The Beard Bunker

We have a guest post for you today from Pete, one of our group's newest nerds. He first featured in our 2024 roundup , and has since been hard at work bringing his Blood Angels up to 1,000 fully armed and operational points. Since his army looks repugnantly good for his first foray into painting miniatures, I asked him if he'd be up for sharing his progress here on the Bunker, and to my delight, he agreed! Over to Pete. There’s a moment in every hobbyist’s journey when the pile of plastic stops looking like a mountain to climb and starts looking like, well, an army. For me, that moment came as I finally hit 1,000 points of Blood Angels, led by Captain Matthias Virelan of the Blood Angels 2nd Company, and wondering how on Terra I’d actually managed to get there.  It didn’t happen in a burst of hobby productivity or a caffeine-fueled painting weekend (friends know caffeine and I are not on speaking terms). It happened slowly, glacially even, over countless ‘just one more highligh...

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....

Today we look at two individuals upon whose transhuman shoulders rest the very future of the Blood Angels, especially the 3rd Company. Lets start with the one with arguably the biggest job. Sergeant at Arms Radueriel. The eagle-eyed among you will be saying "now Jeff, you can't fool us, that's not Radueriel, that's Telion..." and you would be right. It has long infuriated us that only the Ultramarines get a character scout to lead a reconnaisance army. It's daft. There should always have been an option to put a character in scout armour and indeed in an older Space Marine codex Telion was considered an archetype and you were supposed to rename him and use him in your successor chapter. Well. I'm taking that one step further and changing him to a Blood Angel. I'm swopping out his Chapter Tactics and calling it good. Uniquely among my scouts, Raduriel has his face on display, partially to help him stand out, mostly because I just love that scu...

One of the most enduring and interesting things about the Blood Angels is their flaw, the terrible Black Rage that dwells within them. As a result of their having to use the preserved blood of their dead Primarch and the Primarch's ability to store their memories genetically, the Blood Angels that succumb to the Rage find themselves reliving Sanguinius' terrible last hours. Rather than let them slide into degredation, the Blood Angels mark those taken by the Black Rage out with black armour and the red saltires of Sanguinius' wounding and let them throw themselves into battle. Within my army there are already 5 jump pack Death Company marines and these 10 bring it up to quite a lot of them for a single company. I'm justifying this lore-wise by the fact that my Captain is apparently the Master of Sacrifice, a nebulously defined role that I've chosen to mean: Finds opportunities to spend the lives of the afflicted. The 3rd Company are on a constant war footing to...

The recruitment march goes on! Even more Blood Angels scouts are reporting for final training duty with the third company. I've recently bought a tray table for under my sofa and ooooh boy has it increased my painting output as I'm now painting while watching tv or youtube or whatever. That's why there's been a sudden uptick in my posts! These 15 models bring to a close the infantry component of the scout contingent and it's starting to look rather delightful. The 10 bolter-armed scouts and 5 close combat chaps round out the long/medium/short design of the contingent. A third of it covers the advance, a third holds objectives and provides mid ranged fire support and the last third assaults strongpoints and deals with close contact. These will be bolstered eventually by a pair of Land Speeder Storms to carry the close combat and shotgun squads and a unit of scout bikes. All of these are being led by Scout Sgt-at-Arms Raduriel (Telion) who is currently on my...

Greetings! My grind toward having my own slice of the Blood Angels 10th company continues and this time they're even sneakier... pictured here, a blank white wall... Yup, it's scout sniper time. With their camo cloaks, these at least look like they can conceal themselves more completely for relatively close-range recon and fire support. I've had these models for ages, almost aeons, um, I might even have bought them and assembled them when they first came out ... I dread to think when that was. But, they are finally, finally out of the to-be-painted pile and we can thus talk about them! The scouts are painted in the same way as the last lot so I won't belabour that point too much. I needed to do some extra work on highlighting the guns as they take up a huge amount of real estate on the models. Something to notice in the picture above is that I didn't realise until too late that the transfers (thank gods only on four this time) I was using was from two...

It's Blood Angel o'clock again baby yeah! One of the major learning points of Operation Orbital Death Fridge (better known as the Salamut IX campaign ) was that while power armour is just plain awesome, it does rather want for something in the sneaking front. Especially when bright red... Also, with the way power levels and troop choice requirements work these days, having some cheap troop choices available would be for the win. Enter stage right some scouts! These are the first of 30 scouts I've got planned in order to have lotsa options - and heck, an entire scout army if I want. They're split into ten snipers, ten boltgun chaps and an assault unit composed of five close combat scouts and these lads and lasses above. These days, the Astartes shotgun is a tasty option and they look kinda badass too. Painting wise, I had a few choices to make. First of all, lets be honest, red is not a terribly stealthy colour so it makes little sense to worry too much about c...

Greetings Bunker Dwellers! A post like this needs musical accompanyment and I know a classic . So with the musical accompanyment sorted, lets get the gang together: Eagle-eyed readers will have seen these chaps make their debut in the Iyanden vs Blood Angels picdump from a couple of weeks ago. Sadly they got their shiny model syndrome rubbed right off owing to my rather underestimating what Wraithguard D-Scythes could do. Eep. But now they can get their due with shiny pictures. Long term readers - and those that followed me over from Pirate Viking Painting where the majority of my Blood Angels lived - will remember that my head-canon for the Blood Angels is a little different to the studio norm. I'm running the 3rd as a classic Tactical Company with occasional BAngel flair. This squad is one of those oddities. They are actually the 6th Tactical squad mounted on bikes in order to be outriders for the armoured column. I always thought they made more sense as a mobile t...

Hi folks, recently Em and I got the chance to throw down (I don't get to play her nearly enough) and busted out our respective Iyanden Eldar and my Blood Angels. Thinking that the yellow vs the red would make for an attractive game I brought my camera. Here's the results. Enjoy! Blood Angels deploy amongst the gantries. Iyanden take the township and seemingly hunker down and prepare to repel borders Lovely windrider jetbikes, first time I'd seen them in the flesh. So much better than last edition Em's shiny new fire prism sneaks in to take aim at my blameless tanks. The Dark Reapers lock and load atop the tower. Blood Angels bikers, acting as outriders for the tanks advance on the flank. The Fire Prism advances up the ramp to get up the right angle. Seconds later a Razorback was aflame. Guardians spot the incoming bikers and ask the Wraithguard to deal with it. The Wraithguard round the corner and ready their D-Scythes... ...