Imperial Knight Paladin - Complete!

I'm a big fan of the larger war machines available to the Imperium, Leviathans, Hellebores, and the various Titans - Over the course of my hobby carreer I've owned a number of super heavy vehicles and titans, though for the most part they rarely take to the field. It's hard to justify a 600+ point model in a 1500pt-2000pt game. I think this stems from cutting my teeth on the 6mm systems back in the day, and at the time there were a number war machines that have yet to make their appearance either in the new Epic system or from Forge World. One group in particular I really enjoyed, the Imperial Knights - one-man versions of the mighty Titans, though much smaller and more lightly armed. Back in the Epicast/Armorcast days, there was a prototype knight though I never had the opportunity to purchase one.

I ran across a resin knight analoge on ebay that I had to have as soon as I laid eyes on it. The package arrived and I quickly sorted and washed all the pieces. It came with a number of arm weapon options, though for now I'm just building it out as a Knight Paladin, armed with a closr combat weapon and a battle cannon. I also decided that for storage and weapon swap options I'd magetize the Knight.

I added a little extra cabling here and there, and used a leftover banner for the 'loincloth'. I decided that the Knight would be predominantly red to go along with the rest of the Adeptus Mechanicus. However I also wanted to hearken back to the fluff in adding some quartered 'heraldry' to the model as well.

 

I still need to go in and finish the banners and scrollwork, as well as add some waterslide transfers, but I'm not 100% sure what I want to add.

All in all a very fun model to build and paint. Eventually I'd like to build two more and do a Knight Household, with another Paladin and a Lord of some variety (either a Knight Errant or Lancer). The spare arms that came in the package means I can create a Knight Errant already, though making a Lancer will require a bit of scratch building.

Yo ho, yo ho, a Corsair's life for me...

It's been too cold to primer anything recently, so I broke out the bits and started fiddling around with some Eldar. The fluff for Craftworld Alaitoc suggests they work closely with the various Eldar corsair fleets, and I thought rather than building another squad of Guardians, I'd try my hand at making a squad of Corsairs as a proxy unit instead. I had a number of leftover Shuriken Pistols, so I settled on making them into a squad of proxy Storm Guardians.

I utilized the capes and arms from the Dark Elf Black Ark Corsairs, as I wanted them to look fairly pirate-y without going full blown Dark Eldar. Getting the capes to fit took a bit of cutting and trimming, but they ended up working fairly well.

The unit is armed with Shuriken Pistols and Close Combat weapons, and two of the Corsairs are carrying fusion guns. The banner will have no effect in-game, I just thought it would be a nice-looking addition to the unit. Building them as Storm Guardians also means I'll have two weapons platforms, which I'll build out with a different weapons to provide flexibility for the vanilla Guardian squad when it comes to army list design.

TOEMP #6 - Back to Basics. ...Well, Elites.

Back during challenge #4 for the Tale of Even More Painters, I'd finished building a squad of Storm Troopers utilizing bits from the Marine Scout and Storm models, various Cadian bits, some Forge World heads and the odd length of guitar string. Following my brief foray into the Eldar, I figured that I'd swing back over to the guard for a unit and painted them up:

I enjoyed using the Scouts from the Land Speeder Storm kit - they afforded some interesting poses, I particularly liked building the trooper who's vaulting over a section of wall. I'm not 100% happy with the hellguns however, in retrospect I think I should have utilized the shotguns that come with the scouts as the basis for the weapon as they would have turned out a bit beefier. To make up for it, I added chainswords to various models to remind me that they do in fact carry both a pistol and a CCW.

Part of the current challenge is to utilize a technique that you don't ordinarily try. Since I need the guard to look as uniform as possible, I figured I'd try something new on a Dire Avengers squad instead. First off I primered the models white, which is something that I haven't done in the better part of 20 years! I decided that I'd also go with an ink wash base which is rather atypical as well - I don't use a lot of washes, mostly just on metallics.

It should be interesting to see how they turn out, nonetheless!