Avde dominus nox- nightlords project part 3

gretings

so i have actually made some meandering project progress with my nightlords.

As a part of the age of darkness i finished my first squad for the nightlords, and what i finished was a five man destroyer squad with jump packs, it just feels thematically appropos to have  group of marines descend on pinions of fire and callously firing nuclear radiated bolter rounds and missiles at their former brethren, the sergeant is equipped with a phosphex bomb, which i imagine will be my last ditch experiment to make them earn some points, as it is a pretty riscy proposition, seeing as i can only throw i 6" and it will scatter 2d6- 4. Still, feels completely in tune with my NL army so far.

sergeant in the center, ,marced with a "veteran honour" and a phosphex bomb

The entire troop is unfortunately a rather poor example in what direction it will go purely aestethically ,as they all have uniformly black armor, except their left shoulderpad wher i have decaled on the night lords mark, beyond that i gave their left greave an inscription of the VIII'th legion, the crimson of the trasnfer really matches of their black armor. Beyond that i wanted the rad grenades (which i assumed the rounded ones to be, as i can't seem to find them on other sculpts) with some oxidation, as i imagine that the contaminated materials would quickly eat through the metal, and did the same with the phospex. It's rather explicitly stated in the black book that being a destroyer is a rather ignominous duty that ends fairly quickly, so they all have a pretty large amount of weathering on them, but i refrained from doing rust streaks on the boltpistols and the armor itself. But rather focusing of chipping and painting streaks, from both descending into a battlefield and making a hell of it.

the entire squad so far. 

Beyond that i mostly focused on basics here, highlighting with a dark grey, shading a lot, and doing the lenses with the "soulstone red" technical paint fro GW, now the question that arose to my thus far is the following.


* should i do that for ALL my NL?
* and is the basing a bit lacking.

The idea of basing them all on ruins is still something that i feel fairly strongly about, but looking at it as opposed to some standard marines it looks a bit....flat? I've asked some mates that are stronger painters and we'll se what i get down to.

The lenses, is just because i did red lenses for all of my,,sixty? seventy? odd alpha legion marines, and i want to do something else, but i don't want to be garish for my NL army.

Now, as i painted these at two AM yesterday i got a hankering to start on my standard marines as well, and seeing as how i was already going i pushed my fatigued body through some additional painting.

Now, the inspiration for these actually goes out to a reddit user called Anthrax, who gave me a lot of good advice regarding lightning and skull painting, seriously give his stuff a look at, i more or less looked at his MK II and MK III terror marines and went "yeah, that's what i wanna do"

i did two guys so far, one MK IV and one MK III and one of the first things i notices was that just as Anthrax said that painting a skull on the MK IV is really easy and you can do it several different ways, you can do a rounded shape up to (lightbulb like) or just keep to doing the lower "face mask" of the helmet as a skull meaning that you get a half skull which still looks good.

For the MK IV i did a light highlight over my vallejo dark angel with lothern temple guard, and then the metallics, there after i did the lightning with four colors

I) lother temple guard
II) vallejo electric blue
III) fenris grey
IV)white scar.

i think that for future work, step 3 can be removed, i also need to do the lightning WAY smaller, as it currently looks good at a distance (table top) but kind of lumpy close up. I also did some lightning just under the charger between the joints, and i think i'll do that on future models as well. The Mask....i donät know, i kept to ushabti bone, but i think i need to highlight with white or something at a later date. i'll look at it later and make up my mind.

What i did learn was that studs are the bane of your fucking lightning, as it limits where you can have legion markins and lightning, and i don't want to crowd the poor murderer. A definite consideration for future models, also, the Terror torsos are not worth the money if you have a charger over the chest ;_;, well, now i know.

i also did a MK III based on the artwork in FW book three, which is why i have tears of blood, they're done with unthinned tamiya red clear, and look better in real life, but here it just looks cheesy. I also followd the apatethic fish  for his Night lords guide, and did all the "metal banding" in retributor gold, and then washed it with agrax twice over, for that classic NL color scheme, which i actually like.

Same with the lightning here, i need to get a smaller detail brush. i just bought an army painter brush, but it did a cthulu goes eating imitation and fucked up after two dips in water. So...a new one is needed.

better look at the lighthing at the joint

also, the same goes with my bases and lenses. I'll probably do the metallic red thing for these as well, but we'll see.

Next up? probably a drop pod. Or some scimitars ;)

While airbrushing this week i also started on some of the necessary reinforcements for my alpha legion army


I did this up with some new vallejo metallic acryllics (our saver) and i was really happy with the metallic look. I was even tempted keeping it looking like this, but instead i taped it and went to town with some gradients.

the end result with my AB being this.  Now, i'll take better pictures later, but the black stripes is to tie into my new Siege detachment that my AL have taken to heart after their vicious siege battles in the cadox system. So i'll need to trim and fix that. Also not pictured is that the entire "lower chassi" IE not raised parts, are done in more muted metallic blue. to give some clear gradients, and let me play around with some EXTENSIVE chipping.

After stepping away from my Al (creatively) for a while, it's a really stark difference in doing the metallic blue scheme, and i' at turns revolted and enamoured with it.

Still, i'll sort this out soonish.

What are YOU doing for the warmaster?