ECHOES OF IMPERIUM

After the Death Guard I built for the Primogenitor back in 2019-2020 I have mostly focused on Warhammer Fantasy and specifically the oldhammer miniatures. It has been a great joy to not only collect, but also convert and paint miniatures from my childhood and the remix of Cursed City has been an absolute highlight of 2021. But I finally felt that it might be time to do something with the 41st Millennium and after some consideration I came to the conclusion that I wanted to collect a small-ish army of space marines. It was quite an easy choice as I didn’t want to have to convert a whole army like I did with the Death Guard, so Imperial Guard went out the window, I didn’t want aliens, so bye bye to T’au, Eldar, Tyranids, Orks etc. Also I didn’t want chaos nor too fiddly miniatures which ruled out Sisters of Battle and Adeptus Mechanicus. Space Marines it is then, huzzah I guess.

Of all the chapters available the Dark Angels seemed like they could be quite fun, they are ornate but not excessively so and they are quite adaptable, while they have a strong bathrobe theme it has not yet become the utter farce that is the Space Wolves. The only major issue is that I don’t really like painting green, but fortunately they used to wear black armour so it was easily rectified. Forge World also provided a lot of inspiration with their 30k art and concepts and I used books on the occult and heraldry to find inspiration for the armour. I want every marine to look unique, with a personal colour scheme and heraldry that details their experiences and battle honours, veterans of a thousand battles. Of course this will most likely come back to haunt me later, but at this stage it has been a lot of fun. There is something deeply satisfactory about painting red, bone and black. And with some excellent transfer sheets I have even been able to avoid some of the more taxing freehand work.

The first squad is very loosely based upon the stories of King Arthur and the famous knights, in fact each marine is named after a character from the legends. This also provided me with some rough concepts for heraldry that I could then work on, so far they are pretty simple but I hope to be able to paint more elaborate styles later (or at least use transfers to achieve a similar effect).

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