40k Blood Ravens - Character painting begins!

The last month has been almost bereft of painting and building models, which has really been a bummer. While there's been a lot of games and fun had at various conventions I've really missed clipping out bits, gluing my fingers together and putting paint to models. Time to dust off the ol' painting servitor and get cracking! While there's some Sons of Horus looming on the horizon, it's going to be another month or so before I have all the models and whatnot to really get started. So it's time to dip my toes into 8th edition for a bit and see how it goes. I've been wanting to get to grips with the new Primaris marines and figured that some Blood Ravens would be a nice way to go (what with them theoretically being a Thousand Sons successor chapter)...

Naturally the project began with creating a massive grey plastic mountain of models, and I rather enjoyed building them. Took an afternoon to primer everything and pulled out a first chunk of models to get started with - when in doubt, start with a bunch of characters, right? So far it's mostly been just laying in the base armour colors - I really dig the Gravis armoured captain, and the ancient is rather cool as well. Tons of cool detail to pick out, and while they're a little sloppy so far I think they're going to turn out looking pretty sharp!

The trio of Chaplain, Apothecary and Librarian offers up the opportunity to work in some other colors, though the robes and tabards in the Blood Raven red should help tie them all together. Again, rather messy so far but they're starting to come into focus!

Just to round things out are four Lieutenant models, which are probably too many. I'm actually considering using them as sergeants for the tactical squads instead. The one thing I'm less enthused about with the nuMarines are the mostly-monopose nature of them - With these four I was able to do a little mix-n-match to make them all a little different, but as we'll see in future posts, many of the 'normal' marines end up fairly same-y which is a bit of a bummer. Still, overall I'm rather digging the models, and there's nefarious plans bubbling away in the back of my mind to use them as the basis of some 'true-scale' heresy era marines... Madness!