Ian Sturrock's Dark Angels (work in progress!)

[IanSturrock]

I've been working on a few Veterans lately, having picked a couple of sprues up just before they went up in price (and down in quantity). I also snagged some of the original beakie marine plastic arms and heads on eBay, so thought I'd combine the two with a 5-man close combat squad:

The idea with the posing of these guys is to have them all doing some kind of reasonably legitimate stances with their weaponry. Fortunately the close-in, bent-elbow posture of the bolt pistol arm lends itself well to an extreme close quarters pistol shooting style (where your pistol is predominantly used for "contact shots", i.e. the muzzle is actually touching the enemy's body before you pull the trigger), so I didn't modify most of the right arms. The left arms had a bit more conversion to get some variety in the knife or chainsword guards and attacks. From left to right on the pic, these are as follows:

1 to 2: Reverse edge methods knife -- in the style of SouthNarc of Shivworks.com. This is quite gruesome -- lots of fast thrusts that turn into horrid shearing cuts if the opponent gets a limb in the way of the knife to defend himself...

3: This is based on a sword stance from Renaissance-era British martial arts, which is closely related to the bare-knuckle boxing and singlestick fighting of the day: unlike the other stances, the sword arm is held back, offering the other arm and shoulder as a tempting target for the opponent's melee weapon, but you then rotate the shoulders and bring the sword arm forward in attack as you simultaneously withdraw that target out of range.

4: World War II combatives style commando knife thrust... smooth and efficient. You'll see this most notably in the movie Secondhand Lions, when the old war vet is showing the young punks how you *should* hold a knife.

5: Your classic bowie knife combat approach, treating the heavier knife almost like a cutlass, with lots of slashes and snap cuts.

I need to do a little Green Stuff work on these guys to fill in gaps, but otherwise I'm tempted to keep them as they are in terms of details, rather than adding any extra icons to their backpacks or pouches etc. to their belts. (They all have the same backpack style, the one with the winged skull on the sword.) I think that shows off their relatively uniform look quite nicely, in terms of arms and heads. Most of my other vets are deliberately a bit of a mixed bag (more pics here: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.p...&album=6763 ), but I like the idea of a close combat specialist team that are particularly old and experienced -- again, almost that Secondhand Lions vibe, guys who really should be retired but get brought out for that one brutal job. :mellow:

I will add more pics as paint goes on...

[Chaplain Lucifer]

Nice use of old and new bits!

[shortysl]

I love the first two! The very idea of them whirling through a melee, spinning and slamming a blade into an opponent as they extend their pistol arm for a simultaneous pistol shot is awesome.

[Brother Immolator]

Man i am currently doing the same as you only it is a bit more....radical shall we say.

Great job on them!

[Bryan Blaire]

I really like the combination of new and old bits on these guys! They really give that RT-era feel that's just awesome. I like how you've put actual fighting style thought into how you set up their positioning as well. Very cool stuff, keep us updated!