When Maisey painted a demi-company of Dark Angels, all with freehand squad markings, I envied his madness. When Tom painted a whole battle company of Raven Guard, I envied his madness. When Jeff painted a battle company of Blood Angels using, of all things, an 'Eavy Metal painting guide, I really envied his madness.
I envy them no longer, for the six frosted Smurfs in today's post put me in the same sanitarium: a full battle company of Space Marines, all lovingly highlighted and covered in freehand heraldry. Upon completion of the company I immediately took to our gaming group's WhatsApp thread to share my thoughts and reflections at that time.
It's a heady mix of pride and confusion (I made this! Wait, I made this?). There's also a certain amount of excitement that I can paint whatever auxiliary units I feel like without needing to worry about how they could affect the Third Company's composition. This was a particular thorn when fitting three-man squads into the company, and I did take some liberties. For example, Squad IX has a five-man Aggressor Squad, when in theory there should be three or six of them. I just use maths to pay an appropriate per-model points cost for the five man unit, and no-one's objected yet.
Conversely there are six of these new Eradicators, and they're also from Squad IX, bringing that squad up to 11 men. That's a surplus man! That's not Codex-compliant!
Oh yes it is, Precious, because I have painted his kneepad to indicate that he's a reservist from the Ninth Company. This is because I am, and this is important for my fictional space dad, a details man.
At some point I shall set aside the multiple hours required to execute a proper photo shoot of the whole company and talk more about how I've structured the whole thing, but right now I'm rushing a paint job on an Impulsor. Here's a nasty shelfie instead:
Besides the white-knuckle thrill that is an alternate kneepad colour, I made one other decision of note, and that was to use normal Tacticus helms instead of the Gravis helms. I never hugely liked the design, and when the Apothecary Biologis came out wearing his Tacticus helm I realised how much more I liked the look. To my eye it helps emphasise how chonky the rest of the armour is, and as an added bonus, the wearer is now capable of looking left and right (the Gravis helm's filter plugs bang into the gorget and prevent the marines turning their heads - that's why the stock Heavy Intercessor kit has heads sculpted with that part of the helmet shaved off to make them fit).
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| Credit to the sculptors, these pouches actually fit on the model. As with all my Gravis minis, I remove most of the cables on their legs, leaving only the stumps on the actuators to serve as emergency locomotive batteries in the event of a power unit failure, enabling the encumbered marine to walk off the field to the nearest transport. |
I did of course ensure one of the helmets as a little gold skull on it to denote the combat squad leader, since Squad IX's sergeant, Lastratus, leads the Aggressors. I remain torn on whether to name combat squad leaders. On the one hand it always feels more bland when I don't have a name to refer to. On the other hand, ten sergeants and a bunch of characters is a whole lot of fictional names to remember, and indeed, to come up with. So on balance this poor bastard gets to remain anonymous, at least for now.
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| Brother Namelessius, combat squad leader |
The squads of the Third Company may be complete, but there are still so many things I would like to add to round out the strike force. More battleline units from the Reserve Companies, more transport capacity, more drop pods, regular and assault Terminators...
However many Cobalt Scions I paint, it seems the woad goes ever on and on.
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