YoreTime to clear out the picture roll in my phone, which covers late October and early November!
November is kicking off with some good momentum, and I have plenty more Blood Angels in the works for December and beyond.
Digging Yore? Check out my book!Feo was fun to build, but I was equally excited to work on his base — because at a staggering 90mm wide, it presented a huge canvas (relatively speaking) to tell a little story. So I decided to tell a two-part story.
Part one is the back, where I added the remnants of an overrun Imperial Guard post.
It continues on the front, with the remains of one of the Marines who came to Armageddon to assist a failing Guard mission (sorry, Astra Militarum — my brain automatically thinks “Imperial Guard”). When I get texture paint all packed in around him, I’m hoping it’ll look like his corpse is half-buried in the dust, with just his back, one Power Fist, and bleached skull visible.
And given that one theme of my army is “everyone wears a helmet,” how did this poor Marine die? From a head wound…because he wasn’t wearing a helmet. (It’s hard to make out, but his skull has a crack down the front.)
Mmm, slimy poop Chiclets.
The sandbags were outside my wheelhouse (nothing in my army is brown…) and required some fumbling, including a full repaint and re-shading job. I eventually realized that it didn’t need a painted-on layer, just base > wash > drybrush > drybrush — and the recipe I used for the stone ruins on my Assault Squad’s bases. Hopefully they read as sandbags rather than stone.
Next up, adding the texture paint — and building a convincing hill under and around my Ultramarine. This base swallowed the remnants of my second bottle of Astrogranite Debris and a good chunk of a fresh one, too.
I had to break up the line of the hill (which is going to take like a week to dry…), so I made little terraces for tufts and marked them in MS Paint. We’ll see if that does the trick!
I’m not sure how convincing the hill is, and I wish I’d mounted a few skulls on posts to add some variety (building the level up to the skulls, like I did with the fallen Marine’s skull). But I test-tufted it, and held a Marine up in front of it in the same position, to see if it looked like there could be the bottom of a dude under there — and it does seem to work.
Feo’s scenic base uses the following for the non-standard elements (skulls, etc.), as always mostly based on GW’s Parade Ready recipes:
For the Ultramarine’s pauldron decal, I applied it just like normal but then varnished it before doing the dust/weathering drybrush layer; I worried that drybrushing might tear the decal. When I’m ready to varnish the whole model, that bit will get a second coat (which is fine).
I love how huge this model is! I can’t wait to be able to do the full line-up: old Marine, Primaris Marine, refrigerator Dread, Contemptor, Redemptor.
Digging Yore? Check out my book!Lots of ground to cover in this omnibus post!
I’ve been mulling over what painting goal to set for myself after finishing my initial 2,000-point army, and this morning it hit me: a new point total is the perfect goal for me. So that’s my next miniatures goal: paint another 1,000 points of Blood Angels.
Unlike “finish the 2nd Company,” which limits what I can paint (because of the Blood Angels’ force organization), painting another thousand points gives me freedom on that front — but also a manageable, specific goal. At my current pace 1,000 points should take me 3-4 months to complete, and will give me lots of new army options when I can finally play the game.
Squad Barakiel includes a few elements I’ll forget in a month, so as always I’m writing down the colors I used for them. This is GW’s parade ready guide with a couple of minor tweaks.
My main project this week is finishing up Squad Barakiel (the last one I need for my first army!), but because I never let my “minis queue” run dry I’ve also got four other units on the go in various stages:
The Contemptor is perhaps the cheapest date I’ve encountered yet, assembly-wise — he’s simpler than some of the single Marines I’ve put together! The downside is that he has almost zero posability, which is always a bit of a bummer. But I put him together in under an hour, from sprue to fully assembled; for a large unit that’s pretty minimal.
I have a feeling he’ll be one of those figures that shines once he’s painted, when his boring pose comes to life.
I think of this stage as “a clown ate a bunch of crayons and took a shit on these minis,” because they look so bad when I’m done base-coating them. Then the clown cleans up a bit of his shit during touch-ups — and after that, every stage makes the mini look better and better. Needing to believe in that future while I’m base-coating is part of what makes this stage take so long.
I’m driving pretty hard at wrapping up Barakiel before the end of the month. Will it happen? We shall see!
Digging Yore? Check out my book!One of the things that works for me about maintaining my miniature-painting streak (as I write this post on October 17, I’m on day 238) is that “dormant” periods — the days I don’t really feel like working on minis — still involve forward progress, even if it’s minimal. And then when I do feel like painting, it doesn’t feel like I’m grinding the whole machine back into motion — because it never came to a dead stop.
This past weekend, rested up from a relatively light week on the minis front, I tucked into Squad Zahariel in earnest. I spent five hours or so doing their touch-ups and shading on Saturday, which was a blast.
Of course as soon as I started working on their Abaddon Black base coat, I realized that I’d paired two Jump Pack tops and bottoms incorrectly, resulting in one with braided cords appearing from nowhere, and another (less of a problem) with them disappearing without an actual termination.
I was long past the point of re-gluing, so I slapped a couple of spare purity seals on the most egregious of the two figures and called it good. Fully painted, I don’t think my goof will be too noticeable.
I hate wasting paint, so as always I had another unit on deck to absorb any leftover colors on my palette: Squad Barakiel — my final squad.
I tried out a new Velvetouch size for touch-ups that I absolutely love: 20/0 Monogram Liner. It’s perfect for precise dots of color nestled between other colors, as well as for lines which cross an area of a different color — both of which the Death Company models have in abundance.
I’ve only painted one black-armored figure for this army so far, Chaplain Arrius, so he’s out as my reference for doing the highlights on Zahariel. The Death Company minis have so many cords, seals, skulls, and other elements which cross over their expanses of black that a fair amount of shading comes into play — which I dig, because not shading the actual black knocks out one of the techniques on which I rely to produce minis I’m happy with.
I feel like Squad Zahariel has had enough WIP shots devoted to them, so I’m going to call it here. Next time they show up, it’ll be in the lightbox.
Digging Yore? Check out my book!I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t finish Squad Adamo in September — the first month I didn’t finish any figures for my 40k army since I started working on it in March. But given the state of the world and the stuff I have going on, it makes a certain amount of sense.
This was my first time painting yellow helmets, and Averland Sunset followed by Agrax Earthshade left them quite brown. Even with nearly full coverage on a Yriel Yellow layer, followed by Flash Gitz Yellow highlights, they still looked stained and odd.
So I backtracked and did another coat of Yriel, and then redid some of the highlights, and got a less-poopy look out of them. They wound up sort of flat, though; not sure how to correct that next time I do one of these squads.
Like most of my minis, Squad Adamo looks better from a distance than it does up close like this. Lots of flaws!
I’d originally had them as down as 7th squad, and was excited to see that the little lightning bolts I needed for their knees were standard transfers — until I looked more closely and saw that the “lightning bolts” were actually wings. A bit of Googling suggested that making them 9th squad (for the yellow wings) wasn’t out of line with the chapter’s force org, so 9th squad they became.
Not my best work, but they’re not awful or anything — and they’re done. I’ll get them into the lightbox in a future post. Onwards!
Digging Yore? Check out my book!Thus far I’ve held strong on my plan to not work on any minis outside/beyond my initial 2,000-point army, but lately I just haven’t been in the mood to paint — and when I don’t want to paint, I assemble. So I’ve started on my first post-army mini: Feo, my first Primaris Redemptor Dreadnought.
This kit has a ton of movable parts on it: the sarcophagus armor opens and closes, shoulder joints rotate and move laterally, elbows and wrists move, and the front guns rotate. But as with most GW kits I’ve built, I ran into two issues: either the joint was loose, which doesn’t appeal to me for a mini I’m going to transport and use in play, or I couldn’t figure out how to paint the part fully while retaining its ability to move.
Unlike the smaller OG dreadnoughts, even the shoulder rotation comes with built-in complexity: a keyed joint rather than a simple press-fit peg, and huge armor plates that all but prevent arm removal once installed. Seeing that made my course pretty clear. As I’ve done before, I treated all those glorious movable parts as posable parts.
After finding a pose I liked — a lengthy process given the size and posability of the figure — I glued everything in place. The only exceptions are the waist (until he’s mostly painted) and the mount for the primary weapon, which is a nice snug joint and gives me the flexibility of switching Feo to plasma.
I screwed up and glued the legs into place too soon, resulting in a marked forward cant to the body — and making the fitment of the ankles a bit sloppy. Fortunately this kit is designed to be modified, with molded-in parts you can shave off in order to achieve running poses, etc. (or leave on for a figure that looks a lot like what’s on the box). So I shaved off those nubbins and got a better fit.
A lot of Feo’s components need to be able to hold a fair amount of weight (by miniature standards, anyway!), so the gluing process took me several days in order to allow for 12-plus hours of curing time for each stage. I’ve learned that with GW minis a fussy build process results in a deeply personalized and cool finished product, and that was true here as well.
I have two Redemptor kits, and initially I figured I’d make one the plasma guy and one the cannon guy. But those parts swap nicely, so I decided to make one Dread — Feo — with his sarcophagus exposed, in a pose that looks like he’s venting heat or taking a breather mid-battle, cannon low and at rest, and the other in a buttoned-up, aggressive posture with his sarcophagus covered and all weapons at the ready. I love the look of this kit with the “jaws” of front plating open; so many cool details are exposed that way.
Who opens their outer layer of armor mid-battle, leaving “only” the Ceramite of the sarcophagus itself to protect them? A fearless Space Marine — perhaps even a reckless one…like a Marine who pushed his limits too far and took a mortal wound, landing him inside a Dreadnought. (Feo was initially named Impavido, Italian for “fearless,” but it was too long to possibly fit on the tiny scrolls on his sarcophagus.)
I’ve picked out the scenery for his base (a half-buried dead Ultramarine and an overrun Guard post) and clipped his Macro Plasma Incinerator, so the next steps are all lined up. But before I really tuck into Feo, though, I need to finish painting my last three squads.
Digging Yore? Check out my book!Even though most of the pics in this WIP post are of Squad Adamo, my Death Company gang, Squad Zahariel, gets most of the words.
For the figures, I liked the tweaks the GW studio guide puts on the usual red and gold used on most of my Marines. I’ve stuck with that scheme for the most part, and the end result is that many colors are handled differently than usual:
With the Death Company color scheme reversing the usual Blood Angels colors — black dominant, red accents — I wanted to make sure their bases added some pops of color beyond my usual skulls and rocks. Other base elements are as per usual, but the stuff I added to these particular bases is covered below:
As expected, the Death Company color scheme makes a nice palate cleanser after the red, red, red of the rest of my army. Onwards!
Digging Yore? Check out my book!As of September 1, I now have paint on every unfinished model in my Blood Angels army. Squad Adamo is mostly base-coated; Squad Zahariel, my Death Company unit, is primed and fully based; and Squad Barakiel, my Terminator Assault Squad, is primed and partially based.
I’ve painted 15 Space Marines in a month before, so it’s doable for me to completely finish my first-ever 2,000-point army in September. But I think it’s more likely that I’ll finish Squad Adamo and either fully or mostly complete Squad Zahariel in September, leaving Squad Barakiel (and the balance of Zahariel, if any) for October.
Actually playing, which once felt like a possibility at the end of this summer, and then seemed more realistic to imagine in spring of 2021, now — depressingly — feels like it might not happen until 2022. On the flipside, it’s not unreasonable for me to imagine that I could paint another 2,000-4,000 points of Blood Angels in 2021. I’ll take my silver linings where I can find them!
Digging Yore? Check out my book!Because I’ve slowed my posting pace and am queuing posts a bit more sporadically, I’ve actually finished Judgment as I sit here writing this post. But WIP posts are neat (I like them, at least), so I’m wrapping up my photo roll for Judgment and adding in a bit of my Assault Squad for good measure.
I just updated BattleScribe and checked my totals again, and finishing Judgment will put me over 75% done points-wise. Onwards!
Digging Yore? Check out my book!I hit my stride with Judgment in early August, blowing through shading and into layers. That tipping point always feels good.
This WIP post compiles a couple weeks’ work.
With Judgment on the back nine, I got out Squad Adamo — already primed — so I could work in parallel.
I thought a bit about how to handle the ruined stone structures on 3/5 of this squad’s bases, because I wanted them to stand out from the brown/grey stones of Armageddon, and settled on brown. The only brown I have is Mournfang Brown, which looks like poop.
But once the wash is down, it starts to look a lot less like poop — and I had faith in my first layer, 2:1 Kislev Flesh:Mournfang Brown.
Bases are the usual except:
Ditto the models, except:
This was my first time drybrushing Ryza Rust rather than spot-painting with it, and I like this approach quite a bit. It’s easier to take a light, subtle touch and make the metal look old and rusty, rather than just rusty. Pure spot-painting seems to work well for something poorly made that’s had a few years to rust — like Ork scrap and vehicle parts — but doing it on these metal elements would be overkill.
As general Blood Angels or Rhino, except:
Finishing order is probably also worth noting for Future Martin’s benefit:
After Judgment, just 15 Space Marines separate me from my first full-fledged finished 40k army (say that five times fast!).
Digging Yore? Check out my book!