The Talons of Baal (BFG)

From the stars they come... The Angels of Death, the Space Marines, but how do they get there? Answer:

Having painted a lot of Blood Angels lately, I felt they deserved a way of making planetfall. The ship above is a Space Marine Strike Cruiser from the Battlefleet Gothic range. I am a huge fan of Battlefleet Gothic (or BFG for short) as it combines naval combat tactics with kilometers long spaceships. What's not to like? My Imperial fleet is looking a bit tired these days and so the siren call of the Astartes beckoned once more! The paint scheme for this vessel (the Talons of Baal for anyone interested) is essentially the same red as my Blood Angels but with a Devlan Mud wash in place of the usual red and black shading layer. This gave it a grimier look than the infantry armour.

I picked out the inner spine of the ship in black to give it some variety then picked out all the metal areas in a mix of Boltgun Metal and Chaos Black. Large observation portholes and some little details were picked out in Dwarf Bronze - again to provide variety to the scheme. I then painted any obviously dome-like or big window-like areas Fenris Grey and gloss varnished them. Finally with a mix of Iyanden Darksun and Skull White I picked out some points of light as if there were lit windows within the ship to give it a sense of scale.

To give the engines some life I ran thinned Skull White into the dimples on the back of the engine tubes. Once dry I washed several layers of Hawk Turquoise over the white and surrounding engines and hull. To finish off the model I added a nebula to the base - easy to do, stipple Blood Red directly over the black, then stipple another layer leaving a dark patch on the edges (think fried egg). Then do the same with a 50:50 mix of Blood Red and Blazing Orange and finally Blazing Orange. Once that was thoroughly dry I loaded up a stippling brush with thinned skull white and ran my thumbnail over the tip to spray a fine mist of stars over the base. Make sure to mask the ship (I used a bit of sponge) from the mist and don't overdo it. I made sure that there were plenty of stars around the nebula as they are stellar nurseries, where stars are born. Over a particularly big blob (bottom left in the above picture) I painted a thin cross to indicate lens flare. Makes it look better than just having one whacking star.

And so, with a little photoshop jiggery pokery and a picture courtesy of NASA the Talons of Baal sets forth into the void! Haven't decided how many Space Marine vessels I am going to do yet. Given that my army is entirely 3rd company and this vessel can carry them all I may just do some escort craft and add them to my Imperial fleet. Anyhow, back to the workbench for me as the last 15 Death Korps are calling.

TTFN