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.

Death Korps of Krieg Test Mini

I spent the morning washing my DKOK army, hopefully removing any mold release that may have been left on the models post casting. If you do not wash your minis before you paint them, I urge you to start doing so. Before I learned the trick I ruined an Inquisitional Rhino with those cool forge world doors. Mid-way through painting the paint rubbed off the doors. The model is still awaiting a bath in green stuff nearly a year on out.

I could not resist a quick paint job, and grabbed one of the grenadier melta-gunners to see how washes would look on him.

I am not sure about the paint job. I was planning on making the DKOK mint colored like my valdor, but right now I am not sure. Should I commit to this paint job?

Inquisitor Retinue And Slaves

These two sets of models sit with stark contrast of another. The dark eldar slave models are very old, and I painted them as a sort of lark. Imagine my Inquisitor strolling into battle with 'bodyguards' of this type. The other models are forge world resin retinue models from the Hector Rex kit. The two sets of models are so different looking it is as if two completely different companies made them. The models inhabit different universes.

FYI Don't gleefully show your wife the dark eldar slave models if you her to keep playing 40k games!

Dark Angels Codex Updated!

At long last a new Dark Angels faq upgrades DA equipment to 5th edition! That makes my thunder hammer, storm shield, and cyclone missile launcher guy awesome! When I built this model I did it just for fun. In 4th edition codex game terms he just does not make sense. But now, he is a beast, with that shield finally providing protection, and his cyclone firing two shots instead of one. I think I may catch the DA fever again and paint up another terminator squad!

Imperial Guard Advisors

My new painting style does not fit very will with my existing guard, but I decided to keep experimenting with it just because. I painted up two Psykers. One of them is a Forgworld model that comes with the Hector Rex model. Some of the details are still not done, and I have no idea how to base them. Right now I am focussing on just having fun painting.

I've found a lot of different quality in the resin. Some of the models do not obey human anatomy very well. I wonder if this is just a case of old fw versus new fw. All of the newer models have been spot on.

I think it might be time to finally start the Krieg army. I am getting comfortable with making my own washes which seems to be a pre-requisite when working with resin kits.

Titan Crew, Imperial Advisors, and Inquisitional Servitor

I finally broke down and painted some of my forgeworld stuff. I have a titan, death korps, and early mark space marines to paint, and have been avoiding painting them. Basically the minis were so nice I did not want to ruin them. I think I just had a case of the painting fear!

So first things first. These minis are small! Space Marines look like giants compared to them. This also means that the details are incredibly hard for me to paint. At times I was relying on brush mojo to magically land the paint where it needed to be. I found that washes were the easiest ways to paint these up, so I created soupy/wash like paint mixtures and used them instead of full strength paint. The details while hard to paint were also loads of fun to paint. I had so much fun with the FW stuff, I yanked a few imperial advisors that have been gathering dust on my painting table and sploshed some color on them as well.

the Servitor mini came out a little differently than I expected. I wanted to keep him off-white in order for him to fit in with the rest retinue, and as a way to avoid the deep red normally associated with servitors. The tiny little dots of purple on his head were also a last minute addition. I like them, but afterwards they started reminding me of Admiral Akbar, the squid-like, general from Star Wars.

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.