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Inspired by this snippet of lore from 1988's White Dwarf 105 (in the article introducing the then-new original Land Raider), I decided Brother-Captain Fragman and the Star Leopards chapter - neither of whom were ever mentioned again, so far as I can find - deserved to make a comeback:



Since there's no canonical colour scheme for the Star Leopards, I decided to at least use something roughly contemporary to their debut, and went hunting in the old Space Hulk boxes under the stairs for one of my original Terminators - as you can see from the bits I didn't quite manage to properly cover (despite slopping the gloss black on ridiculously thick) I initially painted my Termis as Blood Angels before going back and just mucking around; based on the icon on the shoulder I think I was going for an original-black Dark Angel, and at the same time wanted to use the 'rocks floating in magma' pattern on the shoulder, which I guess I meant to do on the shin as well but never got around to it (I forget where that pattern's from, I feel like I saw it in a photo of some miniature somewhere). Anyway, the black and orange looked cool, so - ditching the magma pattern - I decided that's what Star Leopards look like. Initially I'd meant for Fragman to be part of the Empyrean Crusade (which I'd bought the starter set containing the mini for), so he'd have had a gold left arm, but after a bit of thinking I decided I'd like to just do the colour scheme as-is, and since he's from the Rogue Trader era he ended up here.

Since I've been doing worn paint on the crusade vehicles I tried to add a bit of silver damage to Fragman as well - normally I feel like infantry are too small and detail-heavy to benefit from a battle-damaged look unless they're supposed to look really beaten up, whereas vehicles are big enough to need the extra visual interest and still have enough undamaged areas that adding a bit of paint chipping doesn't make the whole vehicle look like it's a wreck; from the tiny amount of lore I decided Fragman's constantly making honour-before-reason charges, so I drilled and cut a bunch of scars into his armour (but only on the front, Brother-Captain Fragman turns and runs from no-one), which also helped liven up the otherwise featureless left shin. The only other conversion work I did on him was to add a little book to his belt, from the assortment of accessories on the Intercessor sprue - I imagine "It is written!" is both his catchphrase and the reason for every unwise tactical decision he makes, so that's where it is written.

The orange turned out a bit more red than on the original Termi - that comes from the contrast I applied over the regular orange base - but I'm okay with that, I like how the colour scheme pops even if it does look a bit like it came from a supercar. Since the Termi has a grey chest eagle I decided to make all of the decoration on the armour follow suit, the same grey base plus Basilicum contrast paint as I typically use for stone like the Crux Terminatus; normally I'd paint on highlights to brighten it again, but after I put on the contrast I decided I liked it the way it was, preserving the overall dark look of the rest of the body against the bright orange parts. I did the same stone look on the hilt of the sword, which I'm not quite as happy about the result on, but it's not awful and I don't want to mess around with it - I usually find if I don't have a specific idea for something (which I don't for the sword), throwing more paint at it will just make things worse; the blade at least came out well, just bright silver with a blue ink wash over it. Normally I don't paint 'text' on purity seals, but the ones hanging off his belt are so large I felt like they needed the extra detail, and that meant I had to follow suit with the rest - kind of messy, but they're fine at tabletop distance. I copied the hazard stripe from the power fist onto Fragman's storm bolter (in the process reminding myself how I hate painting hazard stripes), with the blue trim echoed by the 'bare metal' colour being a dark grey base with blue ink over it - I used the same for his earpiece, and the tubes on the backs of his arms, and again didn't use any highlights, just let the ink wash do its work and left it at that. As always the face is more luck than design - I can kind of see what I'm doing that small, but not exactly, so there's always a little bit of guesswork in where exactly I'm putting the tiny bit of paint on the tip of the brush when I'm doing small details like eyes and teeth. When I got to the hair I felt like white was a bit overdone for Marine captains, so I went for a Reed Richards dark brown with skunk stripes on the temples (or just the right temple, since the left of the face is recessed into the sculpt so I didn't try to do much on that side).

I like the personal heraldry on the left shoulder shield in the Ultramarine paint job GW has, but wanted my own spin on it - the vertical bars actually come from medal ribbons, specifically the two awards (Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross) worn by 'Mad Jack' Churchill, who seemed like the kind of guy Fragman would get on well with. Like the Ultramarine version I copied the same colours onto the right shoulder, minus the logos, which are just a random skull, and '3' to show he's still captain of Three Company - at first I thought he'd just have the '3' in his heraldry as a memento of his time with the company, before he got moved up to the 1st, but since I didn't want to load on another symbol or marking elsewhere I decided that is his company markings, and the Star Leopards deviate from the Codex Astartes in some ways like having Terminator officers in other companies, like Space Wolves (which would seem to go against the insistence on doing things because "it is written", but they're fanatics, I'm sure they've got a bunch of contradictory sacred tomes, and can do whatever they want while claiming "it is written"). For the chapter logo I didn't have any more interesting ideas that 'leopard head', and ended up using the Thundercats symbol - in place of the checkerboard strip the Ultramarine one has on top of his right shield, I again went with strips, making it kind of a design motif for the chapter.



And then there's the cape, which initially I thought of perhaps doing in black with grey/white spots (kind of like an inverted snow leopard) to emphasise the 'star' in Star Leopards, but in the end I decided to just stick with the recognisable basic leopard colours; in hindsight there's more open space between the spots than there should be, but I wasn't sure how much room I'd need to leave for the small black spots when I was painting on the central brown ones, and mainly I'm just pleased I didn't make a mess of it. With the chapter lore I was inventing as I painted inevitably devolving into comedy, I decided their 'it is written' thing comes from them venerating a library of ancient tomes from the 'before time' (waaay pre-Imperium), which outside of fighting they spend their whole lives studying in an attempt to translate a few more of the ancient words and understand the wisdom of the far ancestors - so for the cape specifically, they don't know what 'upholstery of a seventies pimpmobile' means, but they're sure it must be important or the First Men wouldn't have written it down.

The Tyranid on the base is the colour scheme from my Morbis Gravis Strain hive, as is the ground colour and the bits of grass - I've done a couple of the more famous canon hive colours (the current Leviathan look, and the red-crest one that was all the rage in 3rd edition) on trophy heads on spikes on my chaos marines, so I thought I could indulge myself on this one. Back when I was planning on Fragman being part of the Empyrean Crusade (in which case the ground and rock would've been shades of red to match their bases) this would've served to attach Morbis Gravis to the six-degrees-of-separation game I have going with all my armies, but as it is that'll have to wait.

And finally, I decided his full name was Brother-Captain Howell Fragman, because that means the line "'Heresy!' he howled" was the scribe recording the battle being bored and indulging in wordplay to entertain himself.

Love the stuff looking great!

I wish I had one Iota of your skill.

How did I not notice this thread earlier? Stellar work all around!

The nostalgia is strong with this one...

Thanks folks No new minis just for the moment, but a bit of good news: I'm proud to report that Brother-Captain Fragman won the open category painting contest at my local gaming group. Just a couple of dozen players so it's not quite Golden Demon - and if we're being honest, there were higher quality paint jobs there, I think Fragman got ahead on the fun factor of the leopard print cape - but still, good feeling. Winners each got their choice from a bunch of small kits and sprues donated or scrounged up, I chose a sprue of five Intercessors, who it's only fitting I paint as Star Leopards, so they'll be joining the Empyrean Crusade when they're done.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I wish I had one Iota of your skill.

Honestly I think it's just persistence - I don't consider myself an especially talented painter, I've just been sitting down at my 40k spot on the dining table (yeah we're not hosting dinner parties) pretty consistently for the last three years or so, since I got back into the hobby. Aside from vague memories of how I used to paint back in the old days I haven't been watching tutorials or anything, just trying out whatever seems like a fun idea when it pops up. I remember ages ago reading a book about the founding of JPL, which included somebody saying something along the lines of "the way to work out how to make a rocket that works is to make lots of rockets that don't work; when one of them goes where you want it to and doesn't explode, keep doing it like that." Similar approach, just winging it and any time something has good results, keep doing that. Mainly I think it's having the desk lamp real close to the mini, and keeping my brush hand touching the miniature - usually something like the little finger touching the edge of the base, or something like that, so if my hand wavers the miniature wavers with it, so it has the effect of being steady. If something doesn't turn out how I want, no real harm done, it's probably still good enough for the tabletop so it's not a loss, just move on to the next mini and try again.

Yup. The best thing to do to get better at painting is to keep painting.

Congrats on the win!

Congratulations!

Another old boy - not part of the original plan, this one actually came about when the free mini of the month a few months back was a Space Wolf Blood Claw, and I had no use for a Space Wolf so I went looking in my stack of old mini photos to find something I could use a marine with a chainsword as a base for, and found Captain Dozier of the Salamanders. So (since you have to assemble the mini of the month in store) I rounded up all the bits I thought I'd need and took them in, and did the best I could with only being sort of able to see what I was doing without a bright desklamp shining on the mini at point-blank range - except the bionic hand, the reference image I had of Dozier was quite small so I mistook that for a plasma gun hand, and built one of those, only to later discover it was actually a mechanical fist with a buzzsaw blade mounted on the back. The old sculpt has a fairly clean-looking 'power glove' look, but I like crude bionics on these old marines (there's one in the Rogue Trader gallery I want to do one day who's got just a scissor-like metal cutter instead of a hand) - this one's made from a Chaos Cultist arm, with the 'thumb' added from a Kataphron Breacher part, and the saw on the back from Fabius Bile's toolkit (so it's actually a spiky semicircle, rather than a 360 saw blade, but near enough), all mounted on a forearm made from a chunk of I can't remember, but maybe the Breacher again, that sprue's been handy for random mechanical parts a lot.

For the rest - the bits I was doing in the shop - I stuck to the Rogue Trader mini as much as the parts I hand on hand allowed, which amounted mainly to using a head with a facemask, and the left arm with the sword held out forwards, rather than across the body; I forget where that came from, a Lieutenant or something maybe. Original mini aside, since he's a Captain I added some extra bling, with fancy shoulder pads, the shoulder shield, the 'halo' (left over from the Chaplain I turned into a Legion of the Damned), reliquary on his belt, and since I wanted to use a larger character base, an Ork skull with a combat knife jammed into its mouth.

I've actually done the old-style Salamanders paint job before, on the fallen marine on the base of one of the Chaos Possessed (who ended up being one of my Mistresses of Executions), so I used the same approach, with a silver chest eagle to take the place of the unpainted metal power cables on the old mini, and combining the old colours with the new-style black skin. No way I'm painting yellow over a black basecoat, so the yellow went on first over wraithbone, and all the black got filled in with contrast paint - I went for a bright highlight on the yellow, since half of it would end up covered with the black swirls anyway. For the cloth on the left shoulder I tried to give it a lizard skin kind of look, which didn't turn out great (basically just green blotches), but it's a minor detail so I'm not too fussed about that; I did get out the old 3rd edition Codex Armageddon to look at Salamanders there, and one of them had a painted lizard scale cloak I quite like, but I decided the shoulder piece was too small to really give that a good attempt, so I'll save that for later. Since the chapter logo's on the shoulder shield that left the right shoulder up for grabs - I initially thought of maybe putting the new-style Salamanders logo on that (the headcanon would've been that Dozier was the guy who said "Hey guys, we're called Salamanders, why don't we have a Salamander as our logo instead of this random skull thing?"), but on a whim I decided to go for the modern standard quartered shoulder pad for officers, with checks in one segment and a flame burst in another (copied from Codex Armageddon, where I think it was a squad marking).

I'm not sure if it's just light bouncing around in the photo, but the chainsword on the original mini looks very pale to me, so after initially painting it bare metal like the bionic claw I went back and drybrushed it with bone and white. Meanwhile the halo on his backpack got a wash of blue ink, since the Badab War gallery image of this style of Salamanders armour has a little eagle decoration on top of his banner pole with a similar blue-tinged silver look.

Pretty happy with the base as well, since it's another one of my 'can't be bothered getting out the glue and basing material, just fake it with technical paint' jobs; I went from dark green up to drybrushed highlights, with a final pass of yellow to try to go for the colour the old goblin green base grass used to look, and I think it's not bad for a quick and easy job.

'Tis the season and all that, so for the painting challenge's open round I decided it was time for the Christmas Marine:



Based mainly on the chap on the left, although with the minis I had available I couldn't really get that drunken stagger look his legs have; the base for this was one of the Kill Team starter set marines, with the ankle of the left foot (which is part of the base) filed down so the leg attached more vertical, so he's ambling forward rather than running. With the back foot's toe already touching the ground I couldn't lower the left leg any further, so the flap at the bottom of the shin's got quite a gap where tilting the leg back lifted it away from the foot, but never mind. It's a push-fit mini but slicing the peg off let the right arm rotate around to be firing wildly into the sky, and for the left arm I found a spare arm from the Intercessor sprue with an open hand to fit a mug of ale into. The 'mug' is actually the head of a Stormcast, upside-down and facing back, with the face filed to fit into the hand - in hindsight it would've looked better if I'd filed the bottom of the mug (the top of the head) flat, but that didn't occur to me at the time. The left arm's supposed to be a chainsword and it pegs into the torso where the blade is held across his chest, so I filled in that peg hole with a purity seal. The main thing of course was the dopey-looking face, for which I had a hunt around various bits, before noticing an old Necromunda v1 plastic Goliath ganger. Separating the head from the ganger's torso took quite a bit of clipping and filing, since it's sunken down between his shoulder muscles, but I managed to get it out well enough without any obvious damage.

The paint job's nothing fancy really, but I had a bit of fun extrapolating Christmas decor to the sculpted details on the Intercessor that the old mini didn't have, like moving the Christmas tree badge on his leg up to his hip flap, and painting the reliquary on his belt like it's a gingerbread house. The string of beads around his wrist, as tree decorations, were quite a challenge to paint with my old eyes - after the red contrast base that went over the whole mini, I painted Basilicanum Grey paint over the beads, which darkened them enough to fill in the recesses with shadow while still leaving the individual balls pale enough that I could still see them. The face, I think, turned out excellently, but that was pure luck, just getting tiny bits of paint on the tip of my brush and lightly stroking them across the eyes and teeth, and hoping the sculpt would pick the paint up in the right places. And lastly, in the Rogue Trader spirit, I gave him some 'ho ho ho' graffiti in the style of the classic 'kil kil kil' markings.

He looks so happy to bring xmas cheer.

Bravo sir! Great use of bits and he looks awesome.

Love using a Stormcast head as a mug!

Brilliant thread, brings back so many memories of old marines!

Thanks folks The local group's summer painting challenge is on again, and one of the tasks I've lined up for myself amid various fast-to-paint Tyranids (gotta chase those sweet meaningless Painting Contest Points awarded for volume of minis finished) is to finish off the remaining Astronomican paint jobs, as well as a couple of others inspired by contemporary space marines who didn't happen to be on that same ad page. So here's the first one done:



Brother Froth, or 'FR6TH' according to his shoulder pad, so I guess 'Froth' is a nickname he acquired from that. The base colours of his armour pretty obviously mark him as a medic, although the sculpt itself seems to be just a general-purpose bolter marine - I did pick up the current Apothecary mini but decided to use him for Brother Kribins, since the OG Kribins mini has medic pouches and his healing blaster; Froth, I guess, is still a medic but the only prescription he dispenses is death (that seems pretty on-brand for 40k). Aside from giving him the grenade launcher bolter just for fun (in case he has to deal with a group of 'patients' in a hurry), he also got the second of the two Mk6 helmets from the Raven Guard upgrade sprue, since I felt like the checker pattern on his helmet really needed the beakie's long nose to look right.

Most of the time I was working on him I only had the one image as reference, so all I could tell of the right shoulder was the skull with radiating lines and some vertical design - to play into his doctor status I made the top of that vertical marking a set of wings, to look kind of like an Apothecarion symbol; I later found another photo of the old mini showing more of the right side and it's actually a sword behind the skull pointing downwards, with the guard being the sideways bit I'd thought might be wings, but never mind. The helmet stripe was the big challenge of course - red first, then white inside that leaving just the red edges, then black contrast paint in vaguely square blobs to create the checker pattern. The sculpted skull on the forehead messed up the look a bit, and if I had it to do over I'd definitely file that flat during assembly, but it didn't occur to me at the time, and I did the best I could around it so I'm not upset. I hesitated for a bit on whether to also include the markings on the sides of his 'face', since what are those even supposed to be (it looks to me kind of like a bushy cartoon moustache), but in the end I decided unthinking obedience to tradition is true to the spirit of 40k and added them; my version ended up a bit simpler because that's the best I could paint, but it's fine.

Flown with more-or-less success on the helmet checker pattern, I got all enthusiastic and decided to paint the entire Silver Skulls flag as shown on one of the ad pages (a later one where he's been renamed 'Brother Sheer'); I decided he was a Silver Skull just based on the left shoulder seeming to have a bit of a metallic look to it - even though the Medics article in the 40k Compendium shows the Silver Skulls using the exact opposite colour pattern for their medics, with white shoulders on an otherwise chapter-standard dark metal body. Still, he needed to be *something*, and I preferred to use the chapters in use at the time. The checkers on the flag background came out rather wonky, and the skull on top of them's far from my best work too, but them's the breaks of freehanding everything - it's dodgy, but it's 100% my work, and I'm content with that.

This chap was a bit of an accident - there's a gaming shop (Good Games, Sydney) near where I work, and one lunch break I dropped in and picked up a few of those 'Warhammer Heroes' blind-boxed Dark Angels, because buying toys makes me feel better. This one in particular - Brother Belath - over the course of a couple of weeks, I ended up with three of, so two of them have gone off to other folks in the local gaming group (one of them's a Black Templar, the other joined a kill team, I'm not sure which chapter). But the one I kept, along with the handful of others I got (not the full set, just four of them if I recall the pile at home), naturally I started thinking about whether they'd take to a retro paint job.



I keep a little A4 on foamcore of this ad page at my desk at work - my desk has a lot of decoration - and I got to thinking Belath's not terribly dissimilar from 'Marine Firing', middle of the second row, with the gun held high, and the narrow Phobos shins looking kind of like the first-version marine legs before they'd invented the chunky lower legs we take for granted nowadays. The pain job on Marine Firing's quite unremarkable, but I took an interest in the one below him, named 'Death Squad' - no idea what that was supposed to mean, maybe just that he's got a chainsword so it's just what we'd call an assault marine, but the name plus the unique stripe on his shoulder got me thinking about them being a specific unit, like the Suicide Squad or the A-Team or whatever. So - since you can't see whether Marine Firing's got a stripe on his shoulder anyway - I decided he was a Death Squad marine too.

Of course the weapon on the original mini is a classic Rogue Trader who-knows-what sci-fi gun - I contemplated kitbashing something with a similar long barrel, but with how the bolter and hands are integrated together I decided it'd always end up looking like just a bolter I'd stuck an extra barrel on, so I left it alone and just added a chunky bayonet to it (tip of a Flawless Blade's sword, I think, I used the body of one for a Cypher stand-in and of course he didn't need swords). For the base I went straight to Ultramarines Blue contrast, which I'd probably avoid next time - putting it straight on over the wraithbone spray it had a hell of a lot of range from dark shadows to pale highlights, and yeah I know that's what contrast paint is supposed to do but it was a particularly pronounced example; next time I do an Ultramarine I'll probably start with a flat base blue then ink the recesses like the old days. Most of the painted highlights were actually darkening the pale edges down to a more colourful blue. Still, it looks okay I think. I'm quite fond of how the base turned out - it's all sculpted, no technical paint or flock or anything, but the dark green up to a touch of yellow reminds me a lot of old-style grassy bases, while the bold grey highlights on the rock make it more interesting to look at.



Since there's not a whole lot going on with the paint job I went looking for information about old-style Ultramarines markings, and found their original Index Astartes in White Dwarf 97, which along with a wealth of other fascinating details (including that table showing the names of the company masters and lieutenants, including the first company's Lieutenant Butt, I'm totally bringing him back, maybe based on the Titus that came with the Character Encyclopedia) gave each company a unique symbol, since they didn't have edges on their shoulder pads to colour back then (except 5th company, who as you can read got ritually decimated and had their fancy name and honour symbol stricken from the records, on account of them losing a battle - I love old lore like this). So Brother Marine Firing got the three blood drop of the 7th company. I also made an attempt at the tiny marking below the chapter symbol on the right shoulder which every marine was supposed to have to show his wargear - the symbol for 'boltgun' is a white badge containing a black circle with an extension pointing up, whereas I just did a white blob with a smaller black blob in it, but that's the best my eyes can manage. (I know I could use a magnifier, but honestly I kind of prefer just doing what I can and calling it good enough for the tabletop.)

As you can see Brother Angst also came from this page of marines (which also has renamed versions of the original twelve I started out with) - I'm not going to specifically try to do every one, but there are some fun sculpts in there, so more may show up as and when suitable minis wind up on my desk.

Brother Stalker - curiously, one of only two of the twelve marines in the ad page I'm following who wasn't renamed later on (the other is Ex Brother Marines). The pose is different but I was pleased to find arms on the ever-versatile intercessor sprue to recreate his rifle-and-pistol loadout; I don't remember having a specific purpose in mind with adding the shield to his shoulder, I think it was just for variety, although it came in handy when I was painting and decided to relocate the red/yellow/black badge from his right shoulder. I like the odd little bits of colour on this mini, with the red 'ears', the one red hand (it's difficult to see but I think it's only the left hand that's red on the original), and the green belt buckle; I'm not so happy with how the camo turned out, I tried to use a repeating bent zig-zag pattern but it ended up leaving odd gaps here and there which don't look terribly consistent with the original. The original backpack's also darker blue, but I decided to keep the contrast between the dark grey I use on the 'unpainted' bits (the four square vents down low, and the big ball vents) and the armour colour on the casing. In hindsight I might've either gone dark with the backpack, or continued the camo pattern onto it - despite the camo continuing onto the chest and arms, them being smaller, or obscured by the chest eagle, makes it kind of look like he's just in camo pants, especially since I decided to keep the shoulder pads clean for the sake of the logos.

Speaking of logos, I didn't see an obvious contender for which chapter this chap's from, so I decided to cast my net a little wider, and looked to the 3rd edition Codex Space Marines (one of my favourites, even though it is quite slim it packs a lot in) - I always thought the Revilers looked pretty cool, and their grey matched well enough with Stalker's colours, plus on googling them it turns out the Revilers are successors to the Raven Guard, so 'Stalker' would fit right in with their sneaky ways. Normally I'd look to the parent chapter's style of markings to follow for a successor, but I felt like adding a company colour to the shoulder pad rims would be one too many little extra bits of colour, on top of the ears and belt and hand, and the outline style of the specialty marking felt like it'd leave the right shoulder looking pretty bare, so instead I picked from the example variations in the 3rd ed codex and gave him a double-arrow Tactical badge. That and the knee pad squad marking are in yellow to match the chapter logo's lightning bolt, but maybe it also shows his company.

Now THAT is a cool project! Loving the nostalgic work you've put in.

Thanks



Brother Leanman, also known as Brother Lestrade (no doubt a member of the old Space Marine Field Police, who often calls on Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau for assistance in complicated cases) - a similar sculpt (as in 75% identical) to Captain Lowbroe, but in this case I decided his big hand was just a big hand (as was the fashion at the time), not a power fist, so Leanman got the open palm arm instead. Different pose, but it's still emphasising the hand without a gun in it, I feel like that's true to the spirit of the original mini (and within my means of which parts I had available). Aside from not holding his boltgun in both hands (which wasn't so common in these sculpts as it is today) there isn't really much to set Leanman apart from any generic marine, so - apart from the purity seal on his left shoulder at the back - I gave him a unique upgrade, using one of my handful of vintage RTB01 parts, the pistol holster attached to his right thigh (it's not a fancy part, but it's the thought that counts).

So far as the paint job goes the original Leanman was also pretty simple, just green, green, more green, and black camo lines. The initial green I put on my version ended up too dark - I like a dark base with bold highlights, but in this case it would've made the camo lines difficult to make out as anything but a murky mess - so I gave him an all-over drybrush with a more middle green and restarted from there. It's not really visible from the front, but on the parts of the undersuit visible (backs of the knees, under the butt flap, you know how it is) I decided to lean (aha) into the green, giving them the usual dark grey base but then, instead of heavy nuln oil, a dark contrast green; they're not the same as the armour layer, but they work with it. Similarly the belt, pouches, and holster all got a variation on green, a bit darker but richer green. I gave the chest wings the same treatment, and intended to add brighter highlights, but I ended up thinking it looks pretty good as-is; Leanman's clearly intending to blend in, so a restrained set of wings fits that.

(Of course the terrain is completely the wrong colour for green camo, but again I was just playing around with different technical paints and contrast paints. Maybe that's the colour of the soil on the world he'd on, but it's a jungle world and the actual foliage is still dark green.)

Normally I'd prefer contrasting eye lenses, but so far as I can tell from the photo Leanman clearly has green eyes, so I did my best to be neat with the initial slits of wraithbone, and then used I think Mantis Warrior green (brighter and more lustrous) to make the eyes stand out, rather than looking like I just forgot to paint them.

Since there's no indication I can see of a chapter, I ended up picking the Sons of Medusa from the gallery in the Badab War article, where they have a green colour scheme that matches Leanman fairly well - of course Leanman's in camo, which could be wildly different from his default chapter colours (right next to the Sons of Medusa's default scheme is a camo variant they used, which is mainly bright yellow), but it's a connection even if it's a tenuous one, that's good enough for me. The old-style chapter logo was another episode of pushing my ability to freehand about as far as I could - the face ended up more like a skull than the original, but I think the hair turned out well and quite reminiscent of the actual logo (and as is often the case, I've got an okay result so I don't want to ruin it by going back and trying to fix up the details).

Impressive project! Lots of lovely work, and much to be commended.

I'm particularly impressed that you managed to make the Traitor Castellan's eternally garish paintjob look better on your miniature than on the original drawing. For the first time I know of, someone has made one of the dodgy Rogue Trader Legio Cybernetica paintjobs fit. Well done! Don't get me wrong here, I've always liked the playful colourfulness of Rogue Trader paint schemes, but several of the Legio Cybernetica drawings were in my eyes as much of a letdown as their wacky rules and background was a delight. You, however, managed to do it justice; I can see the appeal now, so consider me converted.

Looking forward to what your future paintjobs will bring!

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:
I'm particularly impressed that you managed to make the Traitor Castellan's eternally garish paintjob look better on your miniature than on the original drawing.

Thanks To be fair, I didn't quite go for the full-pastel look of the original, I don't know if I could've managed a decent result if I had. I don't really plan my colours in great detail - beyond 'what paints do I have ready to go?' - but dropping them down a bit darker with just the highlights at the original colours helped it all mesh together. I would like to try some more of those one day - the closest I've come so far is using one of the spare cannon arms as base decoration for an aspiring champion, painted in the red and white checker pattern from the one on the right side of the art page, but if I ever get my hands on a suitable mini I'll totally see what I can do with those classic stripey-trousers designs.

Moving on, this next one's technically a two-for-one deal, Marine Medic Kribins (named for Bernard Cribbins, who narrated and did the voices for The Wombles; the same mini was later sold as Medic Kyle, which since he was right alongside Captain Reece I feel the reference is obvious), and for want of a better option I painted the fallen marine on his base as a Crimson Fist to make him Ex Brother Marine:



Kribins started out needing some fairly delicate conversion work, to swap the Reductor from his left hand to his right to match the original mini - apparently the old one's supposed to be holding a Carnifex (the medical instrument, not the Tyranid), but I figured any type of medical gun was close enough. That needed the left hand carefully sliced off the Reductor, then the right hand wrist (with its hanging gene-seed pokeball) separated from the actual hand, since I needed the wrist to attach a spare Intercessor boltgun hand to, to take the handless Reductor. Luckily the Apothecary sprue has a variant bolt pistol left hand, so at least that was easy; difficult to tell exactly what type of gun the old Kribins mini is supposed to have in his left hand, but it's near enough.

This one took a long time to paint, since I took a while trying to adjust the base colour - I started with a pale blue wash, to try to suggest that 'hospital antiseptic' feel (and also set Kribins apart from Brother Froth, since the originals are both just marines painted white but I wanted to introduce some variation), but edge highlighting with white is tricky for me and it took several attempts to get the edges prominent enough for the mini as a whole to register more as 'white' than 'pale blue' overall; part of the delay was just that, since it was being difficult, I tended to set it aside and work on something else a lot. I decided to bring the original's red and white cross badge on his chest over to be the colours of the robes on this version, which also took a few attempts - at first I tried to keep the highlights fairly restrained, but it just looked flat and dull, so eventually I punched the highlights right up to bright orange, and I think that's a more satisfying look (painting Kribins actually took so long that my painting style had changed in the meanwhile, I've become a lot more willing to do dramatic highlights in general now). The black backpack arms and red 'spotlight' I took from the paintjob of the Apothecary in the 2nd edition Command Squad set.

I spent a while trying to work out what chapter he'd be - Crimson Fists would've matched the fallen marine, but there's nothing on the actual Kribins mini to suggest it (the red fists could just be part of his Apothecary paint job), and in general I like including as many chapters as I can in these old paint jobs rather than sticking to the same few over and over, so in the end I decided his black shoulder pad was a sign that he should be an Iron Hand; the logo came out a bit wonky, but the old Iron Hands symbol really was pretty stylised, so it's not a million miles off.

So that's all twelve of the original Boys from the Astronomican, but as we've already seen I've been doing other old paint jobs besides; I've got a big stack of A4 printouts of ad pages and combat cards and Eavy Metal pages waiting their turn, so I'm sure there will be plenty more in this thread.

Like Captain Dozier, this is one that came about from looking for an oldhammer marine I could turn the then-current free mini of the month into - in this case the Deathwatch marine with all his extra tactical gubbins. Since he's in Phobos armour with the narrow shins I first looked to the oldest marine minis, but the only ones in similar poses were just generic Ultramarines and Crimson Fists with no interesting extra details in the paintwork, so I cast my net wider and looked through the whole stack of prints until I came to the Combat Cards and decided, while the armour wasn't really reminiscent in any way beyond the basic 'it's a Space Marine', the pose suited Gideon Fax - and he's a Mentor Legion marine, so all the extra techy kit made sense, they're always beta-testing new gear.



A bit of conversion was needed, but happily the Sydney GW store had decided to use the Deathwatch guy as an introduction to customisation as well, and made available a selection of spare heads and arms and shoulder pads for everyone to try out - that gave me an alternate head (no beakies available sadly, but I wanted to save the Deathwatch's slightly bulbous extra-gear helmet for something that'd suit it better) and a blank left shoulder. The right shoulder needed its sculpted Ultramarine logo filed flat but that was easy enough; a bit more of a challenge, in the store without my usual point-blank-range LED lamps, was trimming and filing the fancy Deathwatch elbow guard on the left arm into the rough shape of a standard marine elbow, but in the end it came out well enough, a bit messy but it's not really a focal point so the rough 'sculpt' doesn't jump out at you.

That just left painting, and what to carry over from Gideon's original paint job - the card calls him a medic but the same mini (in the same paint job) was sold as 'Brother Hamilton (bolter)' with no mention of anything Apothecary-related, so I decided not to try adding any medic symbols and just stuck to what was there. Despite not having a helmet I found a couple of places on his half-face mask to add white outlines to echo the original beakie helmet. There was no way I was fitting both his chapter icon and the blue/gold banner design (which according to the big Nisk Ran-Thawll art piece in White Dwarf 98 means Gideon is a 'tutor'), but naturally the chapter logo would go on the left shoulder now it's not covered with studs, so that worked out. Unlike the Stormtalon pilot I did a while back, where I just used the owl face design on its own for his shoulder, I decided to stick fully to the original art this time and kept the pennant outline and circle around it, which ended up forcing the owl face to be very small, but my brush was in a good mood so I managed to squeak through without it becoming a terrible mess.

Since the right shoulder looked a teensy bit plain I thought about upgrading him to the Elite Cadre, which would've meant adding a circular badge containing a wreath to the middle of the blue banner, but I decided that'd be pushing my luck, and instead added a wreath to the central plate of his backpack, which was looking a bit dull otherwise. He got the Ran-Thawll facepaint (I found when I was looking up art for the Stormtalon it's used on other contemporary Mentor Legion minis as well), and I meant to give him blond hair too, but when I put down the orange to serve as a base for that I found I liked how he looked as a ginger marine, so I just did a light highlight and left it as-is. I did for a moment think about adding the sword and bow icons on his combat card to his knee pads, but I ended up deciding the mini looks pretty nice and balanced as it is and didn't need overloading with details that weren't really part of the original anyway.

Right, the white armour pieces strongly resemble some of the medic uniform schemes, so I expect that Jervis misinterpreted the Mentors colour scheme as a medic’s uniform.

Nice solve using the Combat Cards for reference.

 Pariah Press wrote:
Right, the white armour pieces strongly resemble some of the medic uniform schemes, so I expect that Jervis misinterpreted the Mentors colour scheme as a medic’s uniform.

Nice solve using the Combat Cards for reference.

Thanks



New old paint job project. So back when the Combat Patrol magazine was arriving here a couple of months back (Australia gets everything late), I happened to be assembling Tyranid Warriors for the local group's get-stuff-finished painting challenge: three ranged Warriors out of the box, and three melee Warriors using spare weapon-arms from the box attached in place of the wings on three Winged Primes I got a while back in a bunch of Tyranid bits I was mainly after for some Battle for Macragge Genestealers and Termagants and Spore Mines. And of course, there are so many spare arms in the Warriors box - in a slow moment at work I pulled up images of the sprues and worked out I still had enough for twelve more Warriors, for a total of eighteen from a three-Warrior box, if I got twelve more Winged Primes, which of course are cheap as hell with the first issue. So I scurried all over the place snapping up as many Combat Patrol issue ones as I could.

That said, while working on the Warriors I'd already assembled I found they were kind of tedious - too big and intricate to rapidly drybrush speed-paint like I do the gaunts, but not one-offs like the proper big bugs so painting them kind of dragged on. On top of which, converting the Primes was a bit of a chore, since I didn't want them to just look like the same mini with one different pair of arms, so I took off the locking pins on the hips and shoulders and repositioned the limbs, plus a few other conversion tweaks, to set them apart - I'm pleased with the final result (posted them over in the Morbus Gravis Strain thread), but they took a while to do, and also to set, since the limbs no longer fitted snugly in their sockets so I had to just jam them in and flood the joint with glue to make them nice and sturdy. I'm not abandoning the project, but they're in the 'get around to it sometime later' pile.

But now I also had twelve Terminator Captains, which I'd already painted another of (Brother-Captain Fragman) so I didn't want to just paint the same thing again - but while I was toying with ideas for converting them have minis ready with the other weapon options available to the Termi Captain in the codex, the number twelve sparked a thought: there were twelve chapters featured in the original Rogue Trader, from familiar names like the Ultramarines and Dark Angels to 'oh yeah, those guys' like Silver Skulls and Flesh Tearers to a couple of '...who?' entries like Blood Drinkers. So that became the project: one captain for each of the twelve chapters, each converted to play into that chapter's prominent traits and/or history or whatever I could come up with (and to make it seem less like I'm just painting the same mini twelve times), with as per usual for me inspiration from old miniatures and illustrations wherever I could find any.

So here's the first to finish, Captain Veridian of the Ultramarines:



As part of setting the minis apart from one another I'll be replacing the bases on the other, but given the Battle for Macragge I thought it was appropriate to leave the Tyranid base on this one - which does raise the question of when exactly Veridian was a captain, since Saul Invictus was first captain prior to the battle and Severus Agemman took over once the Tyranids decided they'd Better Maul Saul if the invasion was going to go anywhere, and he remains captain to the present. I dunno, maybe the histories of the Battle for Macragge are murky and there was another first captain between them - I got to thinking it'd be fun if he got promoted after Saul's death and then got killed himself in the same day, albeit after leaving an ungodly swath of dead Tyranids in his wake. Of course he's also wearing Indomitus pattern Terminator armour so he should be more recent, but I'm not fussed about that - as with the old paint job marines I've been doing, I kind of regard the 'new' marine styles as just more spare marines, and don't get hung up on when they should and shouldn't appear in the timeline.



Besides obviously being named after Brother Veridian from Rogue Trader (it's written on his shoulder - and he's also the unfortunate marine being shot by the proto-Sororitas later in the book, with the armour incorporating a nun wimple and spiky tits) - presumably 'Veridian' is a name that's been bestowed on a number of Ultramarines throughout history, I gather there's another one about the place in the Space Marine game or something), I mostly took inspiration from this photo in White Dwarf 125, of an Ultramarine Captain based on a mini of an Inquisitor, because that had a fancy paint job and I thought all the personal heraldry would be fun (I've got to stop thinking that about checker patterns). So first thing to go had to be the weapons: I have a few sprues of leftovers donated by a Custodes player who didn't need them, so that gave me a near-enough equivalent to the bolter stick, which if I recall was a Nemesis Force Weapon back in the day. I cut it in half, which took out one of the two hands sculpted into it, while the other down low on the shaft I clipped and filed until it was more or less gone. I used a hand holding a grenade, to try to capture the way the old mini is kind of cupping the weapon rather than gripping it tightly, since they were separate pieces - I don't think it's terribly convincing how the 'grenade' links up with the spear above and below it, but never mind. That arm needed its peg clipped off so I could raise it, and I also clipped and filed off the heraldry shield and purity seals from that shoulder pad, since they looked awkward tilted up that far, particularly the seals which were now 'hanging' sideways.

The other arm was a bit simpler, just replacing the storm bolter arm beneath the elbow with a power fist, from a bag of firstborn Space Wolves parts I got along with 20 firstborn Space Wolves from one of the second hand days I've been to - that needed a Space Wolves symbol filed off the back of the fist, but that's fine since I needed to attach a grenade launcher there anyway (I think that's what that part's supposed to be, I have this arm on an old metal Terminator), which is one of the shoulder weapons pods from a Sororitas Paragon Warsuit. I also took the peg off this arm's shoulder, but only changed it more slightly, bringing the arm forward slightly compared to how the storm bolter is being kind of held back.

For the rest, the head's from the recent Space Marine Noggins upgrade set - I picked the one I thought best matched the Roger Delgado-looking Inquisitor with his goatee, which was actually a bit of a challenge given how small the images are printed on that box, I should keep a magnifying glass handy - and the banner pole is also from that pack of Space Wolves bits; that also needed to be filed flat, which was a bit more challenging than the smaller one on the power fist, especially since the banner's got that big fold in the middle, but it came out well enough (the surface was still a bit uneven inside the fold, but since my freehand is also uneven you can't tell). And lastly, a big eagle from one of the Rhino/Razorback sprues for the banner top.

As I say I do mean to use different bases for the other captains, and painting this one cemented that decision: the big Screamer-Killer head carapace alongside the leg, plus the cape in back, made the backs of the legs pretty awkward to get a brush to (not helped by my putting the bottom of the spear down in front of that leg as well). It'd leave a gap on the left hip/thigh I'd need to cover with something, but I'm also considering removing the cape entirely from at least a couple of the captains. In other respects, it was just a matter of copying the old paint job as-is, with just a couple of variations to allow for the different sculpts: since the new mini doesn't have the big flat belt buckle (which originally had an Inquisition symbol sculpted on it, which I guess got filed flat as part of turning him into an Ultramarine) I moved the central display of his sigil, whatever it's supposed to be, onto the remaining shoulder shield, and since the right leg's so obscured and also mostly covered by sculpted decoration, I moved the heraldry onto his left leg, and also made it just a regular quartered design since the new leg doesn't have a separate knee pad. If you look closely on the original it's got a burst of flame on the lower left quadrant of the leg heraldry - can't tell if there's also an Ultramarine symbol around it as there is on the shoulder and banner, without the white background to help it stand out - but since that side of the leg's angled away from where my brush would be coming from, I decided to just leave that bit empty like the blank quadrants on the other instances of the heraldry.

Incidentally, it didn't occur to me until I'd already put the base colours down but the red cape over the blue armour means Veridian's colours echo those of the Hivefleet Behemoth Screamer-Killer on the base - which I think just goes to show that we're all more alike than we realise, and the real grim darkness is the friends we made along the way.