9th is upon us! The Rulesmiths have unleashed their latest creation, and across the world happy gamers skip happily to war. I was not fortunate enough to get a pre-order of Indomitus (I was down at Butser Ancient Farm pretending to be an Anglo-Saxon of the 9th century), but I have taken advantage of the made-to-order service. Soon I too will have a big pile of Space Marines and Necrons. Or rather, a bigger pile of Space Marines and Necrons – I already have embarassingly large unpainted collections of both. Now seems to be the ideal time to work through some of the backlog, so I set my mind to finding a quick, simple scheme that I could apply to the Indomitus models. For the Necrons, my existing Sonnokht dynasty scheme would work perfectly nicely (more on them in a future post). For the primaris, however, I was in more of a quandry.

I have a great many space marine collections, few mustering more than a squad, or a character. Some, I felt, were let down by overly quick and dirty paintjobs. Others I was very happy with, but the amount of time required to paint a single warrior was prohibitive, and I couldn’t motivate myself to finish the squad. One of the latter was the Chapter Castellan, a chapter invented by Apologist over at Death of a Rubricist, which I fleshed out a little, giving them a culture with some basis in the medieval Low Countries. I unfortunately decided to wet blend each armour panel, then recess shade, finishing off with thinned down Mournfang brown to weather them. Many painters I am sure would take this in their stride, but by the time I had finished 2 warriors (Brother Ledenaert and Ventenar Avenyn) I couldn’t motivate myself to paint more.

Recently (again inspired by Apologist, though Roobios had also started to investigate them) I have started playing with oil washes. I still have some oil paints left from my AS level art, so I cracked them out and set to work. My skill with them is still very much in development, but I was struck by how they allow swift and effective shading/grungifying. What took ages with thinned Mournfang was now fast and enjoyable, largely thanks to the slow drying time of oils – essentially you can continue to play with the oils for as long as you like, and they can be removed from the model with white spirit if they stray out of bounds. As you may have guessed from the title, I managed to come up with a quick and easy scheme for Space Wolves. I had never painted a Space Wolf before this – never finished, anyway. The oils, to my mind, managed to convey the battered, greasy, no-frills nature of Vlka power armour, as well as covering up some rather questionable freehand on the right poleyn.

While not the finest thing I have ever painted, I am happy enough with him that I want to paint more like him, and he was quick enough that painting more is a practical option. He should look fine when placed in a squad of his peers. Without any of the excellent new assault intercessors to work on, I have been forced to cobble one together from hellblaster and reiver parts, with a MKiv chainsword. This should mean that I avoid having duplicate poses from the marines in the Indomitus box, and can save those sweet, sweet running poses for other projects. Because I know better than to let go of some painting energy while I have it, I have cobbled together another 3 ersatz assault intercessors to work on. There is also a commander in the works, but he has been delayed by what investigators are referring to as “a floor related fumbling incident”. I’m hoping to have these three painted up by the end of the week, and preferably another to take us to minimum squad size if I can root out sufficient parts.

That’s all for this installement. Next time I hope to be able to delve a little more into the fluff for the force. Some of you may have noticed that the sigil on the pauldron is from the old VI Legion, rather than one of the modern Great Companies. This is partly because I like it, and partly because of the availability of non-Ragnar Blackmane pads/transfers is… not what it could be. My current explanation is that this detachment are headed by veterans of the Indomitus crusade, and Guilliman, looking in understandable confusion at the vast profusion of symbols for the wolves, just slapped his Greyshields with the legion symbol in exasperation. If anyone has any better ideas, don’t hesitate to leave a comment saying so!