Officers and Gentlemen of the DKK

Just a quickee this time and the penultimate Death Korps update before the project is finished! This time it is the turn of the officers and commissars of the DKK to take the limelight:

The officers were a fairly straightforward affair. It is often a weird point of the Guard that their officers are not much more than a pimped out Sergeant. I wanted to indicate that fact while tying them thematically to the senior officer's look. I worked this through by painting them in very basic DKK style but with the brassy plates on the front of the helmets to tie them in to that "Brass Hat" feel of their boss. This gives them that half way house between the Colonel and his men. Another consideration was the power fist on the rightmost Lieutenant. My client had added an old Space Marine power fist complete with shoulder pad to the officer. The challenge here was to minimise the impact of the part as the slightly oversized arm would look tagged on otherwise. As a result there is no extra decoration on them and the green pad blurs with the breastplate while the brown fist merges with the greatcoat.

I then went in and really knackered the edges. This guy has the only weapon capable of taking on armoured vehicles in combat and I imagine him leaping to the fore and bludgeoning the hell out of tanks, bunkers and other armoured thingies. With these fellows down it was on to their watchdogs, the officers of the Commissariat.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Imperial Guard background, Commissars are effectively Soviet Zampolit (political officers) tasked with maintaining discipline and fighting mettle. They are empowered to summarily execute anyone "found wanting in the field" which usually means running away. They are the lash and the leash of the Imperial Guard and universally feared. To underscore this they dress in black with long leather stormcoats. Much like the Hot Fuzz boys, these were an exercise in adjacent blacks. I got around this by highlighting the storm coat with Scorched Brown and the cloth with Codex Grey. This gave the impression of different fabrics and gave the model definition. The green decoration tied them to the rest of the army thematically whilst allowing them to stand out a little.

Anyway, thats all folks for this time, next DKK update will be all four standard bearers and the last one before I attempt to shoot the entire army! Until next time.

TTFN