Winter's a rubbish time for painting. Sure, I've got a daylight bulb so can work into the evening without too many issues, but the kicker is undercoating and varnishing. Both of these have to be done outdoors and still therefore need enough daylight to be able to see what you're spraying. And with a job that sees me stuck in the office through all the daylight hours, I'm limited to doing stuff with spraycans at weekends only.
However, in my silence on this page I've been busy elsewhere. I finally got around to doing test models for an Ultramarine and an Imperial Fist. I discounted the Ultramarine pretty quickly- I don't know, there's just something with painting that particular shade of blue that doesn't sit with me. I didn't enjoy painting the model and wasn't pleased with the outcome, so they're removed from the running.
The Imperial Fist, however, turned out quite a lot better than I expected, particularly given how much I normally detest painting yellow. In this case, because GW don't do a yellow foundation paint, I started with a base layer of orange, then drybrushed a golden yellow over the top followed by a second drybrush of a lighter yellow. To bring the whole thing together, I gave it a thin coat of strong-tone quickshade, let that dry, then sprayed a coat of matte varnish over the top to remove the glossiness. I'm pretty chuffed with the result. A lot of the time Imperial Fists get painted in a bright, garish yellow that looks a bit cartoony. But I've seen a few examples where they've been painted darker, dirtier and grittier- that's what I was going for here and it seems to have turned out OK.
(Apologies, by the way, for the poor-quality camera-phone pic taken at 6am this morning...)
Having said that, my army will not be Imperial Fists. I'm going with the initial gut instinct and the feedback on previous posts- Night Lords it is. Last weekend I managed to get most of the first model done- most being the appropriate term, I wasn't fully awake when I went down to undercoat, and thus left one arm on the side. That arm still needs to be undercoated and painted, but the rest of the figure is done- hopefully I'll be able to get a pic up this weekend. Then it's a choice of which unit to do this month- a Tactical squad, or an Assault squad?
The Imperial Fist isn't going to waste though. This blog is now also going to be home to a secondary project. I was originally sucked into the 40K hobby by a GW/MB collaboration called Space Crusade, a board game which pitted up to three players controlling five-man Astartes squads against a gamesmaster controlling the evil denizens of a space hulk. The game itself wasn't brilliant, but it was my first experience of painting miniatures and my entry into 40K. Also, the set I had (which was in Dutch- I had to muddle through the rules based on how the computer port of the game worked) was bought for me by my aunt who's no longer with us, so this will be a bit of thanks to her for getting me hooked on something awesome.
What I'll be doing is recreating Space Crusade on a more deluxe level, using the much better quality miniatures available today and rebuilding the board in both three dimensions and at a larger scale- using 50mm squares rather than the one-inch squares the original was based on. The net result should be a board around four feet square that will also be usable as a regular gaming table as well as for reliving my childhood with Space Crusade.
That, of course, means there'll be some variety on here- it won't just be midnight-clad Astartes, all deep blue and lightning bolts, I'll also be painting up a few Astartes from the Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and Ultramarines, as well as Greenskins and Necrons to round it out. The Night Lords will be able to do double-duty as the forces of Chaos in the board game- meaning, of course, I'm going to need a Night Lords dreadnought at some point...
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