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When I first started miniatures gaming, my first game was the classic Space Crusade. That game will forever have warm feelings from me.

However, I soon started converting minis from the set, and using their bits in other conversions and I found that I really wanted to play Space Crusade, but didn't have any of the parts that I'd need.

So I went to my "bits box"- which is quite extensive these days, with parts catalogued- and found that I could pull a full Space Crusade force out of it.

For painting, I've decided to create tributes to forces that I've painted in the past- some for clients, others for myself. None of them will match those forces too closely, as I'll be creating a new take on them.

Here's the first squad I finished: Salamanders
















I painted up my first unit as Salamanders as a tribute to the Salamanders forces I painted over the years (they'll be 'counts as' Imperial Fists for the most part). This version of the Salamanders doesn't quite match any of the other color schemes for Sallies that I've done, and it was nice to have a slightly new take on them.

PS- I've posted them to CMON for anyone who cares to vote.

They look great and have some nice oldschool feel about them. Good job!

Nice salamanders! There skin should be a bit darker and they need red eyes but besides that the look great!

Entirely awesome.

Can't wait to see some of the bad guys.

 zombiekila707 wrote:
Nice salamanders! There skin should be a bit darker and they need red eyes but besides that the look great!

I don't know if it is too small for the pictures, but the pupils actually are red.

I was going for something closer to human with them, so their skin tone is definitely toned down from the jet black that it sometimes is portrayed as.

I've been playing for a long time, and I've seen the Salamanders move through different portrayals- from Caucasian skin tones, inhuman Drow skin tones or African skin tones. In the end, I picked this one for this set.

Great looking Salamanders, really like the feel of the figures.

Really nice looking minis, look forward to more.

Potential to be epic here.

 odinsgrandson wrote:

 zombiekila707 wrote:
Nice salamanders! There skin should be a bit darker and they need red eyes but besides that the look great!

I don't know if it is too small for the pictures, but the pupils actually are red.

I was going for something closer to human with them, so their skin tone is definitely toned down from the jet black that it sometimes is portrayed as.

I've been playing for a long time, and I've seen the Salamanders move through different portrayals- from Caucasian skin tones, inhuman Drow skin tones or African skin tones. In the end, I picked this one for this set.

Can't argue with that! Vulkan would be proud!

Great job on the eyes in particular!

Thanks.

The eyes always get done first on my minis.

And here are the Gretchin.

I had considered quite a few options for my Gretchin- I have quite a few goblins from various companies I could easily convert. I also have some of the older plastic gretchin minis- but I felt that the pose was too standard.

In the end, I decided to take old metal Snotlings, and arm them with missile weapons. I really fell that this works for their lowly status.

Here they are:

Those snotlings are great, especially the paint on their faces (specifically the noses). The color and shape of those honkers remind me a lot of Brian Froud's work with trolls. Quite a charming little band of trouble makers!

Nice Salamanders. Not sure if I am a fan of the whole NMM movement, but it looks good here.

They look excellent! I agree about the skin tones; jet black is stupid, so in my 40k, they've got proper african skin tones.

Thanks. I've been in the game long enough to have seen official studio Salamanders change all over the place (they've even been caucasians).

One of the things that I like to consider is that if you do a google search for "Jet Black Skin" you get a lot of results with African skin tones. But I can also see the argument for more of a Drow skin look to them. Ultimately, you just got to pick the one you like, and go with it.

 Brian Templar wrote:
Nice Salamanders. Not sure if I am a fan of the whole NMM movement, but it looks good here.

NMM is still an evolving part of the art, and you can really see how far it has come since it first started up in the '90s.

One of the issues is that it is pretty easy to get wrong, and end up with guys that look like their wielding stone swords, or that seem like they've painted strange murals on their armor.

With metallic metals, the issue is that it is easy to make them look good, but it is difficult to make them look stellar. For that purpose, there is a movement towards "true metallics" -which basically combines NMM techniques with metallic paints.

In Space Crusade, the marines fight against a mixed force of Chaos Tainted enemies- among those are five Chaos Space Marines.

I was originally having a hard time deciding what chapter to make the Chaos marines (since I've done quite a few Chaos Space Marine armies for clients that I'd like to make a tributes to).

Then I realized that in gameplay terms, they don't need to be a squad -they can all spawn at different locations, and pretty much act as five independent marines.

So, they'll each be from different Chaos chapters. Here's the first one- a marine of the Black Legion:

Awesome! I loved the game and its computer version. I just realize I played this on the Atari ST. Yuck, I'm old

I liked deploying the Chaos Marines as a squad and give a Space Marine player a nasty surprise.

 ArcticPangolin wrote:
I liked deploying the Chaos Marines as a squad and give a Space Marine player a nasty surprise.

Tactically, you're probably right.

However, thematically, I'm doing this as a tribute to the armies I've painted, and it was just too hard to pick only one Chaos force.

Now, on the other hand, I'm still going to need to do that for the Eldar. I've done lots of neat eldar armies- Aliatoc, Sam Hian, Exodies, Harlequins and several flavors of Dark Eldar. That is not going to be easy to choose.

There are five Chaos Space Marines in Space Crusade. I was having a really hard time trying to decide on a single chapter for them- since I've painted quite a few different chapters of Chaos marines for my regular clients.

In the end, I realized that the game doesn't present them as a squad- they're more like independent chaos marines. As such, I could make each of them a tribute to a different chaos marine force that I painted. As with the others, I tried to have a deliberately different take on the chapter than the armies that I painted before.




Sons of Malice


Night Lords


Iron Warriors


Emperor's Children


Space Crusade also featured a powerful Dreadnought as a centerpiece to the forces of chaos. He is to be feared. Like all minis in this project, I wanted to pull the whole Dread out of my bitz box, and I managed to pull it off. The base mini for this is an old metal dreadnought, with additions from various plastic kits. I decided to give it the plasmagun and missile launcher because the assault cannon is kind of a waste against space marines.


And the Death Guard





Automatically Appended Next Post:
There is one unit type that existed in Space Crusade that never existed in 40k (although I believe they did find their way into Space Marine back in the day).

Cool project idea, and off to a cracking start!

i'v got some of the old board pieces and doors if you want them

 Latro_ wrote:
i'v got some of the old board pieces and doors if you want them

I've got all my boards and doors. The only things I'm missing are a couple of the blip tokens.

And taking the place of the Blood Angels are the White Scars successor chapter- the Storm Lords.

When I first started my painting studio more than ten years ago, one of the first armies that I got to do was Storm Lords. My first thought was that the color scheme was crazy (red and white and yellow- really?). But even after the first set of them, I felt like I really got the color scheme under control, and I'm honestly rather fond of them now.

For my set of them, I decided to emphasize their status as an unorhodox chapter (sometimes they're a codex chapter and sometimes they're wild- the fluff on Storm Lords isn't terribly consistent). I tried to use various south-east Asian skin tones for them, because they're successors to the White Scars- who I see as using a Mongolian aesthetic.













http://www.gardenninja.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/space-crusade/scsl6.jpg

Very cool stuff!