Death Korps; Back for more

Since it has been a fair while since my last Death Korps post I thought I would bring everyone up to date with progress. The primary reason for very few updates is that I have been working my way through what is coloquially called: "The boring bits". These are the models - like the lasgun armed guys - who are essential to the mass effect of the army but get a touch repetative after a while and don't make for good blog posts! There is no doubting, however the impact that a mass of guardsmen make:

Lovely, exactly what the guard are all about, that and enourmous things that go "boom" of course. I talked about the methods for painting the basic guardsmen back in the original Death Korps post so I won't go through it all again. Instead I shall show you all what I treated myself to as a reward for hitting the halfway mark on the lasgun models: The first batch of special weapons and the first heavy weapons.

The Death Korps flamers are just lovely models, as are the entire range. The long broom on the flamers gives that impression of wanting the fire as far from you as possible. When painting these I wanted to give a tiny splash of dull colour to help them stand out from the herd of lasguns but not spoil the nice military look we have going. A Scab Red promethium tank enriched with a glaze of Baal Red did the job nicely. As with last time my camera is having the devils own job picking out the shades on the Death Korps, trust me, the subtle effect looks awesome in person!

They are probably too small to see on the photo but the canvas flap holding in the spare promethium tanks have tiny, tiny stud buttons to hold them shut. This is the advantage of resin casting, you can pick up detail that metal and even plastic could not hope to notice. The downsides, unfortunately are legion. The models are delicate, brittle and have flash and bubbles in odd places. It is difficult to repair too; a lot of the models in this army have suffered minor breaks in their past, now with plastic this would be the work of seconds to fix, a dab of polystyrene cement and the break is welded, good as new. With resin you cannot do this, it is superglue and often on broken joins about a millimeter across. Suffice to say, the thirty lasgunners that are in that shot above are "the easy ones", I am currently repairing all the minor breaks on the others or stripping the paint to allow me to put clean coats on. Big job, worth it though, the mass impact of the army is going to be brilliant. Anyway, on to the grenadiers!

I just love the old style grenade launchers, none of this Cadian pattern, drum-fed, semi-automatic stuff. No, no, no, these are break-breach single-shot jobbies with no fancy aiming gubbins, just fire and pray! They have such a characterful look. Wonderful figures.

Like the flamers I wanted to inject a few new shades onto the grenadiers. Militaries often use the term "Soldier-proof" to describe weapons. This refers to a weapon that is darned near impossible to mess up or misuse in combat. The idea is not that soldiers are stupid, far from it, but instead to remove any "now how do I work this..." pondering from a soldiers job. When bullets are flying and bombs are exploding you are very grateful for someone taking the time to stamp "Point this side at enemy" on your claymore mines so you don't accidentally destroy your own side. With this in mind I decided to colour code the grenade cartridges on their webbing belts. Red for anti-personelle fragmentation, pale grey for the high explosive anti-tank.

Finally today we come to the first heavy weapons squad of the army, the heavy bolters:

I really like the little details that Forgeworld have put in, the empty canvas belts from fired cartridges, the loaders hands carefully sculpted to be feeding the guns. Very nice. The client had assembled these with lots of extra boxes and lasrifles on the bases for flavour. Trouble is, the lasrifles are mostly the chunky plastic variety. Initially I painted them with green furniture as I normally would but it looked as though the troopers had nicked off with someone elses guns. In the end I painted them the same dark steel as the other weapons in the army and dulled them with Badab Black to minimise their impact. Speaking of the green furniture; I decided to paint the heavy bolters in the same green as the trim of the troopers uniforms. I tried painting them khaki like the greatcoats but that somehow did not work. I can't explain why, just didn't. Green it was.

Well, that's all folks! There are loads more DKK in the pipeline (some half done, some being fixed etc.) and tomorrow I shall show off some more Blood Angels. Till then:

TTFN