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Made in au
Regular Dakkanaut






Sydney

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:

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2025/01/25 13:19:19


   
Made in bd
Regular Dakkanaut






Sydney

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.

   
Made in fi
Posts with Authority






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!

"The larger point though, is that as players, we have more control over what the game looks and feels like than most of us are willing to use in order to solve our own problems" 
   
Made in us
Sniping Hexa






Very cool stuff love the pattern.

Hydra Dominatus

World Wide War Winner  
   
Made in gb
Fighter Ace





Edinburgh

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.

   
Made in pl
Been Around the Block





Łódź, Poland

This is awesome, great patterns

"From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me'' 
   
Made in au
Regular Dakkanaut






Sydney

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).

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2025/01/26 00:04:21


   
 
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