An Imperial Guard Smorgasboard

Greetings one and all, today we have a collection of Imperial agents and soldiers. All part of the increasing Inq28 forces I'm painting for the same client as Project Leviathan:

These three elements are - from left to right - an Inquisitorial acolyte raised from the ranks, an Imperial officer with something of a Goth complex and three members of the Mordian 7th:

Wait, the Mordian 7th... that name seems familiar... well, if you are in the same blogging circles as me you might well have run across the Mordian 7th in the blog of the same name. My client asked me to replicate the paint scheme so as to represent some of the 7th among his command staff on this side of the Atlantic (I believe they natter online).

Obviously, taking cues from another painter's scheme is often a cornerstone of a commission painters world. We're often matching from photos or other reference material. In this case I had to interpret a few details but for the most part there was plenty of source material on the blog. I wound up using the same yellow as my Averlanders for the weapons, "The Fang" and associated layer colours for the armour and some Vallejo chocolate brown for the leather. The beret colour could have been either the blue-grey or the red. I decided on the red mainly for colour balance reasons. It picks out the red from the piping and the grey is already nicely spread across the model. No need to add any more.

From a model with quite a specific brief to one where my brief was "Goth Officer". A Gofficer if you will. Being a man with Cruxshadows, Opeth and Sisters of Mercy (neatly pigeon-holing my age) well represented among a lot of similar music in my collection this was a brief I could handle. Sadly... the camera just can't. It's one of those models with subtle transitions of colour and texture that studios never ever use for this exact reason. It doesn't photograph well. There is purple brocade in his coat lining, as well as on the uniform piping and sash. Everything else is silver, either faux NMM silver or just straight up metallics. If it isn't either of those choices then as Ford once said "any colour so long as it's black". There's black leather (starting from a brown base), black cloth (starting from a grey), gloss black armour, black hat, black... oh you get the picture. For a bit less rambly musing on painting black, go check out the 54mm (and thus more photogenic) ninja post.

Finally we have the Inquisitional Acolyte, another fond user of black and red with lots of chipped gloss black armour plates and brass bits... what's that? You swear he had a scenic base? Well you were right!

The client wanted a vox caster included on the base and in discussions we realised that a planetary scale unit might be more cool for an Inquisitor's henchman. Sadly this would make him a bit unwieldy so using the same magnets and flex steel technology from project Thunderbolt I gave him a swappable base.

The base itself features an old battered ammo case as a table, an Apocalypse vox caster nicked from a tank and the acolyte's lasrifle with underslung grenade launcher. Worked out nice I think!

That's it for today, nothing too deep, just shallow dives into some progress tracking. Have a nice weekend folks.

TTFN