Space Marine showcase - Imperial Fists and Whitescars (and more)

Phew, it’s been a while since I posted up any of the Space Marine showcase due to Iron Hands commitments leading up to BW3. Initially I thought I would be power-armoured-out after the intensive painting schedule and would instead be moving onto Xenos projects. However, after deciding to take Whitescars to the next blog wars in October, my power armour obsession is firmly back on track, although I intend to give Necrons some attention over the coming months also.

Imperial Fists:

The Fists are a tricky one to get right due to the difficulty of painting yellow. Some people go with a darker (base) yellow and heavy washes, but I wanted to keep the armour as resplendent as possible while still allowing for a little battle damage and weathering. To this end the GW drybrush came in very handy as I will explain later. The basic concept is that they are standard GW marines with the older metal ‘fist’ shoulder pads and backpacks. I primed the models with several coats of white to begin and then painted them a rather bright sunburst yellow. 

With the first few minis I didn’t get the orange wash watered down quite right and so they ended up a rather peachy/orange colour. I intend to go back and correct those ones later as I’ve now got the right shade of yellow. A thin wash of orange, followed by some white extreme highlights and sepia applied directly to the recesses gives a nice golden armour. The basing was simply a mix of mechrite red, orange and dark flesh to give a Martian-scape appearance. I then drybrushed orange over the bottom of the legs to give the appearance of dust clinging to the armour. Standard techniques were used for battle damage.

Whitescars:

Painting white is always going to be a nightmare even with the new ceramite white. However, I quickly found that using a coat of ulthuan grey to cover any dark spots followed by a few thinned coats of ceramite white did the trick. Unusually for a SM army, I elected not to use highlighting for the Whitescars. I just didn’t like the ulthuan grey as a main colour with white as a highlight and so opted to simply go with the shading for the army. (ulthuan grey 2:1 dawnstone)

   

As for the army theme, obviously there would be many bikers. As well as whitescar parts, I also used a few space wolf parts and some greenstuffed hair/tashes as well as some chaos spiky bits. Basing proved more of a challenge as I wanted to go with a jungle theme. Being on a tight budget I went with the cheap and cheerful aquarium plastic plants option. To be honest, I don’t think they’re that bad and will look quite striking on a whole army. I also used the new basing paints to add mud to legs/tyres to take the edge off the brilliant white. As well as the showcase mini here are some pictures of some of the WIP minis so far: