Heresy Era Iron Hands - Back to the original plan, I guess

So it has been an absolute rain-soaked mess here in CO recently, it has been raining more or less non stop for five days which has caused widespread flooding, roads washing away, and lots of damage to buildings and infrastructure in the area. I live on the second floor so I escaped the worst of the flood damage (though I've been without viable running water for three days), but my buddy Dave over at Ex Fide Vivo was not so lucky. 6+ inches of water in his basement - major bummer. Spent a bunch of time helping him and others  clean up the mess over the weekend, and while we were pulling up carpet and foam and generally sloshing around in disgusting muddy water we had a chance to chat about our plans for the Heresy 30k event we're going to be attending in January.

I did manage to spend a little hobby time trying out a number of different paint schemes for the Heresy-Era Alpha Legion, and while almost all of them were total failures, I did find one that worked out pretty well. The downside? Each marine would take upwards of an hour to paint, and with the January deadline rapidly approaching there's just no way I could do justice to the models in the time allotted. Since there's just no way I want to risk ruining a bunch of FW resin with a slapdash/hurried paintjob, I'm opting to fall back on my original idea of doing Iron Hands and as such gave some 'current era' marines a go to see how that scheme would work out.

Relatively pleased, it's certainly quick and it's going to give me the opportunity to try out some new techniques as well - going to give weathering powders a try, since I think they'll show up well against the black armour! Been perusing the Secret Weapon site for likely options and will be placing an order for some various flavors this week. There's also going to be a massive FW order placed this week - the army list I have planned is broadly similar to what I had listed for the Alpha Legion earlier and honestly I think the heavy armoured assault army is better suited to the Iron Hands anyway. As an additional upside, FW recently released a number of Iron Hands bits and kits, with more on the horizon with the upcoming release of Massacre, should be a fun army to build and paint!