The Pale Knight

The Pale Knight

I don't need another knight. I have enough knights to feild an entire 2000 point army of House Krast Knights. Bit of a story to this.

So, you may remember that I am supposed to be working on a fallen angels army. Well, at one point I was going to supplement that 1000 point army with 1000points of imperial knights in the form of a free blade knight preceptor and two armigers. Shortly after I purchased the kits GW came out with an FAQ that took the imperial keyword away from the fallen angel's detachment. If I'm honest I kind of lost interest in the project; my original plan had been to have a flexible 1000 points army of Fallen Angels that I could ally with the various imperial armies in my collection as I felt like it.

Games Workshop then announced Codex Chaos knights, so I was in full wait and see mode. It turns out that the one kind of knight that Chaos Knights cannot have is a preceptor, they have a different pattern of knight for leading (and buffing) the smaller knights. I decided to give the armiger box I had purchased to Helen, who is making a detachment of 'properly chaos' knights. However, I was still left with the preceptor box. After a little bit of dithering, I decided to make a Knight Warden, that could be used as an Imperial Freeblade, or a Chaos Dreadblade (or as a lord of war in games of 30k) as required.

I like the idea of doing an ambiguously loyal army in 40k, which Is why I am so fond of my Fallen Army, being not imperial, but at the same time not being obvious Chaos Worshipers. I decided to turn this sort of ambiguousness of allegiance thing to overdrive with my knight and paint an essentially blank knight. 

Not just the paint scheme mind you, I also took the time to file off the name scroll from the chest of the knight and neglected to hang a banner between its legs. The bone sections were sprayed a bone color, had skeleton horde contrast paint brushed into the recesses, and then a screaming skull highlight. The black trim was done in the same way as the black armor on my fallen, and the metal was largely just gray contrast paint over bolt gun metal spray.

I tried to have a little play with different varnishes here, the bone areas are finished with a high gloss, with more of a matt finish on the other areas. It doesn't quite pop like I had hoped due to GW's new brush-on matt varnish being.... quite satin.. but it works up to a point. I also used a bit of brown weathering powder on the toes, and black weathering powder around exhausts and on the melta gun and flamer.

Pilot

I decided to do a sort of very punk rock female pilot, by doing a relatively simple head swap. I used one of the Forge World female storm cast heads on the standard knight pilot body. It adds to the sort of good-but-rebellious vibe I was going for. I wanted to try and portray a knight who is fighting for what she believes in at the moment, and sometimes that means fighting under a chaos banner, and other times imperial. I know it's an imperative of the Warhammer 40,000 setting that being a free-thinking rebel is, necessarily, the first step on the road to damnation and growing a third arm. Maybe she is taking the first steps toward damnation, but the non-evil rebel look is not something we see often, but which much logically occur. I don't think folks wake up one day thinking 'this imperium thing is a bit much' and immediately start worshiping chaos.

I don't have a full backstory (Or a name! Name my knight pilot!) but my basic idea is that she's absconded from a knight household because of some perceived injustice. A sort of ronin type.

Anyway. I need to get back to painting Fallen Angels I suppose.