Progress report

I was hoping to finish Squad Lorenzo in the last week. I didn't, but I've made some progress so I thought it would be worth popping it up here as a little motivational boost. So here they are:

The dudes so far

Some thoughts:

1. I need to up my photography game if I'm going to be doing WiP pictures – without a coat of matt varnish my current setup's not really cutting the mustard. 

Old school punchyhand decoration

2. I'm 90% sold on purple for the sarge's cloak. Main thing I'm wondering is whether to go with purple all over, or a contrasting colour for the inside – probably the same sort of cream/off white as the scrolls and purity seals. 

3. Pretty pleased with the yellow stripy bits. Didn't want to overdo it so I think I'll leave it to one powerfist, the chainfist blade, and one storm bolter. The only other bit I'm considering is the nozzle on the flamer. 

I'm hoping to finish this lot off this weekend, although I'm not feeling mega-enthused about doing all the metallic bits.

Anyway, if anyone fancies dropping a comment bomb, I'd love to hear your thoughts on any or all of the above. And I'll try not to leave it so long before the next update.

The Blood Angels and Me, part 1

If you'd met ten-year-old me, you'd know there was no way
I wasn't going to be super into this.

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history – well, in 1990 to be more factually accurate – my sister and I were round at our friends' house, one of whom had just acquired a new board game called… *drum roll*
Space Crusade.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, due to not being the necessary combination of old and a huge dork, Space Crusade was a game produced in collaboration between MB and Games Workshop, set in the 40K universe, involving everyone's favourite power-armoured space bastards, the Adeptus Astartes, shooting the crap out of the usual alien suspects, in a slightly more kid-friendly format than the 1st edition of 40K. I'm planning to do a more involved post about it at some point, but for now I'll leave it at saying that I suspect it served as a gateway hobby drug for many an addict of a certain age. It certainly worked on me. 

I'd totally forgotten about this advert until I started looking for pictures to put in this post.
But I think we can all agree it's basically the greatest thing ever.

Space Crusade featured dudes from three chapters of marines: the Ultramarines, the Imperial Fists and the guys I ended up playing with – the Blood Angels. I can't remember whether I actively chose to use them in that first ever game, or whether I had them foisted upon me, but I was pretty much sold on them from the get go. Best colour? Check. Coolest name? Check. Awesome chapter badge? CHECK.

For me, this is like THE piece of Blood Angels artwork.
Think it may well have been the first appearance of both the Death Company
and Captains In Gold Armour.
NB the Terminator with hazard stripes on power fist. 

For the rest of the Rogue Trader era, when it came to Space Marines, the Blood Angels were My Guys. I never really achieved anything resembling a complete army back then, but the handful of marines I got out of blister packs (from Alien Encounters in Guildford, in the days before GW stores were as widespread as now) were painted up following the Blood Angels section of the old Space Marine Painting Guide. I even made myself a BA logo
t-shirt at a screen printing workshop I went to with Scouts, and when I wore it to Games Day at the Derby Assembly rooms in 1991, some member of GW staff told me it was "cool". [Insert joke/comment here about how these days I'd have been thrown in some kind of copyright infringement dungeon, etc.] Sadly I don't think any photographic record of this shirt exists. But next time I visit my folks' place, I'm going to see if I can find some of those old Space Crusade and Rogue Trader figures and get pictures of them.

Although my attitudes towards the Blood Angels would change throughout my involvement with 40K (more on that next time), they were the first guys from the 40K universe who were My Guys, and that meant they always retained a bit of a special position in my hobby affections.

Getting on with it

Five Terminators, all at varying stages of incompletion, yesterday

After all that preamble, it's about time I actually painted some guys, I reckon.

The issue of Where To Start is, however, slightly muddied by the fact that I'm not exactly starting from scratch but rather starting from a position of having a few guys semi-painted already. Call them "test models" or call them "the product of my inability to knuckle down and focus on the wider objective" but, either way, I'm not starting entirely afresh.

As such, the first task I've set myself is to get all of Squad Lorenzo painted, since two of them (Brothers Valencio and Deino, in the front row above) had already made it part of the way there in the course of me messing about fine-tuning the paint schemes. My intention was to paint them as an initial batch of two, then impatience kicked in and I started painting all the purity seals and fiddly bits on Deino before I'd even finished the armour on Valencio. Then I decided I needed to experiment with painting Valencio's chainfist blade yellow, because (in case this weren't already sufficiently apparent) I am an awful, easily-distracted idiot.

Alice gets stuck into some basecoating; my old flatmate
Mike makes a sarcastic comment.

So the first thing I decided I needed to achieve was to catch the rest of the squad up with Bros. V&D. Basecoating red over a black undercoat is, even with the new Citadel Base paints, a bit of a chore so, wonderful boyfriend that I am, I roped Alice into helping me out, to speed the process up. A few tedious warnings from me about paint consistency and not getting it all up in the ferrule fout of the way, and she bashed the initial coats out with aplomb, although Lorenzo has "too much biz going on to paint the armour properly", apparently. This helped speed up the boring bit, which was totally worth the lagers I rewarded her generous assistance with.

This brought the models up to the point at which the photograph at the top of this post was taken. At this point, to give myself a quick win, I rewarded myself for completing all the highlighting last night by finishing off Bro. Deino, as he was about 90% there already. Stripy chainfist aside, this meant that I just needed to paint some seals/scrolls/ropes on the extra three to catch them up to Valencio.

Broey D. 

For a change, I've managed to be reasonably disciplined about stopping myself veering off course (up til now, at least). Now it's reached a point where the paint jobs are starting to take shape and the end is in sight, it's quite satisfying knowing I'll have a complete squad, rather than just a random couple of guys, to show for it once I get there. So we'll see if I can maintain that discipline until Squad Lorenzo is complete.

Anyway, in a hopeful improvement from all the other photos so far, here's Brother Deino, finished. Yeah, I know, I need to drill out the barrels on the Storm Bolter. But other than that, pretty pleased with how he turned out.