Pertinus Aemilius, Company Champion

I finally took passable photos of my new Company Champion last night. I'd taken a set on Monday, but they didn't look quite right. I did a little more work on the paint on his face, and retook the shots. Here we go:

For the life of me, I could not get a good front-on shot of his face. As I mentioned before, I didn't paint eyes or teeth, because the model doesn't HAVE discernible eyeballs once he's primed, and attempts to paint his teeth kept resulting in what looked like an add for whitening strips. In the end, I decided to quit screwing around with the face and call it done. You have to know when to stop.

This is his bio, from the post in which I lined up all the backgrounds for my Command Squad:
Pertinus Aemilius, Company Champion, known behind his back as The Bull. Brave and self-sacrificing, to a fault. He was censured twice as a Scout for engaging enemy sentries in protracted melee, instead of silently dispatching them with his combat blade. The second such action resulted in the death of a fellow Scout when Pertinus' duel with an Ork sentry alerted an entire camp. He served five years penance for that failure. Shortly afterward, he was placed with an Assault Squad, skipping the traditional placement with a Devastator Squad. Selected as Company Champion after fifty years as an Assault Squad member, based purely on his skill with a blade. Pertinus Aemilius is not the smartest or most tactically gifted Ultramarine. He is stubborn and thick-headed, but unflinchingly loyal to his commander.
Next in the pipe is the Apothecary:

Pretty simple. Kneeling legs (which I swore I'd never use for an Apothecary, but did anyways), basic torso (I'd planned on putting his geneseed canisters on his left hip, but they didn't look right), Ravenwing narthecium and apothecarion shoulder pad, and the head from the Marine command squad box. I'd actually ordered a full set of the Ravenwing apothecary parts, but realized once I was assembling this guy that the bitz seller sent me a basic Ravenwing beakie head, not the one with the apothecarion symbol.
That makes twice I've been boned by a bitz shop sending wrong or incomplete parts and not noticing until a month later when I go to use the parts (the previous incident was a seller not including the shrine section of a Ravenwing bike that I'd pegged for a Chaplain's bike; I didn't notice until five weeks later, too late for a complaint). From now on, I'll check every order piece-by-piece. I stashed the regular helmet away for use on Raven Guard, and was lucky that I had a spare basic Apothecary head in my bitz box.

I'm going with a white-armored scheme for this guy. My other two apothecaries used the blue armor and white pad scheme, and they just don't stand out enough from the rest of the Marines on the table. I can paint white relatively well, but have only tried on small areas like helmets so far. This will be a new experience. The one thing I need to decide on is whether to have him shaded in a regular grey, or use the very thin Ultramarine blue that I used for Terminators and Sternguard. My gut says grey, as he won't have the blue armor to tie into. My Terminators and Sternguard all have regular blue armor, and it was important to tie the white to the blue. I don't know if that's needed here.

Painting Progress: Company Champion

I've been making some solid progress on my Company Champion over the last several days. At this point, he's about 80% done.

Here's his head:

The hair is shiny because I've not sealed it with Dullcote yet. I used a paint from the Reaper master Series line called Brown Liner. It's a nearly black brown color, and the liner paints tend to come out glossy. I then did some rough lines in a dark grey across the top to break up the surface some (but you can't see them in the pic, and I couldn't photograph it because of the glare off the shine).
You can see that I missed some spots near the hairline, so I'll have to go back and touch that up. I've repainted the face a couple times due to stray dots of Brown Liner. I do still have to go in and touch the teeth with an ivory or something, but I don't plan to paint eyes. The model doesn't seem to have actual eyeballs in there, and if it does, the squint obscures them.

Then there's the rest of him:

As I said, only about 80% done. I have to hit all his soft armor joints, the purity seal, gems, laurel, and tabard. He's wearing a laurel shoulder pad on his sword arm as well. I'm going to go with green for the laurels, but can't decide whether I should go ivory/linen or red for the tabard. My old Captain model wears red, but I'm not sure if I want to keep with that trend. Here's that old Captain:

Since I'm retiring some old models (my old Apothecary, especially) when I finish this Command Squad, maybe I'll retire this Captain as well. Hilariously, I can't remember if I've updated this guy yet to my new gold recipe and power sword technique.

As a quick note, while I was digging through my Photobucket for the pics of the Captain, I stumbled across this image:

It's my army for a monthly tournament at the FLGS, back in September of 2009. All of those non-Ultramarine bikes were eventually stripped and rebuilt into my current bike force, but it's neat to see the models I used to put on the board.

More Glamour Shots

I snipped some of the bare heads from the new Sternguard kit, and did some test fits for my Champion. As a reminder, here are the two finalists from the previous batch of heads:

And here are the candidates from the Sternguard box:

Not a huge fan of the bald/bionic one or the mohawk one. The mohawk head looks a lot like a guy I was in the marines with, who always cut his hair in a "horseshoe" cut and was a general jackass. lol. The bald head is too mature for the persona I've given this model. I really like the final head, as it displays a fierceness without resorting to the "show me your war face" route. What do you folks think?

I also took a quick shot of the fin assembly of my drop pod, to see how it looked on screen.

I discovered that I am NOT  a fan of painting large, flat areas of metallic colors. It's damned near impossible to avoid brush strokes and pooling. There's two coats of my darkest silver color, a wash of Badab Black around the edges, another coat of the darkest silver, and then two coats of my mid-tone silver. And you can still see streaks and lines! The Dullcote helped a little, but I really need to find a way to paint big, flat silver surfaces. Any tips?

Names, Stories, and a Plan

I've started this post at least two other times, each one slowly evolved into a very long and rambling post about nothing. Hopefully, the third time is a charm.

Firstly, I've not made any progress on my Champion or snipped test heads from the Sternguard sprue yet. I got distracted painting pieces of my drop pod. That bugger is so close to done I can almost taste it.

However, I did sit down and think up some names for my Command Squad members. I wanted each Command Squad member to have a first and last name, and for each name to be pseudo-Roman/Latin to match the Ultramarine naming conventions. In the past, I've named my various sergeant models and they all got single names. These Command Squad members will get two to differentiate them just a tiny bit more. All my future HQ models will also get two names.
Here's what I came up with:

Company Champion: Pertinus Aemilius.
Apothecary: Numerian Castor.
Standard Bearer: Marius Gracchus.
Veteran: Thrax Gaios.
Veteran: Flavius Felix.

I mostly grabbed names I thought sounded interesting. Flavius Felix was an actual Roman Senator, which I discovered via Google after selecting the name. No big deal. I also drafted up some very general backstory/personality traits for each member:

Pertinus Aemilius, Company Champion, known behind his back as The Bull. Brave and self-sacrificing, to a fault. He was censured twice as a Scout for engaging enemy sentries in protracted melee, instead of silently dispatching them with his combat blade. The second such action resulted in the death of a fellow Scout when Pertinus' duel with an Ork sentry alerted an entire camp. He served five years penance for that failure. Shortly afterward, he was placed with an Assault Squad, skipping the traditional placement with a Devastator Squad. Selected as Company Champion after fifty years as an Assault Squad member, based purely on his skill with a blade. Pertinus Aemilius is not the smartest or most tactically gifted Ultramarine. He is stubborn and thick-headed, but unflinchingly loyal to his commander.

Apothecary Numerian Castor is a patient, deliberate Marine. While not a coward by any means, he takes very few risks. He knows his mission is to safeguard the Marines with whom he serves, and when necessary, their geneseed.

Standard Bearer Marius Gracchus, "The Youngling." Marius is one of the youngest Marines ever selected to bear a company standard. His youthful features and penchant for humor hide a warrior who is capable with a chainblade and a masterful shot with a pistol.

Veteran Brother Thrax Gaios is the squad's demolitions expert. He carries a combimelta and a satchel of meltabombs. He can toss a krak grenade into the vision slit of a moving tank at a hundred meters.

Veteran Brother Flavius Felix is the oldest member of the command squad, and is fiercely protective of Numerian Castor. He has taken more than one bullet for the Apothecary, and his extensive bionics are proof of that. Castor ensures the scarred old veteran receives the best augmetics the Chapter's Apothecarion has to offer.

And there you go. These guys are designed to be a fixed unit that can be led by any HQ (captain, chaplain, or librarian). They're not optimally armed, but are designed more for looks and flavor. It's a direction I'm leaning for most units going forward, though a squad like this lends itself to that very easily. The only armament I'm not set on is that of Flavius Felix. I'm trying not to spend more than 15 points per model on upgrades. I'm leaning towards a chainsword and grav pistol, but am not sure. The model will have as many bionics as I can lay hands on though.

In addition to planning this squad, I'm also planning out small non-Ultramarine painting projects. I realized from my failure with Tyranids that it's ok to paint single models from time to time, as long as I'm not under massive pressure to get them on the table as a force. Nids were a poor choice in that regard, as I was facing the prospect of spending months painting models, only to wait months more to ever use them. I've decided that one-at-a-time is a good way to branch into Allies. My first non-Ultramarine model will probably be a Raven Guard Shadow Captain. It'll be good practice painting black and white without any blue, as well as the chance to possibly try out a non-Caucasian skin tone. No pressure to get a playable unit on the table here, just a fun one that COULD be used alongside my existing army someday.

He Is the Champion, My Friends

I'm lining up additional projects beyond my drop pod, and one of those is to build a Command Squad on foot. I'm modeling the Champion right now, and here are a couple in progress shots:

Yes, that appears to be a cat hair across the lens in the first shot. Damn cat. He's supposed to be in a shield guard stance, with his blade waiting for the opportune thrust or stab. It looks awkward from the side, but I like the look from the front. I ended up using a pair of Rhino gunner arms for this model. The shield arm has the gunner hand cut off at the wrist, a bolt pistol added, and then the shield pinned to the pistol and arm. The sword arm is the gunner arm, hand removed at the wrist and replaced with a power sword from the Assault Marine box, and then drastically rotated. I then had to pin the shoulder joint at an extreme outward angle and will fill the soft armor joint with Greenstuff. I triple checked to make sure the shoulder pad will fit on that side, and still leave room for the backpack. I ran into that issue with my Honor Guard models, and so I'm learning from those mistakes.

The big decision I have to make is regarding his head. I want the model to have character, and look stern and menacing. Sort of a "give me your best shot" look. I wasn't sure if a helmeted head would convey that properly. I grabbed a bit of poster tack and did a lineup of possible heads:

I skipped any heads that had rebreathers, as I felt those really didn't convey anything at all. I do actually like the helmeted head I selected, as well as the head in the fourth shot. The first Blood Angel head (fifth picture) is growing on me, but I'm not sure if a screaming head really conveys the vibe I'm after. The final picture is subtly different in the expression than the fifth, beyond the bionic eye. It looks more like a "Nooooo!" face than a "Raaaar!" face.

What do you folks think? Any heads you like or hate? Do you think the helmeted head will convey a feeling from the model? I do have to crack open my Sternguard box again and check those bare heads, but I'll use another post for that. I plain forgot.

Also, point of trivia: the heads from the old kits have much larger ball joints at the neck. For the first three bare heads, I'd have to trim that area down to make it look right. Not a big deal, just interesting changes to model kits over time.