A Rovin' A Rovin' Inquisitor

Hi folks, today we are looking over a fair sized brick of Imperial armoured power, the mighty Land Raider.

This one has been requisitioned (and given the amount of decoration, I'd say permanently) by an Inquisitor. Inquisitors come in all shapes and sizes, some are quiet, discrete men and women who investigate in secret and only reveal themselves to make a high profile arrest or to stage a trial. Then there are the ones who stamp in dressed head to toe in gold power armour seconding entire guard regiments to their cause and taking main battle tank/transport hybrids as their personal rides. This one was pimped up by the client with some scibor panels and forgeworld doors, more on those later.

This tank needed to match (ish) the two rhinos I'd painted before so colour selection was more planning where on a Land Raider the bands of red would go. You can't take them all the way across the front neatly like you can on a rhino but you can make it look similar. Grey drybrushed edges (which have shown up in photography not at all of course) took care of the black then it was in with the block colours. Ooh, in the photo above you can see the cabling on the lascannons. I've finally figured out the fastest way to paint these. Pick a neutral colour for your scheme (I went with Waargh Flesh) and paint the whole bundle. Then you only need three other colours (red, blue and yellow for me) and paint every other cable in the bundle with one of these. The majority colour is the green but you don't notice it. Feels a lot faster. Agrax Earthshade is a nice way of shading and delineating the individual cables as well as muting the bright colours.

Quick view from above, the twin heavy stubbers were a good idea, helps reinforce the "not belonging to space marines" vibe. You can also see the Scibor top panels to which I added brass etch =I= symbols. A quick word on the panels... I'm not keen. Don't get me wrong, love the design work, they add a seriously gothic vibe if you are into that with marines. What bugs me is the loss of function (the side doors cannot open with these panels in place) which causes that "why would you add this" tic in the back of your mind. Combine this with a more and more common problem of really, really thin, low lines as decoration which cause real painting headaches and I'm not a fan. Why do they cause headaches? Well, dear reader, just because you can sculpt and cast a line a quarter of a mm across and about the same high doesn't mean you should. [As an aside, Scibor can't cast a line a quarter of a mm across, the damn things fade in and out] Why should you not? Because they're too low to take paint from the edge of a brush. Surface tension pulls the paint to the panels beneath. This is the easiest and neatest way to paint these sorts of details, you'll notice Citadel only sculpt lines at about 0.5mm at thinnest and then they make damn sure their raised, that's designing with the painter in mind. Because of this problem you have to essentially free hand paint every... damn... line. Frankly, you'd be better off with freehand, easier and I would warrant neater. Worth thinking about. Either pick a scheme without a gold contrast (seriously) or use drybrushing to pick them out and then fill in the background. Mild grumble over.

I kept the weathering light on this one, just rusty exhaust system (Ammo rust streaks over AP Gun Metal and Nuln Oil) and dirty tracks (Vallejo Track Primer, drybrush AP Gun Metal, wash Nuln Oil). I wasn't completely happy with how the concrete dust weathering went on the rhinos and my usual policy is avoid what you aren't happy with. Besides, an Inquisitor egotistical enough to claim a damn Land Raider as his own has valets too...

TTFN