Heresy Era Thousand Sons - HQ and Elites get some brush time

Pretty full weekend of hobby goodness - now that the temperatures are starting to drop, we were able to play some Rogue Trader in the hobby loft on Saturday without succumbing to heat stroke. That evening my band had a gig which is always a hoot, though during the last song I managed to break a bass string. Of course, my first thought was "hey, more conversion fodder!" but my second thought was "Ah crap, gotta transpose everything to a different string". Gotta have the proper priorities after all! Sunday was spent doing a little painting, I decided I wanted to get cracking on some of the HQ and Elite slot's infantry:

I ended up painting all of the models shown here at the same time, but photographed them separately for organization's sake. Leading off with the model I've built to represent Chief Librarian Azhek Ahriman, he got the basic Dark Flesh/Red Gore/Blood Red/Baal Red Wash and then I started picking out the details. Going with a blue cloak (see below under the Sorcerer Coven) and the Force Weapon and little ball o' fire were blocked in with a Jade Green basecoat. The purity seals and loin cloth were based in Graveyard Earth, followed by Kommando Khaki and Bleached Bone highlights.

The Scarab Occult are the Honor Guard unit that accompanies Ahriman, and follow the same basic painting recipe. In general I'll only be running a 5-man squad, so I have an extra if I don't want to spend the points on a company banner in a given game. The Company Champion was given purple robes to help distinguish him on the table top from the rest of the squad, as they're all identically armed. Not sure if the purple works for me, though. Once I get the gold on I'll have a better feel for it I suppose...

The Sorceror Coven all have blue and gold robes, partially to tie in to the fact that in the current era, Librarians generally wear blue, and partially to tie in with Tzeentch's colors. I'll be adding a bunch of runic script to the cloaks to tie them in with what I'd done with Seraphis, the Librarian Dread. Still quite a lot of work to go on all of these models - the gold filigree will definitely help them 'pop' more than they do so far.

In the Age of the Emperor codex pack I'm using to build this army, one of the Legion Tactical Squads may be led by an upgrade character by the name of Sergeant Hesyre. He has a couple special rules - one of which grants the squad Specialist Ammunition so they get a decent Inferno Bolts analogue, but counteracting that is a rule called "vulnerable to the change" which causes his squad to have a sympathetic reaction to friendly units that test for Perils of the Warp. From a modeling perspective to show the effects of the rule, I went with one of the arms off the Possessed sprue to show him in the beginning stages of flux. I also built a trio of objective markers out of the possessed bits as Thousand Sons who have succumbed to the change and need to be recovered to hide the chapter flaw.

That done, nearly all of the models in the army have at least some paint on them, and I'm planning a smallish (1500 point) game with them against my buddy Dave's Blood Angels next weekend. I'll definitely snap some pics of the game, it's bound to be a table full of red models!