Fallen Techmarine (Warpsmith)

Fallen Techmarine

So; I said in my last post that I was planning on expanding my fallen detachment out into a full 2000 points fallen themed chaos space marine army. This is the first part of that second half of the army. I know I haven't quite painted the first half yet, but I like to rotate through character- squad - vehicle for my own sanity.

This is mostly the Forge World Techmarine in Mk III armor but with a few modifications. I did not like the bare head that comes with this model. Now, I'm not one of the people who have a crusade against bare heads and likes to replace every single one with a helmet. I like to think I am quite good at painting faces. However, this particular head just seemed a bit too iron hands for my liking. My first thought was to swap it for one of the plastic Mk III helms I have leftover from assembling my fallen. However, scaling issues between the plastic kit and the resin one meant that the plastic head just sat slightly too large on the resin torso. Raiding our bitz box large cupboard I came across a few resin Mk II helmets Helen had leftover from her 30k Salamanders. So, technically he has an Mk II helmet on his Mk III armor, but I think it looks really cool and marks him out as an individual.

I also decided to replace the resin shoulder pads that came in the Forge world kit with a standard plastic shoulder pad, and one with the Legion symbol on. I just really wanted to work in that Red Dark Angels symbol. The shoulder pads that come in the kit are really cool with unique layered armor texture and a molded mechanicum opal and cogwheel bordering; however, I just felt this iconography was more appropriate.

In terms of painting, he was largely painted in the same techniques as my other fallen angels so far. A couple of bits of interest through. I used some snakebite leather contrast paint to paint grease on the metal parts that looked like they needed to move. On his power axe, I used aethermatic blue contrast paint over a base layer of stormhost silver. It produces a pleasant effect, although it is obviously very different from the time-consuming blending effect I did on my sergeants' power swords. I wanted to try it, and I am reasonably pleased it works as the axe is a different weapon. I think if I add more sword-wielding characters to this force I will have to go back to my old method for consistency though. I kind of think the haft of the power axe came out too '90s with all the flat red. There really isn't any detail on those sections. However, I wanted to get more red into the miniature to try desperately to make him look less like a member of the Iron Hands space marines.

So, next should be the third and final squad of Fallen Space marines. However, I am off on 10 days holiday in the Lake District tomorrow, and there is no way I want to embark on batch painting 9 marines this afternoon only to leave them half done for 10 days.

I have 10 days or so when I get back from my holiday to keep plugging through my fallen before GCSE Results day... and then I am running away to Merseyside to annoy my parents for the rest of the summer break. (and hopefully, play a game of 40k!)

The only fly in that ointment is that Warcry will be delivering whilst I am on my holidays. So I'll have lots of terrain painting to get back to. But if Helen and I work as a team we can probably blast through the terrain in a day once we agree on what colour it should be.