Marine showcase - Iron hands and Salamanders

After some delay here is the fourth installment of my chapter showcase. This time round we'll be looking at the legendary forgefathers of the Astartes, namely the Iron Hands and Salamanders.]

Iron Hands


As anyone who has seen my Iron Hands project will know, the aim was to devise a straightforward army with heavy mechanicum influences and lots of mechanised components. Therefore, tanks, techmarines and bionics feature heavily. Three tactical squads made up of both GW, forgeworld and chapterhouse bionic parts intermixed with normal GW tactical marines (and a few older techmarine models) make up the core of the army. I also used the tank marine torso/shoulder pads for many of the models as well as forgeworld brass etch mostly on the vehicles. A few notable models are the attack 'quad' bike I am converting as well as the open tracked all round land raider. (both of which near completion) I also used some older 2nd edition parts for the whirlwind, predator and heavy weapons to add to the technoarcana of the chapter.

On to colour scheme - very simply black! I used tech bases from evil mushroom games and after assemply sprayed the model with chaos black spray undercoat. Before starting to paint I also quickly went over any parts of the model with chaos black as the spray doesn't always cover metal and resin that well. Next I used the new leadbelcher base (great paint) to do all the bionics, trims, soft armour etc. Once done I washed any areas needing depth (bionics, gun parts) with nuln oil and after it had dried used runefang steel to highlight. The bases were painted in much the same way. Any exposed heads/purity seals were painted with dheneb stone and washed with gryphonne sepia (with a hint of purple for the faces) before beign highlighted with dheneb stone. The wax was painted with the amazing mephiston red - highly recommended! The black was simply highlighted with a thin line of codex grey and then a final tidy up with chaos black to finish. I went for blue eye lenses for a change and put tactical markings and binary script on the armour with the superb new base white. As a side note I was initially skeptical about the new paint line but am now utterly sold on it!


Salamanders



The salamanders were themed around a Vulkan list, so lots of meltas and flamers!! I must admit to cheating a little with this army, however, by using the army painter green spray to get a good base coat. I then went on to paint snot green over the spray in thin layers with a 50:50 snot/scorpion green highlight. A thinned dark Angel green was used for recesses and then a wash of thraka green all over to blend. Once this dried, I then added fine highlights in scorpion green to make them stand out better.

The black was painted onto the shoulder pads and highlighted with 50:50 chaos black/codex grey. I applied the same to the backpack although found it easier (due to the green spray) to leave both base and backpack seperate til the end. Bronze effects were added by painting tin bitz on followed by shining gold.

A transfer was used for the chapter symbol and lhaemean medium added over the top to decrease the shine. The flame symbols/lava were painted on by mechrite red blended up to skull white using blood red, blazing orange and sunburst yellow mixes as intermediaries (this is a lot easier than it sounds, just keep adding colour to your wet mix and brushing on an extra layer). The purity seal was done in the same way as always and the white text on the armour made to look more tribal than the usual marine text. Lastly, the igneous rock was simply a drybrush of mechrite red and scorched brown mixed.