in awe; I'm always a fan of "artscale" Marine forces, but it's rare indeed to see one on such a scale and with such attention to detail, this thread is getting bookmarked in my artscale inspiration folder right next to Apologist's pre-heresy Ultramarines.

I love all the little touches of personal heraldry, and you have checker patterns on some of them, which is auto-win in my book

Wow. Just fantastic! I love them!

Absolutely fantastic work! A GREAT effort, you would be proud to put that on the tabletop I'm sure!

May I ask how you go about the extra-wide track conversions?

Jaeger wulf wrote:Absolutely fantastic work! A GREAT effort, you would be proud to put that on the tabletop I'm sure!

May I ask how you go about the extra-wide track conversions?

I was wondering about that too.

Phenomenal work. It's great how looking at all the extremely well painted armies on this site never gets old because they are all unique, even if they are based on the same chapter as someone else.

Show us more! I'd love to see some customised Termies.
.

The doublewide Rhinos are very cool. Plasticard work, or did you actually stick 2 rhinos together for the treads?

Wow. Just wow. Brilliant work. That's how Space Marines should look. You have an amazing army. I wouldn't e nervous about your painting skills.

Ok, ok, everybody wants a piece of the fat rhinos!

Short answer: yes, it is just two rhinos stuck together (plus the top plate from a Sisters of Battle immolator stuck on the top, some slightly extended side doors and a land raider assault ramp to replace the back door). It's not a super easy process though, because while the front and top trackguards are all the same piece, part of the rear trackguard is actually part of the inside of the track housing itself. So you've got to put together the inside and outside track housings, attach the top plate and then cut very, very carefully along the outside of the rhino's main hull so that you end up with no unsightly gaps in the rear trackguard and then attach that whole thing to the outside of your core vehicle. Alternatively, I guess you could just cover the gap with plasticard, but at the time when I made these things, my skills with that were not up to scratch and the angles involved can make that a little tricky.

As it turns out, this stuff is no easier to explain than it is to do! I've never taken any WIP photos of these things, but at some point soon I'm going to start in on doing some sort of heavy support tank so I guess I'll turn that into a WIP thread when it happens. Hopefully that'll function as a decent tutorial for anyone who's interested.

Hats off to you for getting back to us... I look forward to any WIP or tutorials you put out there for us.. you got great skills...

YES! an other person painting blood ravens!

but yours look awefully grim... almost chaos...
since blood ravens have whole devisions lost to chaos, i have to ask; are these among the loyal BRs or are these lost?

Those models look fantastic.

Blood Ravens seems like a difficult army to paint well based on the number of terribly painted versions I have seen.

Like the other guys said, there's really nothing to be nervous about! That's a killer army you have there

I cracked up at your description of your attempts at leaving 40k behind. Pretty similar to my own return to the hobby

Anyway, keep this up! Subscribed

Dude I thought I was doing good, then I see this.. I have so much more to learn. well done my friend.

I like the army it looks really cool. Is this suppose to be Blood Ravens or a successor chapter?

I avoided Dakka for a little while so I could actually finish a model instead of ogling everyone else's.

Captain Akkarios


Pretty pleased with this guy! I think I successfully landed the badass 'let them come' look I was after. Is a power fist and combi-plasma gun a good load-out for gaming? Realistically, I don't care. Big gun, big punching, big fun. Also this model represents a bit of a landmark for me, as it's my first go at a glowy coil on the plasma gun and subsequent lighting effects. I decided to keep it pretty gentle on my first go, just in case I screwed it up real bad. Probably came out best on the exhaust duct, less so on the shoulder pad. In the future, I'll probably try and make it a lot more noticeable, but it was good to give it a go and I don't think I totally ruined the figure in the process.

This guy is mainly based off the terminator chaplain model. The fist comes from plastic terminators, the head is from chaos marauder horsemen, the shoulder pads are from plastic chaos space marines, the banner is from an ironclad dreadnought... Let's see.. The gun started as a chaos plasma gun - chop the grip section out and replace it with the grip + magazine from a chaos bolter (I've been having fun fooling around with the more ornate chaos marines). The backpack began as, again, a chaos backpack, with the exhausts trimmed down to look like a regular loyalist backpack. I then added iron halos from servo skulls (I believe they're the ones that come with space marine devastators) and fitted them in around the exhaust ducts.

Questions!

Kal-El: not quite sure what you're getting at with successor chapters (do Blood Ravens even have any?) but yeah, they're totally Blood Ravens.

walledin: I think that probably says less about the colour scheme itself and more about the amount of people who start painting these guys as their first army (due to their appearances in the DoW series), or at least the first one back after a long absence. No, that doesn't include me. My first army when trying to get back into this was Salamanders. They were awwwwwful. Bad. Very bad. You will never ever see them, because they were stripped down and reassembled into the first of my Blood Ravens when I decided to start learning to actually paint worth a damn.

DjinsK: I haven't actually played many of the games (got Dark Crusade, dabbled with Retribution) and I definitely haven't read any of the books so I'm actually pretty ignorant of the Blood Ravens' official background, but I'm vaguely aware that some of them are supposed to be not such good guys. That said, these are loyalists.

When coming up with a theme for the army, I took the whole 'Knowledge is Power' mantra as my starting point and decided that they would be into all kinds of mysticism and pseudo-science such as you might find in Lost, or the Assassin's Creed games (which I love), or Dan Brown's books (which I hate). So they ended up covered in astrological and alchemical symbols and various mysterious-looking hieroglyphs and Greek letters. I know it's not the official version, but I've decided that my Blood Ravens have decided to not really care so much about who their primarch was (tired of space marines with daddy issues) and, through their mystic studies into the human mind and its potential, have come to focus on ensuring the survival of mankind through its psychic evolution. So they're securing forbidden knowledge, deploying experimental psychic weaponry and maybe might have had something to do with The Great Awakening (as briefly mentioned in the rulebook). It's fair to say that their methods and objectives might sometimes bring them into conflict with some of the more dogmatic Imperial organizations, but they are trying to do the Emperor's work and if Chaos shows up in the next system, they are saddling up and going to beat it down.

Thanks for all the comments guys, very much appreciated. Hopefully back with new stuff soonish.

Once again, awesome. The detail and freehand really brings the model to life, and makes my marines look like a cookie cutter used on stale bread.

Your army looks incredible. Above all else, I appreciate a player who takes the time to personalize their army and you have clearly done that. From modifying the tanks and giving the marine terminator legs, to the unique iconography, your army definitely has a personal feel. I love your tanks, they seem much more to scale and 10 marine capacity. I image those took awhile, but it was worth it! One of my favorite pieces of your army is the simple sanguinary guard head on the dreadnought, the mask totally fits and looks awesome. All around great work!

Oh god dammit you're kidding me, that's about the fifth time in a row I've had an idea for a cool conversion, then come online and found someone's beaten me to it; I got the Finecast termie chaplain for the very same purpose not a week ago

Lovely work chief, the backpack is particularly interesting, I'd never have thought of using the servo skulls in that manner. Can't wait to see more.

ssspectre wrote:They're not perfect

Well my friend, they're close enough for me to not care!!

Fantastic conversions and an enormous amount of detail. Mind = Blown.

that freehand is crazy good

Your Blood Ravens are Awesome!

Looking great! I can't imagine the hours put in here...

ssspectre,

Capt. Akharios is a wonderful addition to this army. It took this model to make me realize that all of these "tactical" troops are using Terminator legs!

Is there any chance you could provide more views of the Speeder squadron? I don't think the single photograph does them justice... plus I want to see what detail you applied to all those flat surfaces.

This is the coolest army I've ever seen. +1 million.

Mother of God.



Seriously, this is how marine armies should look. This is also probably one of the most understated true-scale marine armies I've seen, and that is a great thing, in my opinion. Damn dude, I really don't know what else to say. I'm loving all of it and that Captain is just fantastically bad ass!

These are some of the most 40K looking Marines I've ever seen. Very, very VERY well done.

The paint itself looks a little blotchy in places, could maybe benefit from thinning a little more and another coat or two to get a nice even colour.

But the style choices, the freehand, the conversions, it just SCREAMS 40K. Absolutely brilliant.

Very, very nice mate.

Really like the "realistic" style of painting you are using here. Its really excellently done. The freehand as well is superb.

Massively jealous of your talent!

How exactly did you make the tanks to give them wide treads?

Also, for the army itself, my God is that impressive. Your work is absolutely stunning and evokes a sense of realism that is often missing from others' offerings.

This was awesom.......TAKE MY MONEY! TAKE THEM!

"Speeders comin'! Speeders comin', yo!"


Just a quick note to say that my personal gallery now contains three galleries with more detailed shots of the land speeders, as requested. FYI, the weird lettering on the sides is supposed to be the crew names.

If you want anything else uploaded (or if I just shot all the wrong angles of the speeders and you want another one of them), feel free to throw me a PM and I'll see what I can do. I am this close to starting a WIP thread to chronicle the building of a vindicator (so them that wants it can see how I go about biggerizing a tank) and also the painting of Certain Other Things that are on my desk, but today I was too lazy to even start building the damn thing. So that's probably happening tomorrow. Thanks for the continued nice things you are saying about my stuff.