The Burden of Duty: The End of the Beginning

[Dagoth Ur]

He looks fantastic! Especially the nicely weathered yellow, but I am also a big fan of the red helmet :)

[hushrong]

The PIP is great! The yellow armor and the nitty/gritty rigors of battle on it look fantastic.

Also just realized that's blood in this right shoulder pad and I bet it ain't his.

 

 

 

 

That marine looks  ing bad ass! I sincerely want to copy everything about that guy. If I played HH I'd love to see him as a moritat and he makes the FW moritat looks like a wuss.

 

As for the terminator armor I say keep at it. You'll find something to make it work.

 

Thanks mate! Yeah, he's gonna be a Moritat. Not my original intent to include Destroyers when I first started working on this force... but as time's worn on, my designs for the 284th have... changed, I suppose. I do like the FW Moritat model, to be honest, so bits of him will more than likely find their way into my army at some point. But this nasty fellow will serve as mine.

 

Gathering bits as I type this for another terminator idea. Hoping this works out better this time. 

He is going to be the baddest moritat to hit the field! I really cannot wait to see him finished.

Destroyers would be cool to see. They are such an interesting unit fluff-wise I think. Just knowing that the weapons you use are killing you but there you go on using them. I had thought about using some when daydreaming about building an HH IW army. Unlike the VIII with their red-gauntlet marines living on death's edge I fancied the Lord of Iron would put those that failed him into a destroyer unit. They could still serve but it would kill them eventually. Slowly but surely with agonies to suffer on the way.

 

Looking forward to seeing those gathered bits to use on the new terminator idea.

[Soldier of Dorn]

[+++inload begins+++]

[pict-capture: Ranger Sergeant Adem, I Ranger, 284 Storm Battalion, VII Legion]

Veteran Sergeant Adem was a long-serving member of the Rangers, leading the detachment's first squad through the dark days of Terra and unto the very end. A quiet soul, he let the crack of his firearm's discharge speak louder for him then his words ever could. Only after his supplies of ammo had run dry did his voice finally fall silent, every round finding a mark in those last days.

[inload end]

Finished basing Adem. Encountered a couple problems along the way: namely a slight mishap in which I broke the antenna on his helm. Fortunately, a quick transplant of the antenna from a nuncio-vox backpack corrected that. Asides from that... I really like how he came out. The white striping is something I just thought I'd try out, and now I've fallen in love with. That'll definitely be finding its way back into future models I do. The only subpar bit, I feel, is the energy coils on the rifle and I'll fix those in future, but if you can spot anything else that's greatly appreciated!

Gonna try something out that I've not really been great about and spend as much time as possible over the coming break after my finals and before classes start up again next month to catch up on my painting backlog. It's... substantial, at this point, and I just need to clear through in all honesty. So, yeah, that's the plan for December. I'll start sorting through what I have next week and making decisions (gotta vow what I can for the IFE, y'know) and figuring out how I'm gonna go about this.

Dos: 99% certain I can, brother. Recorded not an insignificant amount of notes on the process after the fact, and hoping that my memory wasn't so fallible as to completely throw me off something I had painted barely a few hours before. Fingers crossed. :D

Obs: Indeed. Something that's been missing from my scheme is contrast, though I've not realized it until now. Getting the right balance, though, even by accident, has shown me how vitally important that quality has been, even in what I style to be a relatively gritty look. As Jake Blues once said: "Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ! I have seen the light!" That's approximately how I feel about this right now.

hush: Thanks bro. Figured out the right level of weathering finally after a ways of doing it, I think. And yeah, I believe I overdid it on the blood splatter a bit, but... eh. It works. And that Destroyers idea sounds just about perfect for IW. The concept I'm mulling over for 284BTN Destroyers is self-sacrifice, volunteer units, but it's early stages yet... we'll see where this goes.

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Good job.

[Kizzdougs]

Fantastic paint job!! :tu:

[hushrong]

Great to see him finished up. The white stripes on his helm, shoulder, and knee look great on his armor. I also didn't mean anything negative about the blood splatter. I saw red and thought he had a red shoulder pad...then realized he shoulder checked a guy pretty hard or something. He has a bayonet fixed so it's very fitting that he has gotten up close and personal with the enemy.

 

I also like your idea for destroyers. Much more noble tragic and it certainly carries a 'burden of duty' feel to it. Gene-hanced warriors who vow to defend the Emperor, the Imperium of man, and its citizens wielding such terrible weapons of destruction against their foe with full knowledge that this will kill them if the enemy doesn't.

Edited December 7, 2017 by hushrong

[Soldier of Dorn]

Thanks, lads. Appreciate the compliments as ever.

Great to see him finished up. The white stripes on his helm, shoulder, and knee look great on his armor. I also didn't mean anything negative about the blood splatter. I saw red and thought he had a red shoulder pad...then realized he shoulder checked a guy pretty hard or something. He has a bayonet fixed so it's very fitting that he has gotten up close and personal with the enemy.

I also like your idea for destroyers. Much more noble tragic and it certainly carries a 'burden of duty' feel to it. Gene-hanced warriors who vow to defend the Emperor, the Imperium of man, and its citizens wielding such terrible weapons of destruction against their foe with full knowledge that this will kill them if the enemy doesn't.

The white stripes... yeah. I really like them.They'll feature prominently in the reborn 284th (more on that later.) They're something that I've fallen in love with.

The dualistic nature of self-sacrifice, nobility and tragedy is very much something I've always had in mind when confronting the Burden of Duty. It's a thematic element that speaks to me deeply. Not just dying for what you love, but the willingness to choose that possibility. Courage, selflessness. It's something that runs in our culture, in our literature. I rewatched Braveheart just the other day, and that movie, I think, is an exemplar of that. "To trade all the days from now til then, for just one chance to tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they may never take our freedom." Absolutely glorious.

In any regard, there's something I've been thinking of, with the coming new year, concerning this project, and its future. I've been taking a break after a bit of a hobby burnout in December after trying to wrangle Invictus Suzerains into something I was happy with, and it's given me time to consider what i want to do.

I've been working on my Imperial Fists for a while, just shy of two years, and I have no small amount of personal investment in them. The fluff I've written and the bit of modeling for them I've done has been a method for me to express myself on a level I find difficult to speak of in more explicit terms, and it's saved me no small amount of stress over the past two years. But I'm at a stage in life when a lot of things are changing, and a lot of my original ideas for my 284BTN have changed as consequence. And it's become, for lack of a better word, bloated to me. It's become too ambitious, and simply too big. I'm devising all these concepts that have no place in the structures for the Battalion I've established, and I feel no small portion of dread when faced with the reality of the monster that I've created. I no longer have the focus of the project that I did when I first set out, and even if it still remained in some place within my creation, I'm no longer the person I was when I held that focus and that drive.

Not only that, but I think my painting and my modeling have come a long ways since I started. The early models I did, while I'm fond of them, are... inconsistent, the bits choices are not what I'd choose now, the weathering could you no small amount of work, and I feel that they simply don't live up to anything I'd be happy with now. And I feel it's time to start fresh.

The 284 Storm Battalion will be reborn, in golden yellow and banded white, its tale and its organization rewritten from the ground up. Lots of things, I think, will be left behind, and distilled into something simpler, purer, something that I can face and look on without any tinge of apprehension at facing the project of building it. Not everything will be left behind... there are miniatures and characters (some that I've not shared or posted about) that I'm too proud of to completely abandon, but I'm uncertain at this stage. I've barely begun the almighty task of revisiting the piles of notes I've built through my own thought and through conversation with others, and seeing what I can keep, what will be brought back, and what will be remade anew. I suspect I will leave this thread behind as part of this rebirth, as well, and come back with a new one when the new 284 is ready, most likely, I suspect, in a few weeks. There's simply too much here that's invested into what the 284 was, and I feel that will stifle what I want it to be.

So this is it. This will, in all likelihood, be the end of the thread. Not a long one, of course (I never was the most prolific hobbyist) but it's marked a good period of my development within the hobby. I will always be proud of the work I posted here. I'm immensely grateful to everyone who commented, criticized me, and otherwise helped me grow as a hobbyist. It's been a great ride.

I'd feel remiss to leave an update to the project without a miniature, and I've got just the model in mind. Nothing special, but appropriate for the themes of this project. It started with WIPs of Marines of the Line, so it will end with a Marine of the Line, bolter in hand and bare of paint, and a quote from a wartime leader.

"Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

[Son of Carnelian]

Excellent work brother! The care and attention you show to each miniature shines through.

[outlanders_luke]

Awesome work buddy! I've followed you on Instagram for a while, but it's nice being able to read the fluff that goes along with it