Death Wing

With the watcher in the dark completed it was time deal with the bit of this build I’ve been dreading and that was the standard. I’m not a hundred percent happy with the green but I’ve decided to leave it as it is for now and see how it fits in as a whole when everything else is finished. For the rest of I used the box art and took the approach of doing a base colour and then adding a highlight and shade for each colour. It’s a simply approach but I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. There’s still work to do on the terminator but didn’t want to get bogged down on the fine detail at the moment so this is what I’ve got so far and it’s on to the Apothecary next.

I wanted to make a bit of progress this weekend so I concentrated on the watcher in the dark. Nothing to special here with the robe being painted using a base of scale colour black forest green. I added some black for the shading and some white for the highlights. The inside of the hood is imply a flat black to give that feeling that there is actually nothing there. For the sword I used a black metallic which I then highlighted with a Vallejo chrome. I particularly like the way it fits on base at the hilt end of the sword symbol.

For the model themselves I built them up with mix of the normal terminator parts and the ones for the knights. After all they are supposed to be command squad. I’ve magnetised several of the arms and I’ve also added a few bits from the Dark Angels upgrade spur to give a little bit more character to a few of the models before they are primed using Vallejo black surface primer and then gave them a zenith highlight with Vallejo grey surface primer.

I decided to try and do the bone white for the armour using the airbrush and to do this I used Vallejo desert yellow and held the model upside down and sprayed this on to all of the black areas. Then with everything the right way round I used Vallejo bleached bone letting the airbrush try and blend with the desert yellow. I then used Vallejo ivory shooting down and stepper angle to be a final highlight.

For the tabards / cowls I used a combination of Scale 75 dark forest and Vallejo NATO black. I’ve struggled to get this smooth so far so there’s a lot more work needed here. I’ve also made a start of some of the details for the arms but a long way to get yet.

For the base I raided my collection of basing material and picked out three sheets of textured plasticard. These have the stone effect I was looking for and would make things much easier than trying to carve them out of a normal sheet of plasticard. To get everything to line up nicely and allow me cut out the sections that would go on the actual bases I glued these sheets to a thin sheet of plan plasticard. To get a good bond I used Slaters Mek pack which is a liquid plastic cement that I find works really well for this type of job. Once this was all set I marked out where I wanted to the models to stand and using a disk cutting tool I started to cut out the individual bases. I didn’t cut all the way through at this stage as I wanted to add a bit of carved design to the base to add a bit more interest.

I drew out the basic Dark Angel Chapter symbol on the based and scaled it to fill as much of the base as I could. My original plan was to go with a more ornate design but this being the first time I’ve tried to do something like this I decided to be a bit more cautious. With the design drawn out is set to work carefully carving it out.

Once I was happy with the design I went back to cutting out the disks for the bases. I was happy with how these turned out and once I had sanded the sides down to smooth everything up the individual pieces would fit nicely without too big of a gap. The individual bases were a little larger than the top of a standard 40mm base but I decided that as there sitting on top of a standard base then everything would be fine.

To get some depth to the main base, which would allow the gaming base to fit flush I used some cork board, again from my basing supplies and glued the plasticard section to this. Once the PVA had fully dried I cut out the holes to line up with those in the plasticard topper. When I dropped in the gaming bases they were sitting a little bit low so I needed to add a plasticard disk to the bottom to get everything to line up. This worked out quite nicely as it allowed me to drill a hole into this piece to add a magnet that lined up with a magnet in the bottom of the gaming base.

The disks were then glued to another thicker piece of plasticard before I used PVA again to join the cork section to it. Once all of this was set I used some thin strips of Plasticard to tidy up the sides before giving it a final sanding to smooth everything off.

The painting was straight forward, if somewhat tedious. The basecoat was done with the airbrush as was just a black Vallejo surface primer. From there I used Citadel XXX for a heavy dry brush followed by another dry brush of Citadel XXX and then a final dry brush of Citadel XXX. This was then given a wash of Citadel Nuln Oil to help blend things together. For the Dark Angels symbol I used Vallejo Red surface primer follow by Badger Ghost Tint Blood Red. Then on to the really mind numbing part which was to edge highlight each of the individual stones. I’ve imagined the light coming from the front left as you look at the base and highlighted the edges accordingly. I think this last bit give a more natural feel so it’s well worth the effort.

A friend has been asking me to paint up some Death Wing for him for ages and I’ve always resisted. Mainly because whilst I consider myself an ok painter everything I do is because I want to paint it and not because I have to. So I don’t want to end up in position where I have to get something finished because someone else is depending on it. Plus I always paint things how I feel they should look as opposed to how someone else wants them to look. Anyway the long and short of it is that I’ve finally cracked, and the promise of a bottle of spiced rum had nothing to do with it, and agreed to paint up a command squad.

So the plan is quite simple, a five man Terminator command squad with an Apothecary, Heavy Weapon guy and Standard Bearer. For the heavy weapon guy I wanted to have the option swap out the weapons so these will be magnetised, and if I’m doing that for him then I’ll also do it for the other guys. Although there are limited number of shoulder pads so I won’t paint up all the different options for the other guys.

As this is something of special piece I’ve decided to do a combination display base / movement tray. Not looking at anything to fancy here so I’m going to go with a stone floor to represent some part of the Rock. Then have the gaming bases recessed into this and held in place by magnets. Or at least that’s the plan.