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Nice work on the classics.

And yes, scale creep is a huge myth.

 Gordy2000 wrote:
Great work on those Space Crusade marines. Those were the first Warhammer minis I ever painted, way back in the Dark Age of Technology. Basically Space Crusade was my gateway drug.

And hat tip for painting all the weapon options. Good show!

Thanks I missed Space Crusade the first time round - got my start with Space Hulk, but I didn't start getting White Dwarf and becoming aware of the larger 40k world until a little later. I recall Advanced Space Crusade was being advertised in the issues I had then, with its buck-teeth bear-paw Tyranids and Old World Empire Sleeves Scouts (I do want some of both of those, one day) - one of the Eavy Metal pages did show some of the Space Crusade marines, but I didn't really know what they were specifically until later.

 Nevelon wrote:
Nice work on the classics.

And yes, scale creep is a huge myth.

Thanks!

This month's contest entry, some Star Leopards Intercessors - over on the Boys From The Astronomican thread I've told the tale of bringing the Star Leopards back from one obscure snippet of lore, and Captain Fragman then winning the local gaming group's open painting contest (it's just a small group, don't get too excited); from the prize pool I chose a sprue of five Intercessors, and I decided it was only fitting they also be Star Leopards, so here we are.



I broke out the bits box during assembly, since I'd already put together the Intercessors for the Astronomican project more or less stock. Back when third edition came out I found it very satisfying to customise the new multipart Tactical marines - there had of course been multipart plastic Tacticals earlier, but they were pretty limited with their flat waists and helmets and torsos as one piece, the new sprues with ball joint necks and waists, and a bunch of accessories on the sprue, were far more versatile, and even though nowadays we make fun of their 'options' basically just being variations on the same 'marine holding bolter' pose, the small changes and customisations made it really feel like they were my marines from the ground up. So I approached these lads in a similar spirit. The sergeant got the most work, since I wanted him to stand out: Necron chunk on the base to make him taller and more heroic-looking, Black Templar candles on the backpack, a shoulder shield with a book stuck to it (the same book piece as I used on Captain Fragman, I think his idiot insistence on doing dumb things because "It is written!" may actually be a hallmark of the entire chapter, so the book is a recurring motif for them), and his pistol arm is actually from a Techmarine, with its grav pistol swapped out for a plasma; the cables don't line up perfectly with the backpack, but they're near enough. Naturally I went with a bare head per the Star Leopards' habitual idiot machismo, so I took the ball off a helmet and stuck it to his belt, and since I'd recently picked up the battlefield trophies set I gave him a genestealer head nailed to his shoulder pad. The thunder hammer came about just from browsing through the codex and noticing Intercessor sergeants can have one - the arm is an aiming-pistol one, with the pistol hand replaced with a power axe hand, with the blade removed and replaced by a chunk of tech from, I think, the Kataphron Breacher sprue that looked close enough to a hammer head, plus a long bit of purity seal parchment from a Sororitas sprue.



The rest of the squad I kept a little more restrained, but I wanted each of them to be unique in some way (hence entering them in the painting contest under the 'irregular' theme). One of the obvious conversions of the old 3rd ed Tacticals was to slice the bicep of the bolter arm to swivel the weapon up, then put the auspex in the vacant left hand, so the comms marine is kind of my homage to that, with the addition of a backpack sensor gadget from the Apothecary, or Sanguinary Priest, I forget which. I hadn't used the turret gunner mini on my Deimos Predator, since the old Predators I was paying tribute to didn't have them, so the next marine got the Heresy-era helmet and shoulder pads from there. The grenade launcher marine initially just got a skull-and-ponytail trophy piece from the White Scars upgrade set, but I decided that was a bit too low-key so I added a couple of pieces from the Breacher sprue, which I think are just meant to be extra gadgets for one of the big guns but the nodes on them are about the same size as the extra grenades on the bolter's strap, so he became the marine who really likes grenades. And finally, something I'd been wanting to do for a while based on the bionic parts in the Rogue Trader marine gallery which are far cruder than the type you see on minis nowadays, a marine with a robot leg that's actually a Breacher flamer arm, with the 'elbow' becoming his knee, and the flamer barrel removed and replaced with a spare foot from a Necron, which is generic enough to pass. I left the fuel tank from the flamer attached, since it reminds me of the tanks you see attached to the backs of Armiger legs, so maybe this bionic is a smaller version of the same design. His head comes from, I think, the Eradicator (melta) squad - he's also got a helmet top attached to his belt, which I'm not certain is from the same source so it may not technically be the right design to attach to the Eradicator mask, but near enough.



Fragman being a Terminator Captain actually left a bunch of the specifics of the chapter's colours up for grabs, since a lot of his design could as easily be personal heraldry as the chapter-wide colour scheme. I decided to stick with the original inspiration (an ancient-ass plastic Terminator I'd painted really badly, since even though that paint job had nothing to do with the Star Leopards, it did come from 1989 like their one canon appearance), with orange on the left shoulder and left shin - Fragman isn't wearing his helmet (of course) so I wondered whether maybe the helmets would also be orange, but I decided to keep the black helmet from the old Terminator, although I ended up painting the sergeant's helmet orange to set him apart (the skull on the helmet would indicate veteran, like Blood Angels); I also on a whim put a narrow stripe on the helmet of the comms guy, which I think maybe signifies that he's qualified to be a non-sergeant squad leader according to the old Tactical practice of splitting a squad of ten into two squads of five (of course Intercessors don't do that, and even if they had it doesn't make sense the second squad leader would be here alongside the sergeant, but it's just an idle thought). Since the sergeant's left shoulder is covered by genestealer I decided the whole chapter wears their symbol on their right shoulder - said symbol of course being the Thundercats logo, which I specifically chose for Fragman on the basis that I'd only have to paint it once, so having to do it five more times here was a bit of a corner I painted myself into, but never mind; they're a bit wonky, but near enough. The other four marines got the usual squad number and type on their left shoulder then, and for the sergeant I put them on his knee. I thought of using the shoulder trim to indicate their company a la Ultramarines, but I've always liked the Dark Angels kneepad company symbols, so I decided to copy that, suggesting that these lunatics are actually Dark Angels successors; I like to imagine that, thanks to their history of dumbass honor-before-reason deeds, they're part of a smaller subset of the Unforgiven known as 'the Uninvited', as whenever the Dark Angels and their successors get together for a chat, they 'accidentally' forget to inform the Star Leopards so they don't have to be reminded they're related. I went with dark skin for the sergeant just because I feel like I don't get past the Caucasian skin tone paints often enough - I feel like I need more variety of brown paints for the highlights, I don't love the selection I'm working with - and for the robo-leg guy on a whim I gave him green hair, since I thought maybe the Star Leopards are one of the chapters who recruit from a hive world by rounding up the biggest psychos they can find in the gang population.

Incidentally I'm pretty happy with how the Necron chunk on the sergeant's base turned out, copied from the stock photos of the Obelisk and a couple of other scenery-type pieces - I used a slightly colder set of greens, just because that's what I've got handy, and also put the brighter spots of highlighting in more random places rather than always on the corners, which kind of reminds me of Tron as if the bright pulses are flowing along the edges rather than just stuck in one place. Not sure how well if at all that'd translate to regular Necron troops - I didn't do any of the glowing edges on the Necron head on comms guy's base, just glowing eyes and mouth - but all my previous attempts at a Necron colour scheme I liked have fallen a bit flat, so I may give this a try next time I have a complete Necron for whatever reason.

Incidentally the iffy writing on the scrolls is the classic 'kil', and 'hooo' (as in Thundercats) on the two bolters, and on the comms guy's shoulder I've named him Brother Khloe, after Chloe O'Brien who was always on comms with Kiefer Sutherland in 24.

Naturally I've wanted to have an Iron Hands squad in the crusade for a while, both because they're one of the original chapters featured in Rogue Trader, and for the comedy of them and the Hospitallers Inceptor squad having to work together after that time the Iron Hands kidnapped a Hospitaller dreadnought. Inquisitor Amnestine's had the two squad leaders shake hands and swear not to 'accidentally' shoot at each other in battle, so that's sorted; she's got a bit of that Avasarala 'headmistress scolding the kids' energy. (It won't be a problem on the tabletop in any case, since I've decided I can't be having with those flying stands - if I want to field some Inceptors I'll make a new squad with their feet glued to convenient tactical rocks, and of course they'll be some other chapter.)



The Heavy Intercessors were a box I picked up during lunch a while back (makes me feel better about having to be at work), and a little while back I assembled them - not because I wanted them done right away, sometimes I just get in a building mood - with the shoulders from the Iron Hands upgrade set, as well as their cyborg heads and the sergeant's pointy robo-arm and their various Geiger counters or whatever those are on their belts. So as not to reuse any of the heads, besides the two bare and one helmeted ones from the upgrade set, I used a spare regular marine head with a bionic eye, and a leftover head from the Master of Executions, because he's got tubes going into his mouth and just generally looks like he hasn't been taking care of his 'ganic parts, which is something I wanted to emphasize with the Iron Hands; it is a bit odd to have a 'heavily armoured' Gravis squad with four out of the five of them not wearing their helmets, but I kind of imagine the Hands are eager to take head wounds so they've got an excuse to replace more of their skull with metal.

I also made a point of giving them all trophies - not really on purpose, I assembled the sergeant first and thought the top of his backpack looked a bit uninteresting, so I stuck a skull to it because I like even loyalist marines being a bit feral, like the difference between them and heretics aren't so much the level of atrocities they commit as whether they're screaming "For the Emperor!" or "For Chaos!" when they do it; the Rogue Trader illustration of a Silver Skull marine, with an Ork head nailed to his shoulder pad and a human head tied to his belt by the hair, was an inspiration there. That one skull looked a bit lonely on the big flat backpack top, so I added a couple more, and that made me think this squad's just got trophy-taking as a habit, so as I put together the rest of the squad they all got 40k's answer to Pandora charms as well: an Eldar helmet (painted as Biel-Tan, just because the lush green pops against the dour Iron hands colours), a daemonette tail (don't ask why it hasn't evaporated back into the warp, who knows), a Necron head on the front of the heavy bolter, and an Ork jaw (with a gold toof, just for fun).

And then they sat in a drawer unpainted for a while, because squads, especially five bodies rather than three, are a bit of a time commitment for me so I tend to need a prompt from a painting contest to get me to tackle them - which is what happened, with the second fortnight of my local group's 'Ready Ranks' challenge being to paint a squad. I had various options, including some smaller squads (Eliminators, and Centurions, although there's a lot of detail on them, I wouldn't say they'd be 'easier' than a regular five-man squad) - and whenever this challenge rolls around I like to joke that I can always fall back on painting three spore mines to qualify - but I'd been thinking about a drybrushing approach to getting some highlights on all those edges, so I gave the Iron Hands a shot.

So yeah, after a black spray I got out the makeup drybrush and gave them a careful application of Thunderhawk grey or something along those lines - not quite as stark as just regular-painting the same colour as primary edge highlights would be, and it did rub onto some of the flat surfaces like shoulders and lower legs some, but it still read as black visually, and gave the edges and shapes a nice level of definition, so I'm calling that a success, especially since it took half an hour rather than three evenings. Not sure how well it'd work for other colours, but I guess we'll see as we go - I'm not committed to drybrushing every marine now, characters will certainly get their edge highlighting done the old-fashioned way, maybe squads as well if I feel they'd be better suited by it, but it's a handy tool to have available. I picked up a lighter grey (Russ, I think) and painted on some brighter spot highlights on the corners and most prominent edges - probably a bit brighter than necessary, but I do like the look of these bold, almost cartoony highlights at tabletop distance, even if they seem exaggerated when looking at close-up photos.

On the heads I varied my skin tones by playing around with different bases and washes - not counting the chap with his helmet on, the least augmented (the one that's just a regular marine head) got a skin tone base with a wash of pale purple over it just to give it a slightly pallid look, while the others I went much paler, and in the case of the ex-Executioner head even starting with a pale grey-pink base, to make it look like they're just letting their flesh slowly rot around them as they replace everything that matters inside with machine parts.

While normally I use grey shaded with a blank ink wash for the ribbed underlayers of marine armour, and sometimes the 'metal' parts of their guns (to make them look more sophisticated than the metallic copper or whatever it is I habitually use on chaos), for the Iron Hands I went full metallic with a leadbelcher underlayer. As a bit of something different, though, I gave the undersuit a green contrast wash on top of the gunmetal base, to reflect how in the Rogue Trader chapter gallery the Iron Hands seem to have a slight green tinge to their joints - might just have been the artist not wanting them to look too monotone, but it's a little more prominent than on the joints of the Dark Angels who back then also had black armour, so I decided to run with it. The eagles and scrolls on the sides of bolters also got silver, as did the chest wings, although for both of those I went up to a brighter mithril silver (whatever it's called nowadays) look since they're decorative rather than just functional.

The Iron Hands shoulder pads gave me lovely sculpted chapter badges, which saved a whole heap of work, so naturally the Iron Hands go in for stupidly elaborate company badges which I had to freehand instead - not really an artistic challenge, just a slow methodical process, starting with a white circle then dotting in the black gaps between the gear teeth. I went with Clan Borrgos (seventh company) both for my usual approach of units detached for this crusade being reserves rather than the best-of-the-best from the battle companies, and also because the double-ended spanner seemed like it'd be the easiest to paint - again, the central rod and balls at the ends first, then a white dot to hollow out the ends. Normally I'd be using wraithbone for this sort of thing, since it's got excellent coverage and reads close enough to white over a black background to pass, but since I'd used corax white on the chapter symbols and bolter casings, and it was behaving itself, I stuck with it, onto the squad and type badges on the knees as well.

And lastly, since I've been varying exactly how each chapter interprets 'gold on the left arm' as the mark of being part of the Empyrean Crusade, I decided this squad would have a gold band on their shoulders, rather than the actual arm being gold. I decided that right after finishing most of the spot highlights and realising I'd forgotten to paint the arms gold, but it's the thought that counts.

After drifting away from 40k in late third edition, I was well out of things when Space Hulk's third edition had its release, and later re-release, so it was a stroke of luck to pick up ten of its Terminators at one of Combat Company's second hand events - I don't remember the price exactly, but it's likely it was around AU$40 the lot, which was an absolute bargain. (Some folks at those events are looking to get value for their minis, others just want a few bucks for stuff they're done with, there's often a lot of very affordable oldhammer to be had.) They were already painted - a bit rough, but stylish I thought, particularly the ones with really bold highlights, so I snapped a photo of them for posterity's sake before I got to work - but naturally I wanted to take a crack at their detail-saturated sculpts myself, since I find the most enjoyment in small details. Only issue was they had a bunch of Blood Angels symbols sculpted on and I already have a Blood Angels unit with the Land Raider, so I went hunting on the wiki for successor chapters who use similar-enough blood-drop-and-wings symbols. Having similarly already used up the Angels Encarmine (Apothecary) and Angels Vermillion (second Whirlwind) I ended up on the obscure end of things, a chapter named the Auric Paladins, for which there was just one photo which had been shown in White Dwarf and credited to a GW staffer named Mark. Wherever you are, Mark, this one's for you.

Now granted none of the Space Hulk Terminators' symbols are an exact match for the Auric Paladins, but they're also a variety of different interpretations of 'winged blood drop' (there aren't any that are an exact match to the Blood Angels default logo either), so I decided close enough was good enough; not like I had a better option anyway. Since I was pretty much out of chapters I decided all ten would be Auric Paladins, rather than having to find yet another winged blood drop chapter for the bottom five - and also their sculpts are clearly set apart from general 40k Terminators, I felt it was appropriate they remain a single unit. The Paladins' colour scheme also favoured me in letting me knock off the overall colours quickly and get right into the details I was interested in: I started with a primer spray of gold, gave them a careful bath of Agrax, and that was most of the base layer done. I ended up painting the red shoulder pads about four times over, since I first tried a couple of different approaches that didn't work out: contrast paint directly over the gold let too much of its yellow shine through, making them too orange, and then a base of one of my darker reds turned out a bit too burgundy for my liking, so in the end they got a fairly middle-of-the-road bright red, with crimson ink to give a little shading. It's far from obvious to look at, but I stuck to the 'left arm gold' Empyrean Crusade thing by giving the minis a gentle drybrush of silver, except the left arms which remained just the gold/Agrax I normally use.

That just left the 'minor' details - Terminators are of course the best of the best and these lads really feel like it, covered as they are in purity seals and badges and trinkets and who knows what; they'd probably have a Move stat of 6" if they didn't have all that crap weighing them down, but I love it. Bit OTT compared to the other Terminators in the crusade, but maybe the Auric Paladins just really go in for maximum bling? Naturally the shoulder symbols, in their various forms, got the chapter's white wings and gold blood drop - some of the decoration on the rest of the armour, mostly small blood drops sculpted directly into armour panels, I left gold, but for the most part I avoided gold as a detail colour for the body, which left white as the primary fine detail colour, with gold used for blood drops mostly only where they were inside white elements. There are a bunch of little blood drop pandora trinkets, and for those I decided to use red - helps them stand out a bit, and it may be the chapter's way of honouring their Blood Angel ancestors. The Crux obviously got painted stone instead, and I used the same stone colour for some smaller Terminator Honours (or whatever they're supposed to be) gewgaws hanging off them in various positions, with the square type given gold rims and green jewels in the centre - just to have variety in the trinket colours, rather than them being a sea of white that'd blue into one another.



I didn't realise, when I was picking miniatures to work on, that I'd included both sergeants in the five I selected - of course the other five will in time get the same paint jobs so it won't be an issue. I tried varying their skin tones a bit, primarily going for a more bronze look on Lorenzo (the one with the sword, each sculpt has its own name apparently, like in the old days - although I didn't go in for trying to paint named on the little scroll panels this time, so their actual names remain up in the air), but it didn't really come through once I'd highlighted the skin tone; that's something I need to work on. Speaking of sergeants, it'd slipped my mind while I was doing most of the painting that the existing Auric Paladins image (which I didn't have in front of me the whole time) had white casing on its combi-bolter, rather than the black I'd been using on the storm bolters here as typical of Blood Angels. I didn't fancy repainting all four storm bolters, so I decided white casing meant master-crafted or something, and just repainted Lorenzo's weapon, leaving the regular squaddies with black guns. I had decided against black for Lorenzo's cape and whatsisname's loincloth, but I decided against wraithbone + skeleton horde and highlighting that I'd normally use for a pale marine cloak, since it's the same combo I use for purity seals and there are so many of them - instead I tried a darker base, starting at Tau Somethingorother with an Agrax wash and highlighting up through a pale skin tone to wraithbone. Don't entirely love the result, but it doesn't bother me enough to want to paint it over and start from scratch. Those capes/loincloths may actually serve to show sergeant rank for this chapter, since I didn't want to throw off the red shoulders look by making one of them black.

Funny thing I noticed, which I don't remember seeing on any other Terminator sculpts (and which confused me a bit until I worked out what it was) - they have power cables running over the top of the Crux Terminatus on their left shoulders, with cable runs actually built into the Crux. Kind of a bizarre quirk, but I came to think it was a cute reflection of the Imperium's general decay in actually understanding their tech: presumably the suits once had internal power links, but they're worn out and nobody knows how to repair them, so they're just running extension cords from the torsos to the power fists on the outside.

Did a bit of building. The original Razorback is right in my oldhammer era, so - even though the 'new' Razorback is well into growing its own grey beard - I got out the bit boxes and set to work on refitting one with a proper las-plas turret with a gunner (even though there aren't rules for that anymore; I guess it'd just count as twin lascannon, being that they're both energy weapons of some kind). Obviously I had a lascannon, and a donation from my local gaming group gave me two Hellblaster plasma guns, which all got set inside a cradle made from the top armour of the new-style turret. Those all got their backs cut and files flat, which made a nice stable surface to mount to a piece I cut out of the Rhino's internal wall, the one that goes between the driver's compartment and the troop bay, which I didn't need since the vehicle's all glued shut anyway - I cut around the part of the wall with the console on it, so that'd become the gunner's instrument panel. The shield came from leftovers from the Stormtalon, part of the armoured cockpit for the Stormhawk version of the kit - that took a big of trial and error to get mounted, since it was a matter of slicing the top and top corners of the console panel to match the inside angles of the shield, but eventually I got enough of it sitting flush enough to make a nice strong bond when it was glued. A couple of extra little bits of Stormhawk armour (I think that's where they came from) closed off gaps down below the shield, and that all got mounted onto the Razorback's round turret base, with the Rhino's open hatch glued in near the back for the gunner to by sticking out of. He's from the Deimos Predator, so he got upgraded ten thousand years thanks to new shoulders and a 40k-style chestplate left over from my 3rd edition marines - not a perfect fit to replace the Heresy chestplate, but nothing a bit of filing couldn't fix.

This was around the same time as I'd acquired the Black Templars upgrade set - not specifically intended for this, just to have on hand because inevitably I'd be doing a Templars vehicle or unit sooner or later, and just to have extra bits in general - so I stuck the sword on the front bonnet, a cross on the right side door, and used one of the Templar helmets for the gunner; I also stuck a couple of random religious doodads on the front under the headlights, which are actually from the Sororitas Rhino sprue but I'm sure Templars have images of saints and whatever too. (With typical timing, not long after was one of Combat Company Mortdale's second-hand events, where I got a bunch of firstborn Templars including a Razorback chassis (no turret) with a big Templar logo already glued to the front; I've already used up the Hospitallers, the only chapter I know of that's an exact match (bar colours) for the Templars' Maltese cross, but the one on the chassis has a skull in the middle so that'd be close enough for Avengers, Dark Brotherhood or Imperial Paladins.



While I was googling for images of Black Templars vehicles to see how they arranged their logos I spotted one from a site called Chaos Order Arts, with the half crosses on white on the front of the track segments, and that looked pretty cool so I copied it; probably should have taken the opportunity to learn how to mask one way or the other, but in my usual 'too lazy to both with the time-saving option' fashion I ended up just hand painting white directly over black, which took about four coats but came good enough in the end. For the rest of the colours I took some cues from the original Razorback in WD174, in all its child's-toy-coloured glory (not mocking, I love it), but muted to suit the Templars general palette; I decided against red on the side doors and entire turret, but kept it on the weapons (except the plasma guns, following the 2nd edition style that special weapons were yellow) and smoke launchers and the ram bar, as well as the hunter-killer missile, which had ended up on the rear of the track segment because that was the only place I could find for it where the lascannon wouldn't smack into it when it rotated (not that the turret can rotate, but hypothetically) - my handwave is it's an off-bore system with a live targeting link from the Razorback to the missile in flight.



Since the Templars use crusade badges in roughly the same way other chapters use company markings, I decided they'd show their allegiance to the Empyrean Crusade with a shield badge, rather than just having gold on the left side like other units - I googled up a page of Templar markings including a whole bunch of crusade badges, and invented a quartered one with gold quarters for colour consistency, and on the white parts the Templars' cross and the Spartan-style helmet logo I'd come up with for the Empyrean Wardens when I was doing the Hellblasters. I did mean to leave it at that, but with all those crusade badges in front of me I had the idea to have the vehicle also display little versions of all the past crusades it had taken part in, which was pretty satisfying to paint, even if they are a bit wonky when you zoom on. Speaking of my fondness for tiny details, I had a blast with the turret's instrument panel, although I kept the colours pretty restrained on all the buttons this time, since the screens were the main attraction: a central map, with what are supposed to be elevation lines and friendly and enemy units marked, and greenscreen on the three upper monitors, with what I imagine are power levels for the guns, a text readout that's maybe vitals on the Razorback's attached squad, and the larger screen is supposed to be the marine commander giving orders; should've had the shoulders up higher in hindsight, but never mind. The closeup was taken with an ipad camera during painting, I didn't realise how difficult it'd be to get a clear shot of the console with good lighting once the gunner was glued in place. (Incidentally since the trigger unit he's holding is supposed to connect to a storm bolter, it's not actually physically connected to the turret here; you can't tell unless you peer in right at it.)



For the rest, nothing fancy - I did more of those little blocks of text than I normally would, since the Templars seem like the kind who'd go in for devotional passages in a big way, and experimented a bit with including little symbols with some of them. I left the 'visor' on the front windows unglued, so after spraying I could flip it up and properly paint the windows and the little wipers in there, without getting red on the insides of the visor's slits and spoiling the look. I also had the notion to glue the Rhino top hatches together as a separate piece (with a 32mm base on the underside, holding them together, and making a convenient anchor for a handle - I did the same on the turret and on the hull itself, I picked up one of those 100 base packs a little while ago, so I've got 32mm to spare), and leave them unglued so I could swap the vehicle from Razorback to Rhino at a whim. That led to giving it its name, Venator, which google (which is probably wrong, but it's good enough for 40k latin) says means 'hunter' or 'tracker', as a shoutout to Matt Trakker who wrote the book on unassuming-looking vehicles suddenly sprouting unexpected weapons.

Very nice work Daia T'Nara.

Exalted a number of them.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks!


This year's Thing I Painted While Up Late Watching The French Open Finals (last year was the Marines Errant Terminators), Brother Calamus - I picked up the Ballistus last time I was down at Combat Company buying a proper carry case, just because it seemed a shame to go all that way (it's a bit of a trip without a car) and not get something fun as well. Not that anything in 40k is 'cheap' but the Ballistus didn't break the bank, and after finishing Brother Gatekeeper the Redemptor I wanted to have a go at a dreadnought with its front armour on, just for variety (I feel like even though I like the open sarcophagus look, I've embedded it in my lore as something Brother Gatekeeper specifically did, not something I'll be repeating on other dreads, and anyway the simplified Ballistus sprue would make it a chore to remove just the central front armour anyway). But at the same time, even though I'm not that bothered by my loyalists being stock builds, the Ballistus being a one-shot monopose piqued my contrariness to want to alter it, which ended up being the idea of battle damage.



I have seen dreads with missing arms and the like, but although that'd be cool this is (theoretically) meant for tabletop use and it's not very WYSIWYG to be firing missiles out of a launcher that's not there, so I confined myself to more cosmetic damage. The notion of gouging holes out of the front gave me the idea of blowing out part of the sarcophagus to reveal the corpselike marine inside - also something I've seen on other models - although I feel like I didn't take best advantage of that idea. I didn't want a whole body reveal of the 'pilot', just a glimpse, so I just did one side of the face area, and stuck a marine head inside (glued by his scalp to the underside of the roof), plus a spare piece of tech from the Kataphron sprue to fill in the cavity to his side and give the impression he's got a bunch of life support gubbins crammed in there with him. The holes themselves were just a bit of brute force: drilled a hole with the thickest of the bits for the hand drill I use for barrels, then made it larger and more ragged with a combination of sticking in the mould line remover and wiggling it wound, and getting the tips of the clippers in and gouging at the edges.



Unfortunately when it came time to paint, I'd really limited myself in how effectively I could get my brush in - I gave everything a coat of black from the inside, to make sure there were no grey bits showing that the spray coat wouldn't reach into, but then I closed the body up and worked on it assembled, so I was having to poke my brush in through the blast hole and dab paint at the bits of the face I could reach, without really being able to see what I was doing very clearly. Probably should've painted the whole head before sticking it in, but that's hindsight for you - for reference, what we're seeing in the close-up is his eyes, level with the remains of the vision slit, and the black area level with the red tube beside him is his mouth, yelling. Before assembly I clipped off the tip of his nose, and drilled out his eyes, to make him more of a broken husk after whatever catastrophic injury put him in the dread to begin with (so there's no point having his eyes level with the vision slit since he's 'seeing' via the dread's sensors, but I guess it's just tradition), so from that point of view it's not the worst outcome that he's barely recognisable as a marine anymore.



A Howling Griffons unit had been on my to-do list from the start, since like I said with the Marines Errant I love the halved and quartered colour schemes for how anachronistically knightly they look, and the Griffons were especially important since they're in the old Badab War article and the gallery of chapters in the 3rd edition Codex Space Marines, both cherished sources of inspiration. That led me to Fred Reed's Howling Griffons army, featured on the back page of White Dwarf 179, and in the battle report the following issue, so naturally I decided to take specific cues from there where I could. Fred's Griffons use a very bold red and yellow, which is fine with me (not that painting yellow over black wasn't a bit of a struggle), and I also copied the blue chest eagles. All his dreadnoughts have their own banners, but having used the smaller sculpted banner for Brother Gatekeeper I didn't want to use a larger paper banner here, so I'd omitted one - I did recreate, as best I could, the design from the Ballistus-style ranged weapon dreadnought of his, both on the right 'shoulder', and a smaller version on the shield I'd stuck onto the left chest just for variety (it's actually the crotch armour from a War Dog/Armiger, since when I was assembling mine I used spare bits of armour and tech to give it a robo-gina instead, because of course that's what a Slaaneshi mech would have). All Fred's dreadnoughts have the number IV on their banners, so I assume that's their company - I changed mine to IX, reserves as usual, but used IV for the dreadnought's vehicle number, on the right chest and inside the halo painted on the left knee. I gave Fred 'credit' on the name scroll, since the obviously 20th Century name isn't visible once the front plate is on (I haven't glued it, but it's pushed in nice and tight); for the visible name I went with Calamus, which some googling told me is a kind of reed pen used by the Romans. The scroll on the leg got 'debet' ('indebted'), the crusade's overall motto.

I also took a couple of cues from the old Dark Angels Dreadnought, which if I recall was the first to sport what we'd now call the Ballistus loadout of lascannon and missile launcher. That had red for all the cables and conduits, but since I already had a bunch of red on the hull I flipped the colours and used Dark Angels green instead; I like colourful cables, they feel very 2nd edition to me. That was also the source of the blue wax on the purity seals, which conveniently dovetailed with the blue wings on Fred's models, and stood out nicely against both the yellow and red hull parts the various seals were stuck to. White missiles too, although without the red front plate on the launcher the resemblance isn't really there.



And lastly for a bit of extra decoration on the base, besides the usual technical paint (which as well as general texture I used to cover up the traces of Tyranid growth) and tufts, I pulled a Tau gun out of a collection of leftovers, from several armies, donated by a kind chap from my local gaming group, and tried out the 'Tron Tau' look I've seen in a few images, with lit-up edge highlighting over a glossy black base. The images I've seen tend to have blue for armour and red for weapons, but blue looks most Tron-like to me and all I had was the weapon, so I ignored that apparent rule. None of the more conventional Tau colour schemes have ever really been a hit for me - I'm not 100% certain about this one either, given how much effort it is, and it's unlikely I'll ever collect Tau to find out (I don't hate the idea of them, but 'armies I want to collect' is a long list already), but it was nice to have a go at it.

Well having read through this, great read! The BA camo Land Raider really tickled me

 inmygravenimage wrote:
Well having read through this, great read! The BA camo Land Raider really tickled me

Thanks

This week's addition: like I imagine most marine players, I've looked at the Desolation Squad and wondered if I could do anything with them that'd make them, you know, presentable - and always ended up deciding no, even setting aside how there are only three sculpts in the five-man squad my idea of 'looks good' is so far away from them that I'd be replacing enough parts that it'd be easier to just start with stock marine bodies and at least get more variety in poses. Then on one of Combat Company's second-hand days I spotted ten of these Heresy Mk6 marines with the old pointy missile launchers which I'm very fond of - naturally I snapped them up just because (I forget the exact price but I feel like it was around $30, which beats the hell out of having to buy 20 of them in a squad then a separate heavy weapons upgrade for ten launchers plus ten heavy bolters I don't want). At the time, it was pure nostalgia, but after a while I got to thinking they'd make a suitable Desolation proxy - pretty different from the actual Desolation minis, but they're clearly marines with missile launchers and there aren't any other 'marines with missile launchers' squads in 40k, so nobody's going to be confused.



They were already glued together, and a bit of rough experimentation suggested none of the heads were coming off without more force than I'm comfortable exerting on a plastic mini, so in lieu of having his helmet off the sergeant got a servo-skull - which is actually from the 'battlefield trophies' set so presumably it's a busted servo-skull, but these are obviously the longest of long-serving veterans, so perhaps it's the equivalent of an old phone with a cracked screen but it still works just fine. There was really no choice in my mind other than Crimson Fists - I looked first to the cover of Rogue Trader, but they have a very muted blue which wouldn't quite suit my vivid highlights style, and their 'crimson' is a curious cherry red shade I'd have needed to mix paints to get near and that's a level of effort where I start looking for other options, so in the end I aimed more for the Crimson Fists painted up to advertise the RTB01 box. Unlike the Rogue Trader art, these minis all seemed to have both hands painted red, but consulting the wiki told me that that's the mark of a veteran, and these are clearly all veterans. Similarly following that photo they all got the red stripe on their helmets, with the sergeant set apart by his stripe having yellow borders.



I did take a bunch of little yellow symbols from the shoulders of the marines on the Rogue Trader cover though - the one with two arrows would definitely indicate a Tactical marine, but I decided to ignore that in the interests of nostalgia. Those symbols also push the chapter logo up well under where the shoulder pad is covered by the launcher, which saved me the effort of painting them - I've already freehanded a couple of Crimson Fists logos, on Brother Quiff and the fallen marine on Medic Kribins' base, so I don't feel like I need to prove anything to myself, although in the interests of the squad having at least one proper logo I put one on the sergeant's leg. Rogue Trader sources have the red fist painted straight onto the blue armour (accordingly I put some red on the shoulders where the bottom of the symbol would be, just to show there's something there) but since a chapter symbol on the leg is a variant I copied the version from the banner on the Rogue Trader cover, which also links them to more recent versions of the chapter.

Normally I don't go in for battle damage and wear much on infantry minis, since unlike vehicles where there's plenty of room for undamaged paint to make it look neat and tidy despite the odd bit of silver on the edges, when you start adding wear to power armour it can go from 'slightly worn' to 'beat up all to hell' pretty quickly. I decided to go for it this time though, since these lads have been fighting non-stop since The Battle At The Farm (I gave one of them a 'Rynn' badge on his backpack accordingly) - tried to keep it restrained, and I think against the all-over dark blue it looks okay, like the armour's been through a lot but stops short of looking like it's been neglected by its wearers. And since, yet again, I wanted to keep as much of the original colour scheme as possible, I decided the bumps on their shoulder pads could be the Empyrean Crusade gold for this squad.

The sergeant got a fancy paint job on his launcher, both to further set him apart from the regular marines, and to indicate that that's the special Vengor Launcher that only a sergeant can have - in other respects, I decided the 'difference' between Superfrag and Superkrak and Castellan would just be which missiles are loaded into the launcher (which seems much more sensible than having whole different weapons for each type, looking at you Cawl), with red and yellow tips on the regular launchers being frag and krak, while the Vengor warheads got a brighter red with a yellow ring around them. I'm probably going to end up using all four of the regular launchers as Superkrak, so I may as well have painted them all the same, but regardless I wanted to at least nod to there being two types available.

Absolutely awesome - especially the snazzy sergeant!