Thoughts and Musings on collecting an entire Company of Space Marines
3 years ago I decided to start a Minotaurs force with the idea of making it a full First Company with some additional elements, originally I had intended to get it done in a year, 18 months max. 36 months and 139 marines later it is finally done and I thought I would share with you guys some reflections on my process and my thoughts about it all.
Rather than breaking this all up with pictures I’ve made this one big long wall of text and all the pictures are in a thread in the completed projects log section which can be found here. Now bare in mind these are just my thoughts and feelings so don’t treat it as word of god. 3 years. It’s a long time. Think about where you were 3 years ago and what you were doing, think about everything you have done since then. Now think about the fact that all through that time I was painting god dam bronze and red. Yeah I paint slowly. It’s very irritating sometimes!
A little background on me. I started this Hobby about 15 years ago and in that time I have collected about 10 different types of Space Marines from single units through to a full 2000 point army, some Imperial Guard, some Dark Eldar and some Brettonia, High Elves, Orcs and Empire for Fantasy. While I was at uni I stopped painting and collecting but upon leaving uni at the end of 2010 I started up again wanting to put a final coat on paint on things. A lot of those armies are sold now and I’m slowly culling out things from the masses of boxes that I have carted around with me for years. All the previous marines were stripped and I started on a force of
BA 2nd Founding called the “Crimson Fury”, to my shame I still have one mini to paint for that force (which I should be starting next). The next force I collected was a Astral Claws which I painted as prep for what I knew would be a big project: Minotaurs. I’ve always liked that Chapter because they to me sum up what I love about
40k. It’s not nice, it’s not pretty and the “good guys” are pretty horrible (and not least because of their complete middle finger to the UM’s). Originally I had thought it would be a demi company of them and then a demi company of Sons of Medusa but then I changed my mind and went full slow. I decided to do a full Company, and none other than the 1st Company.
The way I see it there are two ways you build a Full Company. One: by accident, by that I mean you one day find yourself with 70 odd marines and realise you aren’t that far away from the golden 100 and you might as well finish it off. This is probably the most common way of actually doing it and certainly the easiest. The second way is that one-day in a fit of madness you decide you are going to do it. This is probably the most common way of starting it but I would say the vast majority of people who start off this way don’t end up finishing it because guess what…. doing it this way is hard. Staying committed is tricky.
Planning Units Out
When I started the force I had grand plans and to be fair to myself about 90% of that has come together. I wanted to build a First Company with some supporting units. I certainly built a 1st Company, that cannot be denied, there are also some support units, just not as much as I had planned. I was originally going to have drop pods for all the Sternguard Squads, Ceastus Assualt Rams or Storm Eagles for the Vangaurd and Characters and another 2 Nephilim Jetfighters/Storm Talons as well as another 3 Dreads (all of which were going to Contempts). As for the support units I was intending on having about 45 scouts with 3 Land Speeder Storms and 10 Scout Bikers total. A lack of funds for that shear amount of resin put pay to the idea of all that Air Support and while I had close to that amount of scouts already bought it all got too much by the end of it and they were sold. And this is something that would become something that cropped up a lot and while it’s easy to just say “Oh I won’t be like that with my force”, believe me, you will.
That said, having a plan is great as it allows you to see what you need and you can budget, you can allow yourself rewards but at the same time there is nothing wrong with changing your plan as things happen and you are forced to take stock. While I did loose money on the scouts I did learn some good conversion skills while building them.
When to buy and when to stop.
I tend to buy things second hand and then fix them up. The way I see it I’ll be cutting them up anyway so what’s the point in buying something brand new that I’m just going slice and dice, much cheaper to just buy something that has already been used and repurpose that. I don’t even want to think about the amount of money this force would have cost had I bought it all from down the
GW shop in town. It already cost enough as it is! I ended up buying 95% of the force within 6 months of starting that way it was all bought and I could see what I had left to go, also meant I had a lot of bits to play with! The disadvantage of this (aside from the money) was that I had it all sitting there staring me in the face. However I know for myself that had I not bought it all I wouldn’t have actually ended up completing it, I would have given up and only had a Demi Company, not that that is a bad thing! It’s still 50 marines! It all comes down to the way that you best work. That said… there are limits. Note how I didn’t rush out and buy those 6 very expensive pieces of resin at a cost of my kidney! I didn’t want to go and do that knowing that there was a chance that I might struggle with painting it all so I hedged my bets and waited, thankfully that was the right choice because I honestly can not bring myself to painting any more Marines for a very very long time!
Consistency of color
This is a big one and a scheme/method that relied upon drybrushed metallic really wasn’t my friend here. I originally thought that because I didn’t really need to edge highlight the armor then it would speed up my process. It may have speed things up but it also created some problems. Consistency was the big one. I found getting consistency across the 100+ marines over a three year period to be tricky for two reasons:
1) Drybrushing itself is inherently a none consistently easy technique.
2)
GW changing their paints! I started off using colors like Tin Bitz, Shining Cold, Badab Black, Devlan Mud and Red Ink etc. Then 6 months in
GW completely revamped their color range which meant I had to find alternatives and make them work. This is incredibly hard to do.
So lessons here: Make sure your color scheme is easy to keep constant over a long period of time and make sure you have adequate stocks of paint. Even then I found that I ended up throwing away at least one pot of Balthazar Gold (the replacement for Shining Gold) because it seemed to lose it’s shine.
GW’s color change really created problems for my reds, I loved the old Red Ink, it gave a great vibrant color to the reds and despite my best efforts I just couldn’t get the same levels of depth and vividness with my new recipe of Vallejo Game Extra Opaque Heavy Red, Golden Acryics Red Light, Aero Color Professional Brilliant Red Ink and then Army Painter Strong Tone. My original recipe was
GW Foundation Mechrite Red,
GW Devlan Mud,
GW Blood Red,
GW Red Ink,
GW Devlan Mud. While I managed to find replacements for Devlan Mud and Badab Black finding good matches for the others proved to be very difficult. Frankly I would recommend stock piling paints at the start, especially if you are using
GW ones, we all know how much they like to change their products for no reason. Sorry I mean make them better (but actually make them worse).
Batch Painting vs Individual Painting
So you’ve planed your force, you’ve done your test minis and decided on a scheme and you have enough paints to get through it all. Now how do actually go about painting all those dam things? It is a little impractical to just paint them one by one! The obviously easy thing to do is break it down into Squads, that also ensures consistency within the squad in terms of their look. I started off batch painting them by squad, that is I would paint all the gold on every part of the marines, then I would paint the silver, then the red etc etc It’s a good method if you have the patience for it but after a while it becomes very very very tedious and sucks the joy out of painting so around the 65 marine mark I changed things up. I started doing them individually which takes longer and there is a lot of going back and forth but means you don’t feel like you are just working on a production line. I ended up doing about 1 marine per week with this method and was generally doing one color a day which is very manageable but means you are only doing 4 marines a month which is very slow compared to the sometimes 10 marines a month I was hitting with batching painting (15 marines in a month was my record and oh how that sucked). At about marine 85 I changed it up again and adopted a mix of between the two systems. I would be working on 5 marines at a time but would only be doing one part of them, say their arms. Then I would move onto their heads and backpacks, then bodies, then other arms. Bases would be in there somewhere as well. I found this to be a really good system as it was churning out multiple marines at a time but it was also giving me a sense of achievement and progress as I got each part done, kind of like a jigsaw. If I ever need to do large numbers of anything again this is the method I’d be using.
Having Faith in the Method
This is something that I came across later on in the journey. As the squads began to be completed I would sometimes be halfway through painting one and get this horrible feeling that it wasn’t working, in my case it was generally once I had done the gold but none of the details, I’d begin to think it was looking terrible and not really understanding why. After a while I realised that it was just a matter of pushing through that feeling and that when everything else was in place it would come together. Now I’m not saying to just push on regardless of what it looks like because I did end up repainting a Dreadnaught and even scrapped a fully converted and half painted terminator squad. 4 of them ended up in the bin, the remains of the 5th one is the Sergeant in the squad that accompanies the
TDA Chaplin, I had tried to convert a squad of Cataphractii. It didn’t end well. However if you’ve painted 80 minis in one scheme it’s pretty safe to say you know what you are doing by then and how to fix any stuff ups without having to strip them back to grey plastic and start again (and if in doubt battle damage and weathering covers a multitude of sins!).
Visual Motivation
When I first started the force I was living in a house where I had the space in my room to have a big cabinet to store all my minis in so that I could take a look at them whenever I wanted. Every time I finished a unit it would be put on a shelf with the rest of the Company and I could see it growing. It may not sound like much but this was an amazing motivator to get things painted. When I was forced to move out of that place I moved into a much smaller place, my minis were then consigned to be living in a small high chest of drawers when I couldn’t see the scale of what I was working on. This really affected my productivity I found as I couldn’t see what my progress as easily. Having that visual motivation where you can see the ranks filling up and your collection growing is very important step I think and for my next force I will certainly be considering how I can construct a cabinet so that I can get that motivation back. Simply having the separated units in their bits form slowly clearing out of the containers isn’t really enough of a positive form of it for me I found. It’s great for making sure everything is where it needs to be and you have all the required parts but not so great for showing you how far you have come. Seeing an absence of something is not the same as seeing the addition of something.
Goal Setting and Manageable Chunks and Getting Overwhelmed.
It is very hard to simply go “I’m going to paint 100 Space Marines” and just do it. Some people can do that though but I don’t think that’s the case for the majority. That is on hell of a lot of plastic to paint and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the task especially when you are in the middle of it. Personally I found the hardest/lowest points were the 50 and 75% marks. It was at these points that I felt like I had been painting bronze, red and bone for all my hobby life and that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I felt helpless and that I was doomed to failure.
Splitting the force up into 3rds I found to be beneficial. In my case that meant 20
TDA and 10
PA. 10
TDA were Assualt Terminators, 10 were Shooty and the
PA was split 50/50 between
VV and
SG. I’d also through a character or a dread in there as well. This helped to break it up a bit and even though I was still painting the same scheme at least the minis were different.
Towards the end I ran out of
FW Shoulder Pads and since I was a bit low on funds I had to make a choice, stop painting Minotaurs until I got more or push on and paint them without shoulder pads and when I had some funds I would come back and add them to them later. I knew that if I just stopped the project it would be years before I got back to them. I pressed on and while painting about 30 shoulder pads wasn’t very fun it was the right choice.
One thing that is great to keep progress going at a steady pace is “Painting Challenges”, when I first started my 1st Company I took part in the Heresy Online Yearly Painting Challenge. For those of you who don’t know what one of those is it’s basically where every month for a year you vow to paint at least one unit from a certain army. Sounds simple enough right? Often not so much as life has a habit of getting in the way. However having other forum members also doing it and encouraging you is a wonderful motivator. After a year I had not missed a month and often I had completed more than one unit. Sadly my relationship with the forum broke down and I didn’t take part in the following years and indeed left the forum for good a couple of months after completely the challenge. However I did continue to complete a minimum of one unit of a month of various forces for 12 months afterwards. It wasn’t always Minotaurs but was a complete unit a month, often along side units from the Minotaurs.
Distractions
Distractions are both a blessing and curse. Distractions can slow your progress but they can also keep you sane when the going gets tough and you just can’t bare to paint yet another mini in that same color scheme again! I get distracted easily and to give you some perspective while I was painting the Minotaurs I also completed a 1500 point
IG Vet force, 25 Blood Angel Successors, 2 Inquisitional Warbands and 10 Tau. Is that painting time I could have spent on the Minotaurs and thus finish of the force probably a good 12 months earlier? Yes it is but if I had simply stayed painting Minotaurs without any other forces I probably would have taken the same amount of time as my motivation to paint would have been drastically reduced.
Is it worth it?
This is a hard one. Maybe it's because I've been in the hobby a while but honestly if somebody was to say “I’m thinking of doing an entire Codex Company of Space Marines, what do you think?” to me I would have to say “If you have been into the hobby for a number of years and you are a gamer first and foremost… and you play
Apoc a lot… and you have a non dry brush reliant simple scheme… and a lot of time/money on your hands… yes. If you don’t fit that bracket…. Don’t.” This is for several reasons:
- Painting 100 marines (even Veterans) is boring as hell. That is a lot of infantry.
- There is only a limited number of units you can have.
- Marines are not the cheapest things to buy to have a “complete feeling” force.
- There are so many more interesting forces out there these days.
This last point is probably the most important. Now I’m not a fan boy of
GW at all and I think a lot of the products they are putting out now are pants on head slowed and have been for a while. For me personally the “Golden Age” was around the time of the 13th Black Crusade in
40K and the Storm of Chaos in WFB (not this new fangelled
AOS trash), it started to go down hill when the Space Wolves started riding giant puppies, every second item for the Blood Angels had blood in the name and don’t even get me started on the complete joke that the Grey Knights are now, the Hell Turkey and those Centurions….. and basically the only thing “Grim Dark” about
40k now is the look on my face when I take a look at the fluff these days. Anyway…. to
GW’s credit, amongst all the terrible terrible things there are some gems. The Eldar Titans, the Harlequinn minis, pretty much the entire Dark Eldar range, some of the new Tau minis, the new Storm Trooper minis (no NOT the Tauros and no they aren’t called Temptus Scions… they are Storm Troopers!), the Imperial Knights, the Adeptus Mechanicus minis…. There is so much out there to collect now, so no I wouldn’t recommend it. And if you are going to do it…. Do it properly and just go Pre-Heresy and collect a 30K Company from
FW, yeah it’ll cost you more but my god it’d be sexy!
So what’s next for me? Well as a reward (and because I seriously injured my knee about a month ago and look to be confined to quarters for the foreseeable future) I went out and bought myself a new gaming computer. Company of Heroes 2 here I come! On the mini front though:
- 2000 odd points of Tau (in white… this could go badly! It’s ok I’ll be weathering them!)
- 2000 of mech Imperial Guard with a couple of Super Heavies.
- An Ordo Malleus Radical force made up of individual “character” minis
- 7 54mm scale =I= minis.
After that is done I don’t have any intentions of collecting any more, think that will be it for me. I’m hoping to get all that done before I’m 30. That gives me 3 and a bit years. We will see how that goes…
Thanks for reading if you got this far and good luck to you if you ever try and collect a Company my hat goes off to you!
