Month 2 complete - and then some!

Ok, so for this month I set myself the task of painting up the Death Company so I'd have a second troops squad painted up.

Only problem is I got a little carried away and ended up painting more than I had originally intended - oh well, I'll just have to paint even more stuff in the rest of this month/March!

First of all, here's the finished Death Company - I've armed them with bolters as their relentless rule means they can rapid fire with these and then still assault the enemy. To help with that I've given them a couple of power weapons and a power fist for those more heavily armoured targets!

All they really need now is a chaplain to lead them (perhaps next month!)

I've also painted up a land raider redeemer to carry Captain Galad and his squad (painted last month) around the board. I press-moulded the grail symbol from a Bretonian banner then made a green stuff cast of it. Then I stuck a couple of Bretonian shields on the side and painted them up to match the heraldry on the captain's knee pad. As a final touch, I named this noble steed - Concorde. Sweet Concorde - bonus points for anyone who spots the reference!

And I started painting a squad of scouts. Three of them are done, and the other two will probably be finished tonight. I've decided to call the middle one Depardiu as he does look quite a bit like Gerard Depardiu to me! These guys should be able to guide any deep striking troops down bang on target, as well as roughing any enemies up they come across!

Then as a final touch - here's a couple of veteran models I did a test paint on -

The Vanguard veteran has Sanguinary Guard legs and jump pack, and a grey knight head.

The Terminator has a Sanguinary Guard torso on a Grey Knight back piece and has a Grey Knight terminator helm. The shield is the symbol from the Sanguinary Guard banner top mounted on a simple plastic shield.

And lastly, an Iron Hand space marine. I decided I wanted some heavy fire support for the army, and thought the best way to do that would be to add some heavy duty allies from the regular Space Marines codex. Eventually there will be a squad of 10 of these painted up, along with a Master of the Forge with Conversion Beamer and another techmarine with a Thunderfire cannon.

Right, that's it - I'm off to paint some dreadnoughts!

1st month's goal complete!

Ok, so the goal for the first month was to paint one HQ choice and one Troops choice. For my first month I decided to paint my own version of the Captain Tycho special character, and a tactical squad, but as I'm doing my own successor chapter the Grailbearers my tactical squad is a little different to the one you'd see in a regular army.

Since the Grailbearers are styled more as a group of crusading knights, it seemed more appropriate for them to carry pistols and chainswords than bolt guns. This isn't to say I won't have some boltgun squads in the army, just that I want to have more combat armed units than shooty units. Luckily the Blood Angels codex gives you the option to take an assault squad without jump packs as a troops choice - the perfect way to represent a combat weapon armed tactical squad!

I've painted mine up as 3rd squad of 3rd company, as you can see by the the red droplet on yellow knee pad, and the white blood droplet on their rights shoulder pads. I've also modeled the sergeant on Sergeant Rafen from the James Swallow novels as I really like the cover of Red Fury (like I said in my last post). I've tried to make him stand out by giving him his own heraldry on his knee pad, so it's not just yellow and red but yellow, black and red.

The squad is armed with a melta gun, two inferno pistols and a power sword and I intend to drop it in from orbit in a land raider for some series tank busting fury!

The captain is my version of Tycho, like I said in my last post I'm quite chuffed to have been able to convert it entirely in plastic! Still considering a name for him - currently thinking Galad since most of my other models in the army have names on their shoulder pads from medieval knights.

Here's some photos anyway.

As to what I'll be doing next month, I'm currently thinking Death Company! Maybe even a dreadnought (even though it's only supposed to be one force organisation chart per month).

Been going more than a month....

I have been working on this army for about 2 months now but then i have a very short amount of time to get it all done before i go back to work at the end of February so i decided to give myself a bit of a head start due to the much closer deadline i am working too.

I had been wanting to do an imperial guard army for ages with a box of cadians sat under my bed for years, when i say a box it was actually 70 guardsmen on sprue from the eye of terror campaign many moons ago. I kept getting drawn back to the renegades on forge world's website so i have to find a way to fund this project while unemployed so i sold my Fantasy chaos army to get all the bits i needed to do what i thought was a characterful Guard/ demon army.

With the launch of the new 40k box set i had the models i wanted for my penal legion these were the first models i painted for the army doing some head and gun swaps where needed to make them look a bit different from the cultists, I love how characterful this unit is every one is an individual.

The priest was up next he wasn't planned to go with the penal legion from the start but this is now where he takes his place on the battle field offering a bit of punch to the unit as well as allowing the degenerates of the penal legion to reroll hits in combat lets hope for extra attacks and rending for them lads!

With the arrival of the first of the orders from forge world the first unit of guardsmen was painted up, swapping the back pack on one model for the voxcaster and using allot of green stuff to make the lasguns fit the models properly, this wasn't really a problem it allowed me to position them  in allot more ways than normal.

To keep it a bit varied i painted the first of my tanks next a demolisher adding the banner top from the chaos maruader horsemen sprue to the turret to bring a bit of the chaos feel to the tank after i had removed all of the imperial eagles from the model.

while i continued to paint the mass of guardsmen i added other units so that i didn't get bored after finishing the second 10 man squad, i added the first off the 2 hell hounds to the painting desk and played around with ways to make the end of the gun look over heated and charred. This was done by doing a blend from mithril silver through to shining gold then adding glazes of abaddon black to the end of the gun to show smoke damage.

After playing a few games with the army heavy weapon teams were added to the 30 man blob squad and an additional unit of 3 auto canons was added to the platoon so these had to be painted up.

After painting all this red and black a change would be nice so the bloodletters were brought out, oh no more red and black! i had seen the alternate colour scheme for the forge world bloodthirster so got to highlight to white from black my god that takes a while but i found with some practise it wasn't to bad.

With the new year i wanted to finish off the first platoon so got the green stuff out to convert up my commissar then set to work painting him up in the same colour pallet as the rest of the army but swapped the colours about a bit to make him stand out not that he needed much help wielding that small sword of his.

The platoon command would be next to be attacked by the paint on my brush. with the addition of some copper wire to make the arms on the heavy flamer fit on the model they were finished in just under 2 days.

This command squad along with the last few men meant i had finished the platoon so that's 3 troops (1 of them allies) a non HQ, HQ choice, 1 fast attack and one heavy support done.

The company command took a bit longer to paint a whole week was spent on these with a couple of different ways of painting the banner tried out and changed.

I spent most of that time painting the Commander himself now known as Commander Parov, its ok that only the commanding officers don't have gas masks on right?....

The aegis defence line took a bit of work to get how i wanted it to look and i found a pot of terracotta paint that needed to be used( why did they stop this colour). I had been waiting for the spikey bits sprue to turn up to do this but once it had skulls and spikes were added and it was painted up.

The lateest addition tot he army is my second Leman Russ this time an exterminator a few spikes were added along with a helmet from Dave Plamer's Brazenclaw army....

That's me all up to date with what i have painted not got a huge amount more to go but the rest of it does need quite a bit of work to finish.

First progress on the FIST!

So we're into month one and I've started my first units. Starting before January would've been bad form of course ;)

So I've started a HQ and troops. Specifically Codicier Lothar Ossiax and Tactical Squad Expurgio. Below are some work in progress pics. All need some tweaking + green stuff. I'd love to label each in turn, but that doesn't seem to be an option on the phone app. So, in order:

*Work station alpha!
*Codicier Lothar Ossiax (two pics)
*Veteran Sergeant Axiom
*Plasma gunner
*(as yet unnamed) brother kneeling with Melta bomb
*brother with boltgun

So we're going for a very technical look. Funky backpacks, if not servo-arms. The Libby is a simple conversion from the Dark Vengeance one. But with the addition of a bit of Fists brass I think the hammer looks spiffing!

Some of the rest o the squad are going to be from DV, so kinda dull. But need some painting practice before I bring out the coolest guys.

Thoughts?

Launching a crusade

For xmas, Santa brought to me - a blood angels battleforce, a captain box, and some more death company (thanks Angel!). The last couple of days have been spent in a haze of plastic glue and I now have assembled -

1 Assault Squad, with jump packs, power fist and two inferno pistols.

1 Assault Squad, without jump packs (I'm going to paint them as a tactical squad as I wanted to suggest that the Grail Bearers use chainsword and pistol as often as bolters and this was the easiest way to do it) with power sword, melta gun and two inferno pistols (red hot death!).

1 Death Company Squad, with 2 power weapons, power fist and bolters. I went with bolters as I wanted to take advantage of the Death Company's relentless rule to storm up to the enemy, let them have it with both barrels from the bolters and then assault! In turns of power weapons I have a sword and an axe so that I can have some AP2 in there.

Finally, a captain I've converted up to be my counts as Captain Tycho. I was quite pleased to be able to do this entirely in plastic, using mostly captain and blood angel bits, with just a breast plate from my bits box.

Photos below -

Here's the sergeant from the assault squad.

And here's the tactical squad

One of the tactical marines

And two others.

And the sergeant. I've based this guy on sergeant Rafen from the James Swallow novels, in particular I was inspired by the cover of Red Fury where he has his hair unbound and hanging down, and his armour has shields and heraldry on it. This then went on to inspire much of the rest of my conversions as it fits the knightly theme I'm going for. Note below the grail crest knee pad on my captain.

Here's the captain

I sculpted the face mask from green stuff after carving away part of the face with a craft knife.

And instead of the wing dripping blood that was Tycho's crest, I've modeled a winged grail as his crest.

To represent the 'Dead Man's Hand' I've nicked a hand from my bits box left over from the Grey Knights. I figured if he could rip the head off a daemonette then he doesn't care about armour saves.

And finally, here's some of the Death Company. I really went to town on these guys, trying to make them as individual as possible.

This one was a simple issue of posing him so that he looks like he's running towards the enemy, firing his bolter.

This one I trimmed the spiky crest off a helmet and modeled it as part of the back pack.

This one is based on a classic Death Company miniature back when they were metal. I wanted him to look like he was leaning back into the swing of the axe.

This one is one of the only bald blood angels. I wanted him to look like an aged veteran who has finally given in to the rage and is fighting his way through a horde of enemies, both real and imagined. I call him the Sgt Cloten marine.

And finally, my favourite. I wondered what it would look like if one of the Sanguinary Guard fell to the Rage so decided to model one. I picked the death mask with a tear weeping from one eye and figure I'll paint the mask bone white, with a single red tear and a gold crest.

Well that's all for now, more in January when I've got some of them painted!