Heresy Era Thousand Sons - Land Raider Phobos Painting in progress, part 1

I couldn't wait to get some paint back on the Land Raider, as well as spend a little time with the tank banner that LuckyNo.5 made for me. I went one more round with a small dental pick to get what last little bit of old paint I could, then gave it a hit of primer.

 

For the red on my Thousand Sons, I start with a Dark Flesh basecoat, followed by a heavy drybrush of Red Gore, and a final light drybrush of Blood Red on the extreme edges. Once that's done, the whole thing gets a medium wash of Baal Red to tie it all together and bring down the harsh highlights. Now that the main armor is done, I'll need to go back over all the remaining parts with Chaos Black before the next stage of colors are applied.

After the excellent work LuckyNo.5 did on my blog banner, I asked him if he'd be interested in doing some 'real' banners for my army, and he came back with the design above, in both a color and black and white version. Ordinarily I'd just paint everything onto the black and white template, but the colored version ended up looking so nice that I decided that I'd just paint onto it. Basically I only painted in the red sections, and went over the text with a micon pen here and there. Overall I'm thrilled with how it turned out (though there's still a little touch-up required here and there before it's done).

At this point I'm debating how I want to apply the trim colors. At the moment I'm thinking white doors with the red starburst symbol, and gold for the rest of the trim, as the Land Raider is designed to carry Magnus and his honor guard Terminators, and it seems that most of the veterans in the army are painted red and gold, contrasting with the red and white of the rank-and-file troops. That being the case, for the Rhinos and Predators however I believe I'll go with predominately white trim with minor gold detail here and there. All in all, I'm really happy with how the tank is turning out, and I'm pretty jazzed about painting the army as a whole.

....I'm sure that will fade when I'm painting the 30th tactical marine. Heh.