The Bearer's of the Word

With my impending move to Australia coming up, I've been horrendously busy, not just with packing, but also with work giving me a large project that was then left almost entirely in my hands as two key senior engineers left, as well as one of the replacements. With all that, I've spent the last two months working a lot of overtime, as well as organising my move and trying to get a few projects finished, at least to the point where I could pack them away. 

The first of these projects was my Word Bearers. While I had a lot of these models done to a stage I was happy to call complete, part of this project was always intending to be a learning project to teach myself some new techniques for painting armies fast. While my painting is decent enough with single models, I rarely finish an entire project as it takes so long that I've generally lost interest by the time I get to the last units. 

As the word bearers were purchased mostly assembled for cheap from a friend, I decided that I'd just tidy them up, paint them red, ink, drybrush two highlights, then paint metal and 1-2 spot colours. This plan has worked pretty well, with the exception of adding in a weathering stage (part of the learning new techniques) by sponging some battle damage. 

As I was nearing the completion of some of the models I also decided that I wanted to try to use some weathering pigments on my vehicles. Obviously if I did that to just the vehicles then they wouldn't match the infantry so I set my first goal. Finish a squad and I could weather my first vehicle. Part way through I acquired some 32mm bases, so ended up rebasing the marines as well...

Eventually though, I've managed to complete a squad of Word Bearers, their transport, and the Dark Apostle. I'm pretty happy with how the infantry turned out, though I think the rhino is a little heavy on the dust and it looks more like dried mud at this stage. Ah well. It matches and they're complete. 

The finish Dark Apostle. Originally on a 25mm round base, he's been glued directly to a 40mm base (which lifts him up) and the basing material has been built up around  the 25mm base to disguise the edge.  

As I finished painting him, I dropped him and as he was finecast the sigil of corruption broke (that's the chaos halo). To repair it I used a plastic chaos star, cut of some of the spikes so it fit inside the existing sigil and pinned it into place. Painted a slightly different colour it really helped make a the sigil 'pop'. 

The additional colour spot colour I decided on with this project needed to fit with plasma weapons, glass lenses, demonic stuff and fire. With this in mind I went with turquoise. Painted bright it does plasma and reflective things like eye lenses. Highlighted up from black it does demonic mutations. And it seems to work reasonably well with the dark red of the Word Bearers. 

A better angle of the base. I've used sand, guitar wire, bits of melted plasticard (for the parchment) as well as plasticard beams from a hobby shop and and treadplate to make the ruins. Boltgun shells are simply lengths of this plasticard rod cut to size and painted brass. Weathering pigments really help this look like dry and dusty concrete ruins. Lot's of dust and dried rust. 

The squad piles out of their transport. 

A close up showing the damage, decals and dust on the Rhino.

And below are some incomplete squads.  

The first three models of a squad of Havocs. The Champion, an ablative wound model, and the first of the missile launchers. 

Another angle of the Havocs.

And the Dark Apostle towering over some 95% completed cultists. Once the rest of the 30 or so other cultists are painted, I'll go through and weather all the bases and tidy up the edges of the bases to make them 100%. 

The additional height really makes him stand out over the heads of the cultists he'll be with on the gaming table.

 And as my computer is currently on a ship headed to Australia, I'll hopefully have plenty of time to finish the rest of the cultists and hopefully another squad of marines before it arrives. More updates to come.