40k Blood Ravens - Characters painted, more or less...

Rather than spam the blog with every single step I figured I'd push ahead and post up the (more or less) completed models, and keep the recipe pics for my own reference. So without further ado, a whole mess o' character pics!

First up is the commander in Gravis armour - I really dig this sculpt, he's heavy and brutal, and the wrist-mounted bolter with the ammo feed is a nice design touch.

Really dig the Primaris Chaplain sculpt as well, another brutalist re-imagining of an iconic model. I particularly like the Iron Halo!

The Librarian I'm of two minds about - I enjoyed painting it, but felt that it's the least epic of the new character models. Nothing particularly remarkable in the design, though it is solid and reads as a Librarian straight away. Went back to the well with the ethereal green weapons and cabling, which sets off nicely against the blue and red.

Ah the new Apothecary - I absolutely LOVE this new sculpt and think it may be one of the best Apothecaries they've done. Really enjoyed painting him up although from what I understand they lost a little utility on the 8th edition battlefields.

The Ancient is a fairly unremarkable sculpt comparatively speaking, but as I've always been a big fan of banners on the 40k battlefields, I really did enjoy building and painting him. Picked up a sheet of totally-not-blood-raven-transfers (wink!) from Fallout Hobbies at NOVA and was well pleased with how it turned out!

Finally, the four Lieutenant models - Fairly basic marine sergeant type figs, but pretty happy with how they turned out. Had to use my usual bright blue color scheme somewhere in the projects after all, and the power swords fit the bill nicely!

Now for the downsides - Overall I'd say when the dust settled I'm only about 75% pleased with how they turned out. It was a bit of a speed painting exercise after a long stretch of no real hobby activity, and they feel a little rough. I know that I can do better than this, and looking back over them there are some pretty jaggy blending and shading issues here and there. Part of that I think comes from painting-red-fatigue and in retrospect I think I may have been better served choosing some other chapter than the Blood Ravens. I'm committed now however, so we'll press on regardless.

That said, I just got a shipping notification for the next batch of Sons of Horus bits, so sometime in the next week or so I should be getting a nice big box o' joy from Forge World, which includes enough bits and kits to actually get started on the next Heresy force. I'm really looking forward to getting cracking on with the sea-foam green scheme, and will be taking some lessons learned from this current project to heart when it comes time to bring brush to model on the SoH!

40k Blood Ravens - Character painting continues!

Got a little brush time in over the last couple days and have been plugging away at the characters. I figured I would document each step so I'll have a reference to check as I work through the rest of the force and ensure they're all following the same steps.

After laying in the reds on the armour, next up was to hit everything intended to be leather, bone or parchment in Vallejo Tierra (Earth).

The bone and parchment areas were then picked out in Bleached Bone, while the leather got a second pass to brighten it up. The chest eagles and the ravens on the shoulder pads were re-blacked in at this point as well to clean 'em up a bit.

Next all the bone, parchment and leather were given an Army Painter Strong Tone wash to bring them down a little and give a touch more depth.

All the bone and parchment areas were then re-highlighted in Bleached Bone followed by a pass of Pale Sand on the uppermost surfaces.

Finally I went in and re-blacked the shoulder pad rims which cleans up a fair bit of slop and sharpens 'em up a bit! Next up will be highlighting the black on the rims and chest eagles, then on to the metallics. So far so good!

40k Blood Ravens - Character painting begins!

The last month has been almost bereft of painting and building models, which has really been a bummer. While there's been a lot of games and fun had at various conventions I've really missed clipping out bits, gluing my fingers together and putting paint to models. Time to dust off the ol' painting servitor and get cracking! While there's some Sons of Horus looming on the horizon, it's going to be another month or so before I have all the models and whatnot to really get started. So it's time to dip my toes into 8th edition for a bit and see how it goes. I've been wanting to get to grips with the new Primaris marines and figured that some Blood Ravens would be a nice way to go (what with them theoretically being a Thousand Sons successor chapter)...

Naturally the project began with creating a massive grey plastic mountain of models, and I rather enjoyed building them. Took an afternoon to primer everything and pulled out a first chunk of models to get started with - when in doubt, start with a bunch of characters, right? So far it's mostly been just laying in the base armour colors - I really dig the Gravis armoured captain, and the ancient is rather cool as well. Tons of cool detail to pick out, and while they're a little sloppy so far I think they're going to turn out looking pretty sharp!

The trio of Chaplain, Apothecary and Librarian offers up the opportunity to work in some other colors, though the robes and tabards in the Blood Raven red should help tie them all together. Again, rather messy so far but they're starting to come into focus!

Just to round things out are four Lieutenant models, which are probably too many. I'm actually considering using them as sergeants for the tactical squads instead. The one thing I'm less enthused about with the nuMarines are the mostly-monopose nature of them - With these four I was able to do a little mix-n-match to make them all a little different, but as we'll see in future posts, many of the 'normal' marines end up fairly same-y which is a bit of a bummer. Still, overall I'm rather digging the models, and there's nefarious plans bubbling away in the back of my mind to use them as the basis of some 'true-scale' heresy era marines... Madness!

40k Blood Ravens - Test model painted

A quick hit today after a long, long week at work. I needed a little break from all the crimson and gold and bone I've been doing on all the Thousand Sons and figured I'd work on one of the new primaris marine models I'd picked up on a lark last weekend, so I settled in to paint some crimson... and... gold... and... dammit.

 

I knew that if I was going to drink the Kool-aid and do some (erstwhile) loyalist 40k marines there was only one chapter that I could really do - The Blood Ravens, of course! With their ties to the Thousand Sons how could I not? Overall I really rather dig the model and enjoyed painting it quite a bit! I don't have any other primaris marines in the hopper as I'm not super thrilled by the push fit models in the 8th ed. box, so I'm more or less in a holding pattern until such time as the multi-pose models are released. So, just a one-off speed-painting exercise before diving back into their primogenitor legion once again!