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Sons of Baal

A disturbingly long time ago, I was very excited to finally be owning an army I had wanted since I was ten years old. The full story of my adoration of this army is contained in that link so feel free to join me in misty eyed reminiscence, but suffice to say, I owned damn near the entire third company of the Blood Angels. Then something both wonderous and terrible happened: Primaris. The new primaris marines were so gorgeous. The sculpts were great, the scale was finally correct, everything was great... except that my firstborn lads looked like children next to them. And at the time? There wasn't a "primaris army", it was more like auxilliaries. Not enough to excite me. Plus, y'know, I'd painted a 100+ Bangles... that's a lot of Bangles... So I resigned myself to my beautiful boys being a relic of the past and got on with other projects. 

[Cue Galadriel voice] But then time passed, and Primaris got more and more units and felt more and more like a real army. And eventually it came to pass that a new edition of my most beloved boys was being released... In the month of my birth... it was like a sign. Even better, the rest of the Beard Bunker also saw it as a sign and got me that gorgeous army box as a birthday present! The time was clearly upon us. The Blood Angels were making their long-promised return to the sector after the events of the Samalut crusade.


I needed some test models to get the colours right (like hell was I going to do the old laborious seven-stage blended armour process, nope) and Infernus squads are like a fiver on ebay so they seemed like a fine option to test the scheme on. Primaris have a lot of edges and I thought a drybrush technique might just be the win on this one... I was right. The method is as follows:

  1. Prime Mephiston Red
  2. Basecoat Mepiston Red (it's more intense than the spray)
  3. Wash with a mix of Mephiston Red, Doombull Brown and Black, about 3:1:1 and thinned with water and thinner. 
  4. Sequential drybrushings of Mephiston Red, Evil Suns Red and Wild Rider Red. Each drybrush lighter than the last. Wild Rider is really just to pick up the edges. 
  5. Basecoat the rubber in Vallejo Dark Rubber
  6. Basecoat any hard black components in Corvus Black
  7. Basecoat any black leather in Vallejo German Camo Brown Black
  8. Basecoat all the metalwork in Army Painter Gunmetal
  9. Wash all the black and metalwork bits in Nuln Oil
  10. Highlight the hard black with Eshin Grey, the leather in the basecoat with a bit of deck tan thrown in and the metal with platemail metal if needed.

And other than details you are damn near done. This lets me do batches of five lads in a very reasonable time. We were on. 


I also had some Reivers lying around from a Kill Team project that never really got off the ground so decided to do these too as part of the warm up for the main army. Reivers work quite well for Blood Angels, they're all on the edge of being terror troops at the best of times. I figure these lads are the Blood Angels that don't play well with others, indeed a lot of them are showing some signs of head injury so "lightly unstable" might not be an unfair charge. They've got funkier rules these days too, being able to switch off someone's OC stat is a fun thing to have access to. Because I'd made them for a Kill Team there's a mix of weapons but I'm just going to run them as a stab squad most of the time. 

You get a nice view of how the black leather looks different to the hard case black on the equipment in this shot. I've fully equipped these lads so that they have that tacticool, behind-the-lines look. Oh and the masks look so much better in black than bone. I also decided that I would do some dust weathering on the lower limbs of the armour. It makes the suits look more like the mini-vehicles that they are and emphasise that it's hard plates that can be covered in dust rather than cloth that flexes. This is done with light drybrushes of Baneblade Brown along with thin washes of the same. Gives a nice effect and helps root the models into their bases.

The final choice I made for this army was to eschew the lovely moulded shoulder pads from the army set (I've sent them to another member of the nerd herd who is doing the second company of the best space marines). I find the moulded pads fiddly and honestly am quite good with transfers anyway. I like the painted on look of well fitted transfers. Gives me a happy. So with this, the first two squads of the new, improved 3rd company are complete. I'll do more lore and good stuff in the future but wanted to introduce the basic painting choices and the journey to this army in this post. Expect a lot more to come. There's twenty maniacs with chainswords and a cuddledread at a minimum after all. Until then, lovely people

TTFN

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you Phil! I'm hoping it'll become so 😁

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  2. They are looking great, and, more importantly - "EASILY" DOABLE.
    Hope you have fun battling them against other bunkerites in a short time!

    Also, I am Blood-Raven-ing this painting recipe. For...."reasons".
    Easy Red is along-standing wish of mine, and while I trend more towards the Flesh Tearers spectrum of red boys, I have thirsted for a Red army for some time.

    Is the extra baseccoat of Mephiston red an absolute necessity, or could you skip to the wash step and compensate with heavier drybrush later without losing too much quality?
    Curious about the rationale and tradeoffs here.

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    Replies
    1. I think you could skip, for me the difference is subtle but the paint is more saturated than the spray so I fear I'll notice more of a difference

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