Inspired by Art (2)

A while back (yipe, almost two years ago!) I made a post called Inspired by Art, where I showed a bunch of pictures of models that I had converted that was inspired by 40k artwork.

Death Company Marine

Here's the first member of my Death Company, Brother Elemiah.

It's hard to tell, but I tried to give him a very angsty, sleepless complexion. The pale skin didn't come out quite as starkly pale as I planned. For his eyes I wanted to make them look bloodshot with dark circles under them, so after I painted most of the face, I gave both eye-sockets a wash of red gore, which I think came out good, but doesn't show up well in the photo.

I still need to flock his base, so that part's not quite done yet.

Brother Noctis

Painted my first Space Hulk miniature this past weekend, Brother Noctis.

The highlights didn't photograph as well, but they weren't really "extreme" highlights to begin with.  I gave this guy a good coat of Testors Dullcote as well to give the paintjob some staying power.

I'll slowly work on the other miniatures from Space Hulk, but only once in a while to give me some variety from all my other projects...

Inspired by Art

Every so often I see a picture in a Codex or White Dwarf and I think, "That's really cool. I want a model that looks like that," and I feel inspired to try to duplicate it.

This first one is of a Tau Commander, the art coming from the original Codex Tau (I believe the same picture is in the current Codex: Tau Empire as well. It required a minimum of converting--I just had to trim off the lower legs at the knee joint and reattach them to make them bend more.

I always thought that this picture of Commander Farsight looked pretty cool, so I felt inspired to duplicate it. This one also required a minimum of conversion, I think it was just bending the knee a bit like with the Tau Commander.

Next is an assault sergeant from the new Blood Angels Codex--I thought that the Blood Angels marine with the pair of Lightning Claws looked particularly cool. This one required some more converting. I used one Lightning Claw from the Space Wolves Grey Hunters set (generously donated by Badelaire), while the other is from the Space Marine Commander's box set. I had to chop them off at the elbows and rotate them to get the angles right.  To match the breastplate, I used a normal tactical marine breastplate and filed off the skull, replacing it with a blood drop from the Death Company sprue.  The pauldrons (er...shoulder pads) are from the Death Company sprue and the Sanguinary Guard sprues.  For the legs I hacked off the right leg at the hip, and replaced it with another assault marine right leg (so now both legs are the ones from the assault marine sprue that are more bent at the knee).  I'm still working on the conversion (I have to greenstuff some power cables), so this is still a work in progress.

This last one is a model that Badelaire did, based on the picture of a particularly mean looking nob in Codex Orks. The arms and lower legs are from the Warhammer Fantasy Black Orcs sprue, while the choppa is converted using normal Ork Boyz bitz. The rest of the bitz are standard ork nobz bits.

Three Blood Angels

Now that the Blood Angels Codex is out I've started painting some up.  The problem is deciding on which painting method to use.  Since the early days the Blood Angels have appeared in various colors.  All red, but different shades of red--from a solid, medium red, all the way to brilliant orange.

Now my personal opinion is that the color of the Blood Angels should be, well...the color of blood.  And that's not orange.  It's definitely a deeper red than that--more Red Gore than Blood Red.  So I did up a series of three test models to try to determine which result looks the best:

Model 1:  Primed white, then painted with Red Gore.  This requires a few coats of Red Gore, but the result is pleasingly bright.  The color looks decent, but maybe it's a bit too pink?

Model 2:  Primed black, then painted with Red Gore.  This requires several coats of Red Gore because it takes a lot to cover up the black.  But like the Mechrite Red over black below, the black primer is good in that I get instant shading, and instant dark lines between the armor plates, which adds a lot to the final product, I think.

Model 3:  Primed black, then painted with Mechrite Red.  Mechrite Red has much better coverage than Red Gore does, although I still need to put on two coats to make it even.  And I'm not sure it's quite the right shade of red that I'm looking for.  I think that it has a slightly orange tinge to it.  Also, its opacity makes it look less like blood because real blood isn't completely opaque.

Now which looks the most like blood?  I need to figure out which one, because there are a lot of Blood Angels in the pipeline...

Sons of Sanguinius

After seeing the new Blood Angels sprue picture on Jawaballs' blog...


This guy needs some battle brothers...soon.

By Request: Epic Pictures

By popular demand, I took some pictures of my various Epic scale forces. Some of them are in a state of disrepair, and I caution that the paintjobs are woefully out of date, but here they are.

Back in my days of playing Space Marine with some fanaticism, I collected and fielded an entire chapter of Space Marines, my homegrown chapter, the Nightblades.Now the chapter is somewhat depleted, as I cannibalized some of them to paint up other Space Marines from other chapters.

Back in its heyday, the Nightblades' usual foe was the Eldar from the Yriel-Dyann craftworld:The Eldar were formidable opponents, and the superheavy grav-tanks, the Tempests, and the Eldar Exarchs caused me untold amounts of frustration. As did the Eldar Phantom Titans, which unfortunately got lost in the shuffle, so I don't have pictures of them. Suffice it to say, one of them was armed with twin Pulsars, and pretty much vaporized my titans with ease.

Speaking of which, here they are, Bellator, Pugnator, and Venator:
As you can see, they've seen better days, and are due for some attention from the Adeptus Mechanicus.

My Space Marines were on occasion aided by various other forces, including the Imperial Guard:
Imperial Knights:
and the massive Imperator Titan, the Iustus Potestas:

Occasionally, my Imperial forces ended up fighting the forces of Chaos, represented here by one of their Titans:

The Ork forces never got to see battle, but I still started building a force anyway. In the future sometime they may still take to the field.
The Orks, of course, had to have some heavy support.

After Epic 40k was released, I started building forces using the new strip bases. I ended up cannibalizing some the Nightblades to make my Ultramarines force:
Also, as an experiment, I wanted to paint up squads from other chapters, so I did up a squad each of Dark Angels, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, and another homegrown chapter, the Sea Warriors.The Sea Warriors were an experiment of mine, even their name wasn't set in stone. Their symbol was similar to that of the Dark Angels or Blood Angels, but instead of a winged sword or blood drop, the Sea Warriors had a winged trident.I had not developed the chapter background all that much, other than that they had a nautical theme.

Blood Angels Captain

This Blood Angels Captain in Artificer Armor was released way back in January 1991 (WD133). They even used him as the prototype for the now famous Captain Tycho. I picked him up way back then (along with the Ultramarines Captain in Artificer Armor and a generic Space Marine Captain with Terminator Honors, who is now serving as a Brazen Claw Captain), but I only got around to painting him recently. I finished him on New Year's Day, 2008. Seeing as the original model was only equipped with a bolter, I converted him to give him a little more close combat "punch" by arming him with a power fist. He'd make a great captain for a Blood Angels army.

Except for one thing... He's illegal in the new Blood Angels Codex. Blood Angels Captains cannot get Artificer Armor (unless you're Dante, Tycho, or Mephiston). What is more crazy is that a Blood Angels Captain can't even get a bolter.

Now for the most part, I like the Blood Angels Codex just fine. But little things like this annoy me.