Finally Finishing an Army

So here is where my army has gotten thus far! I have gotten the basics of the army done, so I’ll post some pictures of what I have done. Let’s start with my characters. From the top down we have Captain Aurelius Caesterlus (they are Ultramarines, so prepare for some terrible faux Latin!), a Fleet Officer attached to the 3rd Company. Chaplain Quintus Antonius, Lieutenant Caius Lucius, Company Ancient Marcus Signus, and finally Apothecary Galen Aelius.

Next up we have a few troop options, just some basic Intercessor Squads, so nothing really fancy here. The blue on my armour is actually very quick and simple. Spray the minis with the Macragge Blue spray from GW, then wash the whole thing with Nuln Oil, then heavy drybrush with Macragge Blue again, then lightly drybrush with Calgar Blue. Very quick and very simple!

Next up is some Veteran Inceptors, because no one said I couldn’t! Top tip for anyone else thinking about painting these chaps: sub-assemblies! The jetpacks can get in the way of some of the details at the back of the minis, for sure, and I found having the arms attached a bit tricky to work around too. From a tabletop perspective, I’m never sure what to do with this unit, but it needed painting all the same!

I also hate flying stands…

TANKS!

Well, tank. This Predator I built and painted to fit in with both 40k and 30k (though my 30k is even less complete than my 40k pile of plastic…). Another tip here is beware of Contrast over large areas. For ease of painting, I’ve started using Contrast for weapon casings and ‘soft parts’ of armour because it really is great for that sort of stuff, but on the casings for the Predator I needed a couple of coats to get it to look good. I am rather happy with how she turned out, though.

Another simple paintjob here was the tracks. Paint them silver (I use Leadbelcher) then wash them Nuln Oil, then Agrax Earthshade, then maybe a second coat of Agrax if you want them to look more worn.

My latest unit that I just got finished. Veteran Intercessors with Stalker Bolt Rifles. I don’t have any Eliminators just yet, so these lads will have to do! Contrast for skin is definitely your friend when you’re trying to get things done. I used Darkoath here, and it is so simple. For big characters I might do a bit of layering on top to really make it pop, but for these chaps it looks fine.

There’s also a few ‘Agents’ that I have lying around that fit in with the army. These are my Inquisitor, Freyja Nattdatter, conversion and my Vindicare Assasin. As you can probably work out, Freyja is based upon Greyfax but as I wanted an Alien Hunter, I got rid of the crossbow gun VERY carefully and replaced it with a Plasma Pistol from the Mk IV Marine kit. A simple headswap with an Escher and BOOM! almost-instant Inquisitor! The Vindicare is a little more boring, but both have some little Blue markers to show their allegiance.

As I said, it’s taken me a while to get this far with an army, and this is the furthest in over 10 years in the hobby… I’m sure I’m not alone in having that problem, so I thought I’d go over my system. It’s actually really simple, but it helps you to get an army rather than a few bits and bobs finished.

First things first, work out what is a ‘unit’ and what is a ‘big thing’ in the system in which your playing. In this case (40k) I counted characters and vehicles as ‘big things’ and any multi model group as a ‘unit’. However, for Bolt Action, for example, you may want to count your support teams and command teams as ‘big things’ alongside your Big Cats and Tommy Cookers (I may start another project about getting my Germans for Bolt Action done later on).

So now that you have everything split into the groups, you need to get started. Start with something you’d like to paint, but make sure to keep something nice back to reward yourself when you’re just sick of painting the same thing (Goblin players will understand). So let’s say we start with a Marine Lieutenant. A good choice, all games need an HQ, after all. For Bolt Action, maybe start with a Junior Officer and his bullet shields friends. Once that’s done, move onto a ‘unit’. Deff start with a ‘necessary’ unit like a troop choice for 40k, Battleline for AoS, Infantry Section for Bolt Action, ect. then once they are done, back to a ‘big thing’ then rinse and repeat.

It’s a simple system, but before you know it you’ll have what looks like an army getting painted and, even better, what PLAYS as an army painted. No longer the set-up of shame as you place ranks and ranks of grey plastic at the gaming club. Hope this helps someone out there, and happy painting!

This is the first mini I’ve started after this project started, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to go through some various steps I took to get my Redemptor Dreadnought (currently operating under the name ‘Jeffrey’) ready. So let’s get started with the skeleton of the mini!

And that’s the basic skeleton! At this point if you want to show some more ‘polished’ zones such as pistons, go ahead and paint some bright silvers in there, but remember to leave some shading in the recesses! Next up we’ll be moving onto the armour plates. The brilliant thing about this skeleton, though, is that is works regardless of the chapter you’ve picked, or created, to paint! After this things will be more Ultramarine focused, but you can always switch out some colours.

Hopefully this uploads this time round, but here is the sequel to the Big Blue Meanie (still currently called Jeffrey)! Now with more blue! The painting method I use for vehicles is a little different from that of my infantry, particularly here where we have some already painted stuff that can get in the way of a drybrush.

And there is the blue part done! Just a few other details like gun casings and gold details left to do!

Painting black is very simple with Contrast. Duncan Rhodes’ latest video on using it was a very helpful (even if I didn’t get it 100% right first time).

Plasma Coils! Always a fun task to pick what colour you want, but the Ultramarines are pretty standard, so I went with traditional blue. This did turn out a little more dull than intended, but I like to imagine this is after the weapon has just fired and is on ‘cooldown’.

I thought I’d briefly go over my basing technique before showing off the finished product. I did skip a few details, but they were mostly simple base/shade/highlight stages.

This update has taken a little longer than anticipated, but my Aggressors are finally done (minus bases but more on that later). I thought I’d do a full step-by-step guide for these guys, so here we go! I started from a Macragge Blue spray undercoat and used the GW range of paints to paint these guys up.

Well I finally reached beyond 1000pts. painted. A bit of a first for me, but painting blue gets a bit old after a while so I’m putting this project on hold for now. I’ll be starting up a more general project for the time being that will cover a wider range of minis. So I think I’ll change the status of this one for now.