Death Korps Officer and Grenadiers

It is Death Korps time again! To open we have one of my favourite models in the range:

The model is simply stunning, the quality of the sculpting (particularly the coat) is beyond compare. The colour scheme had to fit with the army and yet stand out as special. I remembered seeing photographs of Belgian officers in the Great War with polished brass helmets (I believe the origin of the phrase "brass hats" for senior officers) and thought that it would fit with the arrogant hauteur of the Death Korps officer corps. The remainder of the scheme is identical to the basic troopers (but with more blending). With dark green as the contrast colour for the army Dark Angels Green was used as a spot colour for coat lining and trim.

While this shot was technically to show off the shading on the cloth it is really to show off the amazing sculpting of the greatcoat draped across the officer's shoulders. I'll pause there and allow you all to admire that... so onwards!

I didn't want the epaulettes and braid to be metallic as there was already a lot of brass and bronze on the model and as a result had a go at non-metallic metal. I used the method described in white dwarf for the Sanguinor with a few tweaks suggested by Darran Latham on his blog as, lets face it, he painted the darn thing in the first place! Now I know what I did wrong here, there is too much shade tone and not enough highlight for it to look like shiney gold but handily it does look rather spanky as braid so serendipity strikes again.

A closer look at the details of the model. The brass helmet was painted using many blended layers of metallics starting from vallejo Brassy Brass (well done guys) - the equivilent of the old brazen brass - working up through their Brass paint (yep, that is different) up to Brass with a little Mithril Silver added. Glazes of brown and chestnut ink helped to intensify the colour and define areas of detail. The little medals on his chest were a lovely touch and made him look all the more unlikely as a front line fighter while adding a splash of colour.

Now I mentioned in my last post that it was grenadier week. Well, that turned in to grenadier fortnight with one thing and another but finally, here they are:

A word of advice for anyone building these things. The cables are specific to the gun and arm combination. For the love of your sanity stick these things on as you build them. Attaching them later was the work of many hours and much swearing but they look wonderful for it.

The general scheme for the grenadiers is the same as the basic troopers (hence my camera's usual problems in picking up subtle colours, grrr.) with the adjustments discussed in the heavy stubber post. The obvious changes are the additional green body armour which changes the tone of the colour scheme considerably while keeping them in line with the normal troopers. The face masks have that creepy skull motif picked out in the same mix of catachan green and rotting flesh with skull white to lift the design off the canvas.

The back mounted hellgun power cell is connected by those fiddly power cables, these were painted dark angels green and charadon granite with a wash of badab black to pick them out. The hellguns themselves have nice thermal sleeves strapped around the barrels to prevent the heat of discharge from burning the user. I tried this in green at first but it altered the balance of the colour scheme too much. Way too much green! Khaki worked nicely and also visably tied the sleeves to being fabric.

As usual the armour plates and helmets received dings and chips by first painting them in with a mix of scorched brown and chaos black and then highlighting the inside of the chip (the yolk of a fried egg) with boltgun metal. This is a nice quick way to create weathering and interest within a unit.

Well, thats all folks. More death korps are already on my painting table along with the honour guard of my Blood Angels and my very first ever Warmachine figure (A Cygnar Cyclone Warjack for the curious).

TTFN