Gorram's Grand Army Project

Given how much I like painting small minis and enjoy the novels from the Warhammer sci fi wing, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Legions Imperialis turned my head. The fact that there are 12-15 other people at the club also picking it up made it an easy purchase.

As for the legion, no hesitation, it is Sons of Horus. I love the colours and I like the novels around them. I had to do some wiki-crawling to decide on a Knight House for future expansion. So I know this is SoH as they were on the novel Vengeful Spirit. That’s as far as I’m going at this point in terms of tying into the lore. My research phase caps out at “yeah I’ve read that book, I like those colours, they’d be fun to paint”.

Made the mistake of going with Business Daddy for my pre-order who didn’t get their full allocation and then failed to bother saying anything for six days. I’m not mad, just disappointed. There’s no point in cancelling because no one has the full order in stock so I’d be waiting regardless. I went over to another online shop and picked up a box of infantry and rhinos (safe to say there will never be too many of those in my army) because it has been a very bad week and I make poor financial decisions when emotionally ruined.

I’m not going to write screeds about the models. Let’s be honest, other people’s opinions are boring. You’ll know what you think, nothing I say is going to influence that at this point. 

I did what I would usually do working at this scale and mounted them all on tongue depressors and primed them black. I like working from black because it cheats the recesses. I did a couple of test models and found that the colour of paint I had to hand for Sons of Horus wasn’t going to cover in one coat. This army is potentially going to run to thousands of models – I’m not doing two coats.

A quick trawl on YouTube, a re-prime and a trip to GW for one Contrast paint and this is what I’ve got:

1. Prime white/wraithbone 
2. Terradon Turquoise contrast for the armour
3. Black Templar for the weapons and to break up the armour on the larger models. The Terminators are also all Black Templar to be Abbadon’s Justicarum.
4. Blood Angels red contrast for plumes, etc
5. Retributor Gold for sword hilts, termie shoulder trim and some banner pole details
6. Gentle dry brush of Leadbelcher over weapons and Contemptors for weathering
7. Nuln Oil 50/50 with water as an all over wash to just tone down a tiny bit
8. Bases are sponged with three paints (Incubi Darkness, Stegadon Scale Green and Thunderhawk Blue) to add texture without actually adding to the thin bases. Rim with Black.
9. Transfers

That’s it. 

All told, the whole box took around 3 hours to paint to this stage but another two hours to do the transfers, bases and gluing it all together. The scheme comes with only one minor change from this *video here*

I’m really happy with the armour colour, it’s going to look great across a whole army. It was also just delightful getting back to smaller scale minis after a few months of painting 28mm.