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Imperial Knight House Cenwulf (More Rangers and Army Shot!)


Vash113

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After several days of frenetic painting this weekend I've finished some of the support for my WIP Knight Household army and got some pics taken that I figured I'd throw up here to share and get some cc on.

 

 

 

 

Group shots of the Baronial Court (Eventually going to turn it into an Exalted Court with two more knights) and the first two of four Sentinel Squadrons for the army. I decided that I didn't just want to play a strictly Imperial Knight army but wanted to represent Huscarls, aka Men-At-Arms, the bodyguards and household troops of the Knight House fighting alongside the nobles and their knight armor. To that end I liked the idea of running 1-2 Emperor's Talon Recon Companies, formations entirely composed of Sentinels that make one Sentinel an officer capable of giving orders to the squadrons. I'm also planning to add a counts-as Belisarius Cawl and small Skitarrii force of two squads of rangers, a squadron of Onager Dunecrawlers and a squadron of Sydonian Dragoons. In total the final house force will number 5 Imperial Knights and between 20-32 smaller walkers/crawlers and a handful of infantry.

Painting wise I chose to try and represent the standard heraldry scheme for a knightly house with personal heraldry for each knight shown on the right front shoulder plates while house heraldry is on the left front shoulder plate and the outer halves of both shin plates. The Imperial Aquila in white on a black field is shown on the backs of both shoulder plates and insides of both shin-plates. I chose to style the aquilas as skeletal birds based on one of the Freeblades from the Knight Companion book. The Tilting shield has a knotwork style representation of the house crest that is far simpler and cleaner than most house heraldry but fits the norse aesthetic IMO. All of which was applied by freehand rather than transfers. I copied the tilt-shield heraldry on the lower left forward hulls of the sentinels with squadron markings shown as futhark letters on the upper right forward hulls of the sentinels.

While I want the markings and wolf iconography to tie-in with my large Space Wolf army I wanted the knights to be a clearly distinct and separate fighting force and so went with a medium granite gray rather than the dark blue-gray/shadow gray that I used for my wolves.

The wolf heads are from shapeways and help my space viking-esque knight house fit in alongside my Space Wolves as you can see here:

 

 

 

 

 



So what do you guys think of a combined arms Knight House using units from multiple factions to represent a more rounded out army drawn from the retainers of a Knightly House?
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Very Well thought out and executed force :cool.: ,

i love the mid grey colour,the wolf heads and knotwork and futhark are a really nice touch, the combintion of units suggested is spot on,i really like the way it's headed:thumbsup:

 

I look fwd to more updates.

 

Cheers, Mithril

 

P.S. is that the Tower shopping centre GW on Bland street??

Edited by mithrilforge
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Very Well thought out and executed force :cool.: ,

i love the mid grey colour,the wolf heads and knotwork and futhark are a really nice touch, the combintion of units suggested is spot on,i really like the way it's headed:thumbsup:

 

I look fwd to more updates.

 

Cheers, Mithril

 

P.S. is that the Tower shopping centre GW on Bland street??

 

Thanks for the comments, and yes that is the Tower Center GW on Bland Street, I sometimes go to the one out in Fair Oaks but I'm usually at the Springfield/Tower Center store.

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They look great :thumbsup: Mixing and matching armies to better represent support is a good idea, would let you create a distinct force :smile.:

 

Thanks. I often like to mix army books to represent rare and/or interesting aspects of Imperial forces. My Space Wolves have Catachan Imperial Guardsmen converted with beards and iconography to represent Kaerls taking to the field alongside my wolves, while I use Blood Angels Death Company allied in from the BA book to represent my old metal Wulfen from the Eye of Terror/13th Black Crusade book as I feel those rules better represent my smaller, still power armored wulfen than the new demi-armored wulfen.

 

That sentinel formation is very cool, great idea for supporting the Knights too!

Thanks I thought so too, as soon as I stumbled across it in the Cadian supplement I knew what I wanted to do! :D

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Cool army!  I love the concept of Sentinels running interference/scouting for an IK house, sort of in a scaled-down reflection of the relationship between Warhound Titans and their larger "battle titan" brothers.  I'm also a massive fan of Sentinels anyway (because they look like Star Wars AT-STs) so this isn't a hard sell to me in either case.  Great work!  :)

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Cool army!  I love the concept of Sentinels running interference/scouting for an IK house, sort of in a scaled-down reflection of the relationship between Warhound Titans and their larger "battle titan" brothers.  I'm also a massive fan of Sentinels anyway (because they look like Star Wars AT-STs) so this isn't a hard sell to me in either case.  Great work!  :smile.:

 

Exactly, what giant robot would run around without support? :happy.:

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Earlier today I finished work on my counts-as Belisarius Cawl. Sacristan Primus Eorlund Ironblood. I kept with the granite gray of the house colors for his robes with primarily gold and silver metal and details picked out here and there in blue, green, white and red. Cawl is simply an amazing model with tons of detail and TONS of arms to boot! I'm not sure yet how I want him to work with the rest of the army but when the Imperial Triumvirate was first revealed I knew I had to add him!









Cawl was the last unpainted model I've bought for my Knight Household and I'm not sure what to add next. In a week I've completed Cawl and six Sentinels and that's WAAAAAY more painting progress than I usually manage in several months but I'm on a roll and want to keep going.... I just can't seem to decide what to add next.

Que two paragraphs of indecision!

I've narrowed it down to either a Mechanicus/Skitarii Get Started box, with the Dominus, 10 troops and an Onager, the savings is just so good on that box, the onager alone is $66 and I need at least three so :wacko.: but it would add another Tech-Priest, some troops and another type of Imperial Walker. I've already ordered some spare weapons from a bits site so I can build two 5 man squads. In a few weeks i could add another of the same box and buff out the force with four squads of 5 for the minimum 4 troops choices to run a Conclave Mechanicus formation which could include everything but the Sentinels, give all my vehicles It Will Not Die and Power of the Machine Spirit within 6" of an HQ from the force. It also gives 4 HQ slots so I could include Cawl, the Dominus and two Engineseers since I ultimately plan three, the GW plastic one, the Forge World Titan Tech Priest and the Forge World Macrotek so I have three different sculpts. It also comes out to some 640-ish points in one box and since the army currently stands at 1810 that would get me nearly to 2500.

On the other hand the easier and simpler route to a 2k list is to add the third of four total squadrons to the Emperor's Talon Recon company, at about the same cost cash wise it would add 135 points putting me right near the 2k range to get the force more generally playable immediately and would probably be quicker to paint since I've already got the scheme worked out for the Sentinels. On the other hand a break from painting JUST Sentinels is very tempting... oooh decisions, decisions!

So anyway that's where the force stands now, I'll try to get some close-up shots of the freehand and heraldry later and get those up as well and hopefully I'll have a plan for how to progress with this army by the end of the week.
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Love the Arch-Dominus stand-in with the grey and metallics, I think he'll blend well into your existing force but stand out on his own, too.  I plan to follow my army's paint scheme when I paint up my Cawl (eventually), and I use a somewhat similar grey, so it's nice to know it works well.

 

As for where to go next, really both options are awesome.  If you go for the Start Collecting! it means you'll be diving full-on in the AdMech factions which in my book is a great step.  As an added bonus, the Onagers will add some great long-range firepower and they help to push the armoured force theme you seem to be running here.  On the other hand, I LOVE Sentinels and would like to see a full ETRC on the table, especially alongside those sweet Knights, so I guess I'm not the best help here.

 

To quote a favorite commercial: "Why not both?"  :yes:

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He looks great, the grey works with the metallics nicely :thumbsup: As for next things the Skitarii Get Started box is great value so what more excuse do you need? :wink:

 

True that, the savings is seriously tempting...

 

Love the Arch-Dominus stand-in with the grey and metallics, I think he'll blend well into your existing force but stand out on his own, too.  I plan to follow my army's paint scheme when I paint up my Cawl (eventually), and I use a somewhat similar grey, so it's nice to know it works well.

 

As for where to go next, really both options are awesome.  If you go for the Start Collecting! it means you'll be diving full-on in the AdMech factions which in my book is a great step.  As an added bonus, the Onagers will add some great long-range firepower and they help to push the armoured force theme you seem to be running here.  On the other hand, I LOVE Sentinels and would like to see a full ETRC on the table, especially alongside those sweet Knights, so I guess I'm not the best help here.

 

To quote a favorite commercial: "Why not both?"  :yes:

Nice, I hope you post up pics of your Cawl when he's painted!

 

As for what next I do plan to do both eventually, it's simply what I want to add now vs next month vs the month after that. I'm taking this force in small-ish chunks partly to manage the workload and keep it interesting and partly to budget the force reasonably. After all it's not the cheapest of armies :wacko.:

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Before I start in on the Skitarii Get Started Box I figured I'd put up some individual pictures of the Knights heraldry and markings.

To start with is Thane (Baron) Brynjolf, the Savage Rain, Kingsward of House Cenwulf:





His tilt shield shows the basic pattern of the Kingsward behind the stylized runic wolf-head icon of House Cenwulf that forms the most typical armorial marking.



The right shoulder plate shows the skeletal Imperial eagle and the personal heraldry of Thane Brynjolf, a trio of red arrows.



The left shoulder shows the common black wolf head armor heraldry of the house alongside the Imperial eagle.



The leg plates show a simplified version of both the Imperial eagle and house heraldry to better depict the imagery on the smaller area of the shin plates.

Next up is Thane Ulfric, the Crimson Wrath, Master of Judgement of House Cenwulf:

 





Ulfric's tilt shield mirrors Brynjolf's with the symbol of the Master of Judgement represented behind the house heraldry.



Ulfric's shoulder shows crossed red axes as his personal heraldry while on the back carapace can be seen the dual stripes of a Thane, the equivalent rank in House Cenwulf for a Baron.

The third and last of my current knights is Jarl (Seneschal/High King) Thorvald Cenwulf, the Iron Tempest, High King of House Cenwulf:

 



Thorvald has a single stripe down the middle of his carapace to depict his status as the High King and Seneschal of the house.

 



Thorvald's tilt shield lacks any definitive patterns behind the heraldry while his shoulder shows a traditional iron sword splitting a lightning bolt as his personal heraldry.

Here are the markings of the Huscarl Sentinels:



Both squadrons depict the stylized house heraldry on their hulls showing their allegiance to the house and mirroring the markings of the larger knights.

 



Alpha squadron uses a rune roughly translating to A as the squadron iconography.



Beta squadron similarly uses a marking indicative of B.



The commander of Alpha Squadron is also the senior officer of the Talon Company and his hull is marked with a single vertical stripe similar to the marking of the High King's own Knight Titan. The commander of Ceti Squadron is the company Lieutenant and will have dual stripes on his hull to show his officer status but subordinate to the commander of Alpha Squadron.

I apologize for the pic quality, hopefully they give you guys the general idea, I look forward to some comments and critique and will hope to get some more additions finished soon.
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Awesome stuff!  I love the attention to detail on these models and the care you've clearly put into making them fit with your SW army.

 

Have you had good luck with your PC Sentinels on the tabletop?  I'm tempted to get a few Sentinels for my army but I'm not sure how best to equip them . . .

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Awesome stuff!  I love the attention to detail on these models and the care you've clearly put into making them fit with your SW army.

 

Thanks, I find the detail is a great way to make my models stand out compared to others of the same armies and they often draw significant attention when I put them on the table. It makes the long hours painting absolutely worth it to see people's reactions when the models hit the table.

 

 

Have you had good luck with your PC Sentinels on the tabletop?  I'm tempted to get a few Sentinels for my army but I'm not sure how best to equip them . . .

 

Actually I have, three Plasma Cannons are a great way to wreck something nasty, makes squads of power armor vanish, Terminators disappear and even light vehicles are tempting targets. I have had an irritating number of plasma overheats above the statistical average but even then I have yet to actually lose a sentinel from gets hot damage and two shots still hurt quite a bit. The Multi-Laser Sentinels have also been proving fairly effective recently, boosted by Cawl they took the last wound off of a flying Magnus just yesterday!

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Go for the skitarii if your knight house is admech aligned. Where did you get those faceplates?

 

As shown by the Imperial Aquila on the hulls of the knights the house is Imperial, not Mechanicus aligned. I'm using Sentinels and AdMech/Skitarii units as Huscarl household troops, not actual Mechanicus soldiers.

 

As for the faceplates they came from shapeways:

 

https://www.shapeways.com/product/NCENC9D2Z/iron-wolf-head-compatible-w-imperial-knight-titan?optionId=55962069

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On Saturday I picked up the Skitarii Get Started box and while I'm still waiting for my bits order of special weapons to arrive before I build two Ranger squads I did build both the Onager and the Tech-Priest Dominus. The Dominus was finished by Sunday evening but I wanted to wait till I at least had the Onager finished before posting and last night I managed to put the last touches on the crawler and base it and today I stopped by my local GW to get some pics taken in better light than my basement.









The Dominus was fun and quick to paint, I went with a purple glow on his beamer to distinguish it from the other weapons in the army including Cawl's solar atomiser. Just like Cawl I'm tempted to add some scrollwork to the robes but I'll wait to see how I feel about it after I get the Rangers done. For now I'm happy with the results on the Dominus.











The Onager was similarly quick and simple to paint, at least with my chosen scheme. I was a little unsure with the gold trim on the leg plates without matching gold on the rest of the hull armor but I tried to tie the color through to the rest of the model with little details here and there. I went with a red on the pelt that I added to the hull instead of the normal white/gray/black/brown as I felt that those colors wouldn't pop when placed against the dull grey and silver armor of the hull. Having read about "Rust Wolves" on Mars in some of the Black Library books I decided that there's no reason something similar might be common on the homeworld of my Knight House and chose to do a red and orange pelt color to represent the pelt of a deadly Rust Wolf. The icon of the house is represented on the forward glacis of the Onager and eventually I'll probably add a squadron marking to the side of the hull but I'm not sure what that might be yet, I'll wait until I expand the squadron to think about squadron markings.







Just for fun I took some size comparison shots, of Cawl, the Dominus, a Sentinel the Onager and a Knight, just the three vehicles and just the two Tech Priests. I like how the Onager does well to fill the size gap between the Knight and the Sentinel, while the Dominus (no small bean himself) shows just how huge Cawl is in comparison.

So what do you guys think? As always I'd love to get some C&C on these latest additions to my Knight House!
 
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I'm impressed you managed to crank those models out so quickly and still keep them nice and neat. Thanks for the comparison shots, those are pretty useful. It really does show that Cawl ate his vegetables. He's huge!

 

No-one's more surprised than me, in the last couple of months working on this House Cenwulf army I've gotten more painting done than I have in the last two years. It doesn't hurt that my painting techniques are all speed painting, trying to get the best result with the least effort, boiling down complex techniques into as few steps as possible while maintaining a decent result.

 

I'm glad the comparison shots are useful, I certainly like to see how different models stack up to each other in scale, until you see them next to each other it can be hard to recognize just how big or small or relatively proportioned certain models are.

 

As an aside my bits finally came in today so I can at last get started building my Skitarii Rangers. I didn't realize the Arc rifle connected to a special backpack which wasn't sold with the bit but I don't think it will look too bad without it, I'll just cut the power cable away and leave it as a stand-alone magazine fed weapon rather than a backpack powered weapon. Hopefully I'll have both squads built by the end of the day, primed by tomorrow and if all goes well painted and with pics posted by Monday.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This weekend I have a friend that's collecting Ad-Mech. He had the datasmith in there too for a "small, medium, LARGE" comparison like the one you just showed. He's also running a grey'ish color scheme... ARE  YOU HIM???

 

Just kidding. However, all of that armor scaling up like that is pretty impressive and I don't know that I've ever seen those particular models (Sentinel, Dunecrawler, Knight) together in a single shot before. BEAUTIFUL WORK!

 

Glad you like them, I too find it useful to see different models pictured next to each other, it helps see the scale and dimensions of the models far better than when they are shown in isolation.

 

In other news I've finally finished the first five of my Skitarii Rangers, they took considerably longer to finish than I'd like but part of that was me simply being pretty busy this last week, also because I took a break to finish a second squad of five Custodes, what I'm going to do with them I have no idea but I just love those models! That said I'm happy with how they've turned out and now that I've got the scheme worked out the other five should be faster to complete.

 

 

 

Just like the Sentinel Squadrons I've shown squad designation in Futhark alphabet letters on the lower left cloak, mirroring the markings on standard Skitarii. I went with a simple wood effect on the weapons using XV-88 Base washed in Agrax Earthshade. I think it worked quite well on the Galvanic Rifles but I'm not sure it did so well on the Arc Rifles and Pistol, still better results than I'd initially expected trying to get a wood effect on such small and detailed weapons. I also added some bronze to the weapons and masks of the Skitarii to further break up the silver and gray primary colors and add some detail to the paint scheme and I did the lenses in a simple light blue that I also used for the power coils on the arc weapons.

 

Hopefully I'll have the second five finished before too long and when that's done I can think about getting a second Skitarii Get Started box to give me the necessary four Troops for the Grand Conclave and boost the Onager Squadron to 2. As always C&C very welcome!

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These are some really nice models but I have one small criticism. I find with the muted colours of your models that the green base rim is pulling attention away from the model themselves. I think if you went for a less intense colour for the base rims they will look better over all.

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