Start of my Black Legion warband / ETL vow squad

[Urauloth]

After months of tinkering I've got the first batch of my CSMs almost ready to be undercoated - this thread will track the progress of my squad for ETL, and also the warband in general. All I have are phone pictures right now but I'll be changing that when I hit the painting stage.

 

Heads aren't attatched at this stage because of the awkwardness of painting the horns; plan is to do them seperately on lil' sticks and attach them late in the painting process.

 

All the CSMs have some degree of magnetization for similar reasons (learned the hard way how badly chainswords can get in the way of painting the torso armour...) but in the case of the bolter dudes in this squad, the arms are stuck in place and the weapons are magged with 1mm magnets - two in the weapon, one in each hand - for a degree of versatility when I get around to list-building.

 

Flamer:

http://i.imgur.com/uvxmK.jpg

 

and the same CSM with a boltgun:

http://i.imgur.com/vurI9.jpg

 

There's a melta done the same way. Doesn't work with the plasmaguns, though, they're too heavy. My test for acceptable magnetisation is to turn the mini upside down and shake it; if it stays in place all is good, if it rattles around or falls off it flunks the test and i stick it together in a more permanent manner, thus the plasma guns will be glued to their firing hands and magged at the shoulder.

 

Here's another bolter marine, this one with some broken tank track links on his base I'm looking forward to rusting up:

http://i.imgur.com/b63oF.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/3OR0T.jpg

 

Icon, both arms magged at the shoulders - the 3mm magnets I'm using give a strong enough bond that you can actually pik him up by the icon when it's attached. Working on pistol/CCW arms for him in case I don't want to field an icon for some reason, but my vow includes an IoCG so he'll be staying like this for a while.

http://i.imgur.com/X84WH.jpg

 

And the champion, with the pistol and powerfist he needs for the vow...

http://i.imgur.com/iDIml.jpg

 

...and his alt-loadout with a power axe, which I converted before 6E made them knock-off powerfists.

http://i.imgur.com/HfFCm.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/sg5Yy.jpg

 

With any luck I'll have the first mini done sometime after the weekend.

[daemonclaw]

looks promising ,i notice with all the magnetising you dont mention backpacks,are they fixed as i find it a bit of a pain personally painting them insitu or maybe its just me

[Urauloth]

They are fixed, I tried out magnetising them but I found it was a hassle to stop them tilting, and the strong magnets in the torsos made it awkward to fit mags to the backpack as well. They'll be a bit of a pain to paint, but they'll be mostly black, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

[Urauloth]

Here's a shot of one of them painted up; no battle damage on this one yet because I'm still experimenting with where to put that and exactly how to do it. Unfortunately my lightbox isn't working - I either need better lights or to radically alter the setting on my camera - so this is taken with a flash which has obliterated some of the fine highlights on the mini. I'm going to try taking some pics in daylight instead and see how they turn out.

 

http://i.imgur.com/wKAl4.jpg

 

Unfortunately I'm going to have to abandon ETL since I've had a lot of medical issues recently and there's been no way for me to get enough work in to make the deadline, but I'll keep this thread running as a p&m log anyway. I'll try to get some better pics up soon.

[Urauloth]

I managed to get better colours but now I've screwed up the depth of field, I'm going to go read some more photography tutorials I think.

 

http://i.imgur.com/VWGmC.jpg

[Armond]

Beautiful work! Sorry to hear about the medical issues, hope they resolve soon!