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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.