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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.