FW Tyrant of Badab And Astral Claws Combat Squad

I took a break from DKOK wash experiments last night and decided to paint my FW Tyrant of Badab and one set of MK2 iron armor marines. I have a whole list prepared for my Astral Claws, but I did not want to bother looking at it and just painted a bog standard melta squad.

Virtually everything went wrong with these guys!

Important rules (try to break as many as possible)

1. Paint the inner most details first. For some reason I painted all the detail and then tried to go back and do the armor.
2. Have patience. I rushed a lot of armor painting after getting the details done, and then had to use washes to get into the cracks, which obscured detail.
3. Never give up! I was at the point of giving up last night and gave the guys one more soft black wash. (using awesomepaintjobs recipe) It toned everything down, and when I saw the minis this morning I kind of like them!
4. Have supplies handy. I ran out of space on the paper plate I use for painting, and just pushed on.
5. Change brushes. My favorite brush is rubbish now. I have plenty of replacements, but I just reach for it out of habit. After this post that brush goes in the the garbage can. It has served me well for 6+ months, but its days have come and gone.
6. Use the airbrush for base coating. a lot of people don't have the opportunity to do this, but I would love to see some of the better painters on the web put an airbrush through its paces.

No, in terms of my DKOK, I have to deal with item number 4. I did not bother with my mint color scheme because I did not have an empty paint pot to mix my wash in. Ron's link FTW to my recently painted Imperial Advisors, and his posting pointing out my wash pooling have been really helpful. Sometimes It takes a nudge by someone else to kick one's painting up a notch. I need to get my figure painting into gear so I am not stuck painting only vehicles for the next Storm Wardens project!

Now the real question is whether or not I can go to a GW without buying more minis to paint. As rob from warhammer 39999 noted, I have a very large backlog.

Astral Claws Centurion Helmet Crest + Corpse Taker

Timing is everything. Ron over at FTW just posted about Roman style helmet crests. As my first real green-stuff attempt, I sculpted one of these for my Astral Claws Sergeant test miniature. I am not sure if I am going to do this for all of my Astral Claws, or just this one miniature. In Roman legions, the crest went front to back for normal legionnaires, and perpendicular to that (as shown on my sergeant) for officers. This would be a neat way to make centurions and sergeants stand out from rank and file astartes. It would be fun to see a squad of Astral Claws that did not side with their chapter. The minis could form a little diorama showing them throwing down their weapons.

The other mini posted above is the beginnings of my Corpse Taker. For those who have not bought IA9 and read it over and over again like I have, the Corpse Taker unit is a small Apothecary squad that removed gene seed from Astral Claws and non Astral Claws wounded. Basically they try to collect all of the gene seed they can in order to create more legionnaires. This is just about the worst thing one chapter can do to another. Naturally I had to paint one unit up! I used Fabius Bile's backpack thing along with regular apothecary bits.

In terms of color, I am still unsure how to paint white cleaning. No matter how smooth I think the blending is, the moment I take a photo the edge highlights of pure skull white stand out like sore thumbs. I plan to paint the shoulder pads blue and gold like regular troopers. I was also thinking about adding highlighted battle damage as well as blood spatters. These are gruesome marines after all.

Astral Claws Retaliator Squad Sergeant

Since Bolt Gun did not look that great to me, I decided to try a second AC paint test using codex grey as the base. After I had airbrushed Codex Grey on, I increasingly added white to the mixture and sprayed downwards from the top of the mini. The initial effect was great, so I decided to go one step further and wash on a heavily thinned badab black wash. The wash pooled in places, which should not have been a surprise to me these.

I really like this mini. I've never tried to paint a space marine holding his helmet, so this is a first. I have a little green stuff plume that is curing right now to put on the top of it. It may make the guy look a little too ultra-mariney, but since the Astral Claws used Ultramar as part of their legal defense for the independence of their realm it seems ok right now.

Astral Claws

In addition to a lovely FW Argus Lighter, my wife purchased a photo booth for me to use in updating this blog. It turns out my cell phone picts were not well received!

Since the Argus Lighter is for my Astral Claws army list, I thought I should give an AC paint scheme a try. I used very thinned down bolt gun metal, followed by chainmail line highlighting and a watery badab black wash for the metal portions. I did not want to use all metallics on the mini, so the gold was done with foundation yellow. I am not happy with how the mini turned out, both in terms of my painting skill or the methods used. I think the gold really needs to be metallic gold and the blue darker. I think I will use shaded grey instead of bolt gun metal for the body. My difficulty in painting metallics is one of the primary reasons my Grey Knights have never been completed.

Does anyone have a good recipe for astral claws that I could use?

I really enjoyed getting back into the swing of things last night, and even had some fun with the light booth. (hence the random chaos minis---or should I say Astral Claw allies!)