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I just finished reading Kharn and a number of times the author refers to the world eaters mag-locking their bolters to their armour. Makes perfect sense and is nicely sci fi.

And it re affirmed something I have always thought, i hate astartes models with holsters. The main reason is I can’t think of a good colour for them other than brown or green leather. Maybe black. They always look like they have been sculpted to be leather or a similar material and I don’t know how to paint that in different colours.

Anyone else feel the same or got any good guidance on embracing the holster?

While they tend to be sculpted as leather, you could think of holsters as made of or covered with textile. Think modern military equipment. That opens up a lot more colors since you're only limited by the dyes at hand and the chapter's dogma. Visually that also ties in with the more modern look of most Primaris Marines.

Visually I'm not a fan of this whole mag lock business because it ends up looking like you just stuck a weapon on the model and it floats there with nothing to keep it in place. It's not evocative design in my opinion. Specifically in the context of GW models it helps with the oversized weapons, though. GW has made a number of models with holsters that are too small to fit the unholstered weapon, but a suitably large holster just looks bad. Oftentimes hilariously so. As far as I'm concerned it's something for which there is no good solution, but I still prefer a reasonably downsized holster (with the weapon in it) to the alternatives.

I tend to go for a common modern generic military colour. So grey, black, khaki, tan or olive green. These colours tend to go with a wide range of other schemes as they are intended to go with multiple camo schemes.

Brown leather strikes me as tonally ill-fitting for the otherwise sleek, sci-fi Primaris, but black leather is pretty common for 20th century military gear and nowadays holsters are frequently made from plastics like Kydex. The designs aren't quite the same, but painting holsters and other LBE in black feels appropriate and helps keep them from standing out too much.

I agree with Geifer, there's no great solution when the weapons are so oversized.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the holsters either. Have also read too many books referring to mag-locking to armour.

its amusing to me when the holster just makes it clear that:

- the pistol is sizably longer than the models leg bones
- the models arms appear to have several additional hidden joints to be able to actually reach and draw the weapon

and then especially bonus points when its not even clear how/where on the model its meant to attach

and entirely down to the oversized "heroic" scale of the weapons, probably about time GW for marines and similar at least just gave up and made the pistols part of the models arms just built into the armour.

model carries the bolter, and can drop to just use the inbuilt pistol, job done

I agree that the scaling and modelling of the holsters isn't great, but I really like them in concept.

It really fits the impractical, anachronistic look of 40k. 'Eavy metal painting them as they do everything makes them look weird, but a cracked, beat up leather texture contrasted against smooth space marine armour is a good look imo.

Don't put them on, so it doesn't matter to me.

I always thought the Eldar holsters were particularly strange, what with the weird shape of their shuriken pistols. That said, I actually like the look of holsters on space marines, even if they're totally unrealistic, size wise.

 Geifer wrote:


Visually I'm not a fan of this whole mag lock business because it ends up looking like you just stuck a weapon on the model and it floats there with nothing to keep it in place. It's not evocative design in my opinion.

I'll do a maglock attachment with tanks' stowage, or a weapon attached to the side of a models backpack, or even belt. Mainly because I'm too lazy to make hundreds of greenstuff straps. But I agree they do look a bit daft stuck to a model's thigh armour.