Assault squad 54- Alpha legion assault marines

Phew, so incoming posts.

This was a very productive week for me, between working almost 17 hours a day, and having the family visiting my inlaws it meant that as soon as i got home i cranked up ye ol' airbrush to get some good work in. First and foremost i've started on my new SECRET project (it's just nightlords) and i'd forgotten how fun it is to actually make real headway. I'm almost getting a real sense of progress when i can sit down and crank out a five hour Airbrush session. It means i need to cut down on my sleep to about three hours a night, which is sustainable for about a week, but then i need to hunker down and enter my odinsleep for about half a day. Mebbe twice over if time allows.

But enough about that. Thanks to the Age of darkness "two week challenge"   i actually managed to close down on some of my non airbrush related projects. This time it was for closing down on my Assault marines. Part of the new 54'th company, my recently formed veterans from the battles in the Cadoxd system. After realizing that their armored assault techniques where ineffective en-masse against the unified siege mastery of the Iron warriors, and coming up short against the lightning fast Maru skara of the emperors children, my Praetor council decided to form up two new formations of troops.

the 54'th a specialized assault formation that will descend on wings of fire and strike without mercy.

and the 69'th the Stoneburners. Compiled of the most merciless of my Armored elements, utilizing recently captured Phosphex and ammunition stores, they are rearming to bring even the indomitable IV'th to their knees.

What this means in real-world shit? I'm getting some assault marines, destroyers and heavy armor. TO scale up to apocalypse level events. It ties into the battles my guys are fighting. and it means that i know where to go next with my armies.

But right now, what i recently finished was my first assault squad for the 54'th leviathal.

I was pretty happy with my end.result and without descending into an endless circle of back-patting,  i think that these, alongside my avenger and terminators is the best work that I've done. And it's thankful to see that when placed close to the first models i did, a real sense of progress can be tracked

The entire squad, Pwoer weapons and sergeant at the fore

 I did a ten man squad to begin with. And in it i have a sergeant with Artificer armor, powerfist and a power dagger (+1 attack)as well as a handflamer for some overwatch and first turn clearing. The squad proper has two powerswords to clear out  3+ saves and then i figure i will get them all Melta bombs for some versatility.

The downside is that the points start scaling really quickly

These poses are probably my favorite

 I also tried my dab hand at doing a lot of spongechipping, but with a set of tweezers and a really small piece of packing foam. meaning that i got a lot of inconsistent random patches, i also went a bit heavier on the nuln oil than i usually do. Which i think gave a bit better contrast to the metallic blue.

Lägg till bildtext

I also took a lot more caution, and care in doing these guys. While they are "just" troops i wanted to give then a lot of attention and wanted them to catch some attention on the battlefield. and with that in mind i actually painted them in their separate parts. Which not only gave me better control over the details that i needed to do, but also lets me do irregular chipping as well as shading better.

Seeing as the fluff is that they are all veterans of their craft i took my time in giving them a lot of decals, and might even have gone a bit overboard, each guy has at least three of them, i chose to put a "large" insignia on the chest for the same reason as Batman has a large bat on his chest according to frank miller (draws fire there) but beyond that the whole model is basically just an excercise in using basic techniques properly.

Metalls are all leadcbelcher, nuln oil gloss and highlight mitril, the helmets are simply black with some eshin fine highlights. The decals are Microsol and microsot (HAIL MICROSOL!) with some light chipping on them. I think it all comes together pretty well.

And for contrast here is a latest done marine, with one of my earliest


some difference i believe