Cadian 101st and Friends

So, now I come onto building some more Command units.
If you read my Start by taking stock entry, you’ll know that I made a decent start on five out of the ten total models underway for filling out my two intended Command Squads, one for the command of 7th Company and the other for the same Company’s Second Platoon.

Well I have another Command Squad kit now so I can make a start on another three of them. Okay, that sounds less impressive now I type it out but I am still waiting on two more models from other sources: a Cadian Castellan kit for Colonel Sparker who, as a high ranking senior commissioned officer, deserves a fancy uniform and the Cadian upgrade kit as there are a bunch of medical bits and bobs for Chief Medicae Banting.

Well, that still leaves some room to get on with bits. Namely: Colour Sergeant Tyson, Sparker’s Aide; Kavik and Elias Orugi. So I got my trusty sectioned box out and started prepping the bits to work with.

Here you can see the latest parts marked out with prepped bases. Lets go ahead and clip the pieces and get them all set out.

*insert smash cut here*

“But wait, that looks like four sections filled in there!” I hear some the eagle eyed amongst you call out. Well yes…
One of the models in the kit that I was originally less than enamoured with was the “Veteran with medipack”. This was a very, very specific model with a folded stretcher strapped to it’s back and arrayed with medical kit bags that I felt didn’t give much in the way of ability to customise the look of a command squad. Well, I did find a place for this model with Evrind, Chief Medicae Banting’s Orderly.
So having made on a version of him with the first kit I decided to start working on a second as, of all the models that I started on using the first set, this one gave me quite a bit of analysis paralysis. Do I make them more of a soldier that happens to be carrying some medical gear? Do I make him medicae personal who happens to carrying a lasgun? So here I asked myself “why not both?” I’m not about to use the second instance of this model anywhere else in the army so lets build up the second one and take it in a different direction.~
The first is very much “soldier who is carrying medical stuff”, something like a stretcher bearer or a corpsman. He’s largely devoid of additional medicae insignia and fixtures. This second one is planned to used an arm I spotted in the upgrade kit that is handing over what looks like a blood bag or a drip feed and there are some nice helmets with medicae symbols replacing the aquilla but without the extra gubbins on them that I think will make for a nice “junior medical” look compared to the planned all-the-gubbins-definitely-a-senior-medicae look I’m planning for Banting.

Maybe I’ll pick one over the other when their done. Maybe I’ll end up with both if they look fun to paint up.

Anyway, enough waffling: lets build.

So there we go.

Now, usually I would go into each of these models and how I picked the different pieces but
A) you can read about much of my process on previous posts and
B) it would be a lot of waffle about the plans I wrote in Who are the Cadian 101st and waiting until the much touted upgrade kit arrives to fill in the blanks so rather than that I think I will leave this off here for now.

Instead, I plan to come back and do a more detailed review of the Command units once I have them completed as they are all individual characters with some specific choices rather than the mass just-make-them-different-enough-to-not-draw-the-eye of the rank and file infantry.

I got a nice little package recently, some 3D printed heads from MGS Miniatures acquired via their Etsy store. I got these as some possible heads for Lt. Arminka and Blanchez and as a quality test on the printing.

I have to say, I am initially impressed.
I’ll be giving these a clean up and seeing if they fit (I suspect the one on the right will not as there is a lot more pony tail than I expected) and maybe order a couple more to test fit and play around with. These work out at about £1 per head which I think is reasonable for getting those few key characters well represented.
I’ll report back on these (and any more I get a hold of) in the Command unit review by virtue of some of them should end up on a couple of the models.

Annnnnnd that’s that for now. I have about run of road until I the other kits arrive to finish these off. I’ve already been thinking about painting these and I have decided that my first step is to airbrush all the Infantry with Zandri Dust from Citadel for that classic Cadian Guard Khaki as a base layer and work up from there. The hitch is that my hobby space is also my home office so putting everything away and setting up the airbrush is something I like to commit to as a weekend job where I can get a bunch of stuff done before packing away again for another week of gainful employment. As such I’ll really want all of these models fully built before I start applying this first layer.

I’ll probably find something else to keep me out of trouble, after all: I too have the ubiquitous pile of potential waiting to have something else plucked out and worked on. Hopefully the hiatus will be short and I’ll be back before too long with a brief update on filling in the remaining blanks for these units.

Until then friends.