Commissions, Part 3

People sure are funny. 


This guy originally told me he wasn't that into 40k, and yet, when I turned in the 2nd boxed set, all painted and gorgeous, he came back with a bag holding a Dread, an HQ squad, and a Captain. 


Imagine that. Maybe he just likes my painting. :)


Anyway, because I liked the way it works in the Blood Angels color scheme, I decided that veterans and other higher-ups in the Angels of Flame have brassy helmets, as well as back packs and other gear. Also, I decided that, since I was doing flames, I use this (hopefully ongoing, fingers crossed) project to do other things I normally never do. such as banners. So:

This Captain has a lovely back banner (first one I ever painted, really; the scrolls on my Terminator Chapter Master  don't count, because they're scrolls) and the wicked cool (and useful) combi- melta, not to mention little winglies on his flame icon. I realized after that there were bits I could've used to further spruce up the armor, but that might've made it too gaudy. He does have to stride into battle, after all, and that banner is going to get in the way the first time he goes through a door into.... well, anything. I suppose it auto-folds away when he has to get into a Land Raider?

His command squad got the same treatment, with fixed-up backpacks, gear on their belts, and lots of shiny brassy bits all over the place. I though of giving the Company Champion some kind of personal heraldry, but didn't want him to overshadow the Captain, so I left him relatively spartan. Just some scroll work on the leg plate for him. Everyone else got mastheads on their backpacks and terminator honors. 

Not bad for the second banner I've ever painted, ever, eh? 


Banners are a bit of a wast of points, so I sold him on having the main company banner as an objective. The angel is some angel or other (probably Sanguinius, but didn't he have black wings?) who had fiery wings and obviously impressed the fuck out of whomever founded the chapter.  These guys became the 4th Company by virtue of there being a little skull with "IV" in the CC's pack-mounted mini-shrine:

See? So I repeated that on the shield and company banner. It helps to have a theme. I wish I could have carried it over to the guy's other tac squads, but oh well. The Dreadnought was another story:

Another first, this being the first plastic Dread I ever modelled, ever. He's SO light compared to the metal ones. It helped to weight him down a bit with magnets (and detail), but man. Anyway, no magnets in the waist, because it would've been a waste, pun intended. 

The guy wanted magnetized shoulders so he could switch the arms around into any config he wanted. I became fond of the Lascannon & Claw look, but for purposes here he's in Mortis configuration. I decided to do something new with insets for this pic, the top one showing how damn strong the magnets are (ooh, but wouldn't you love to have all four arm options at once?) and the bottom a nice detail of the spent shells and skull on that nice base (not to mention more of the cool hydraulics). The way the terrain is broken up made me think "pavement", but in retrospect I probably should've done it as sandstone to tie in with the wrecked Aquila terrain. Oh well.