Heavy Metal

Greetings all, this week has been something of a hobby non-entity. Family matters have kinda killed my hobby mojo (get better soon Grandad!) and while I have got stuff done; nothing is finished for photography. So I present an older army, my Imperial Guard, the glorious Gethsemanite XVth! This time we will focus on my favourite element of the guard. Their armoured vehicles. So here are the tanks of the third company:

The colour scheme for the army is Charadon Granite and olive drab green (Catachan Green with a Badab Black wash). The tanks add black and a thin Khemri Brown stripe to the mix. The painting starts with a mix of black and Catachan Green drybrushed up through Catachan Green and then a Catachan and Rotting Flesh final highlight. The broad bands of Charadon Granite are painted on and drybrush highlighted with Charadon
and Khemri Brown mix. Next comes a thin stripe of Khemri Brown to break up the quite similar green and brown. Finally thin short bands of black (with a little Scorched Brown added to soften the colour) are painted following the line of the Khemri Brown. The metalwork is painted with Jeff-rust. The weapons are painted the same way as the rest of the army. I wanted to achieve a black anodised look to the guns - imitating the look of modern firearms. This was achieved by painting the gun barrels black and adding thin edge highlights of chainmail to the edges of the metalwork. Once dry a quick gloss varnish brought up the shine and finished off the effect.

Once the painting was finished the weathering - my favourite part - could begin! Now I talked at length about tank weathering in a previous article. These models take the process much, much further. Instead of running the wash into the panel lines I sloshed a very thin Scorched Brown wash over the entire tank. Gravity takes care of pulling the wash to the lower reaches of the tank, it really does look dreadful until it dries! Have faith! I then used the same dust drybrushing as on the Blood Angels razorback. The main difference between the two methods comes before the wash stage. When doing the chips and dings there are some large areas of scoured metalwork (noticably the dozer blades and track guards) that are painted with streaky drybrushing of Jeff-rust.

This old model Hellhound showcases the dozer blade scoured metal quite nicely. I intend to be replacing these with the gorgeous, gorgeous new versions eventually. This design will become a Banewolf as the external tanks seem a good idea when you have filled them with corrosive man-dissolving chemicals.

EDIT: Totally forgot! The tracks also have a wash of Forgeworld's masterclass oil wash (brown ink and gloss varnish) which gives them that nice "heavy machinery" look.

The Chimera below has had quite a lot of small conversion jobs performed on it. The first is the track guards, ordinarily the GW track guards only cover the first quarter of a chimera's tracks. This seemed a trifle silly so I cut the slanted edges off the long "angled" track guard and attached it behind the others.

The second small conversion is on the lasgun ports:

I don't like the lasgun "hedgehog" on the unaltered kit. I know that the idea is to show that the chimera interior is a sealed unit but I prefer to show the squad using their own lasguns to fire out. I decided to make shutters that the unit would open to fire out of. This was achieved with a couple of small bevelled pieces of plastic-card per opening. These were glued behind the opening before assembly.

The pintle-mounted heavy stubber showcases the black anodised effect on the weapons nicely.

Finally some sentinels! These show the squadron markings quite nicely: the coloured triangle denotes the platoon that the squad is attached to, the squad is identified by a greek letter (in this case sigma) and a number to show the position in the squad. For anyone thinking of playing Imperial Guard consider a squadron of sentinels with autocannons. They are fast and manouverable and can get behind other armoured vehicles easily enough. An autocannon is fine for dealing with thin rear armour and scares infantry a lot more than the single shot lascannon. Well, that's all for the armoured showcase! Hopefully my mojo will return soon so that the next update will have shiny new models!

TTFN