Blindhamsters Blood Angels

[Blindhamster]

Hey Guys!

So, like so many others here, I've decided to create a PLOG (or BLOG) for the creation of my primaris army.

Important: I plan to actually try and get around to painting this stuff, unlike my hundreds of standard Blood Angels Astartes. The original goal had been to build the starter set and get those painted, but a nice chap I know offered to trade his Primaris for my Death Guard, which i (unsurprisingly) accepted. I had also ordered a few bits from Bits and Kits too...

Anyway, so why do I care about Primaris? For me they look how I've always imagined marines, the proportions look so much better than just about any True Scale marine I've seen, although there are a few that I thing come pretty close. I also am in the minority, in that I like the way the background is going, I actually like the idea that the Imperium isn't on a total back foot for the first time in probably the full 10 millenia since the Heresy! I can totally get behind the idea that a secret project to create better Astartes was sanctioned but because of the bureaucracy and shear inefficiency of the Imperium, such a project could then languish when it was desperately needed. Sure, I get that it's "Just GW trying to sell models", of course it is, its a business. But for me at least, I actually like the way the background is going (WE MOVED FORWARD IN TIME! HOORAY!!).

As some of you may know, I've been in the hobby around 21 years now. And I've also been a member of this forum for the since 2004, I've seen so many inspirational things come out of this forum and I'm always greatful for the awesome stuff people come up with! So thanks for that

As any of you that came across my old Blood Angels blog, or maybe some of my older porjects even on here will know, I usually like to do fairly substantial conversions, lots of reposing and sculpting. I imagine this project will eventually get more of that too, but for now, I'm focusing on keeping things reasonably simple, so I can get things to a point I'm happy to paint in a reasonable amount of time and (hopefully!) actually get stuff painted. I'll still be doing conversions on things of course, but probably not much in the way of heavy sculpting beyond stuff like hair and little details.


The concept for my army, will be the soldiers assigned to 2nd Company to replenish it after the events of Angels Blade/Traitors Hate and then the Devastation of Baal. Once that book (or other helpful sources) comes out, I'll probably do a minor reshuffle to fit whatever official format GW Assigns Primaris in the Blood Angels chapter. I am hoping the info on existing Astartes being 'upgraded' proves to be true, but if not I'll work around it. But I'd like to 'upgrade' my Aphael to Primaris status, probably once I've got the new captain in hand and can work it out.


Anyway, so here's what I've done so far! EVERY IMAGE IS CLICKABLE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION

What you see above is Four Intercessor squads, Two Hellblaster squads, Three Ancients, Four Lieutenants and a Captain in Gravis Armour.
There are also a set of Intercessors, but I cannot finish building those till I have painted the heads and sprayed the bodies.

 

 

For the Lieutenants, I have built two stock, with a a shoulder pad change on one of them and some BA blood drop bling added to both - didnt bother taking extra pictures of those two.

 

I then have a second ranged Lieutenant with a bit more of an involved conversion:

He has a hand from one lieutenant, body from the other, an arm from a lieutenant with the hand from a sergeant, a shoulder pad swap, replaced the pistol on his waist with one from the mk3 kit, head from a hellblaster sergeant. Overall I'm pretty happy that I've managed to make him quite distinctive from the standard two.

I then have probably my favourite model so far -

Again, the conversion is simple, but I feel it's worked very nicely for pose, leaning forward like he has just completed an arcing slash with the sword. I need to sculpt hair on him still, unsure on exact style I'll go for, probably messy short hair.

For the Intercessors, Squad 1:

This squad has a few shoulder pad swaps (every squad has a few), Sergeant is close to stock, different right arm (one from a lieutenant, with the bolter from the sergeant, used the sergeant arm, but replaced the hand with one holding a bolter clip from the blood angels tactical squad.

Sqaud 2:

This unit is almost built stock, just some shoulder pad changes.

Squad 3:

This squad again had a few shoulder pad changes, sergeant uses a bionic arm from devastators, head is a sergeant head with hair shaved down (he'll stay bald), quite happy with how he looks.

Squad 4:

This unit is again, fairly stock, simple head swap on the walking and shooting marine, sergeant had a shoulder swap (this was the first unit I built)

Next Is Ancient 1 and Hellblaster Squad 2:

The Hellblaster squad has every model with a shoulder swap, sergeant uses head from a Lieutentant and has both pads swapped.Ancient is totally stock except for a tiny bit of BA bling added to his belt (one of the scroll pouches).

Ancient 2, Hellblaster Squad 1 and Ancient 3:

Ancient 2 has a head from assault squad and both shoulder pads replaced. Hellblasters have a couple pads replaced but are otherwise totally standard, Ancient 3 has a bolter arm from a sergeant, head from devastators and a little bling added to his backpack, banner top replaced with a bit from BA tactical kit - I see this Ancient as a marine that was 'upgraded', or if that turns out to not be something that happens, one of the first BA Primaris, along the lines of the Ancient from Dark Imperium Book.

And finally, a shot of Everything that is built as it stands:

The Gravis Captains back isn't stuck on, so I can paint the helmet easier. It's a stock model, I'm thinking of trying to do a fairly elaborate conversion with the second, but thats low priority for now.

So, still to build I have:

a third hellblaster squad, a fifth intercessor squad, a second inceptor squad, a second gravis captain and two more lieutenants. I plan to build the Inceptors for sure, but may hold off on the others for now.

I will definitely be picking up two Repulsors, a Redemptor, both the regular and birthday Captains, the Librarian and probably just the one set of Reivers for the time being.

I personally love the Repulsor, it looks awesome, I'm very interested to see the rules for it, I am excited to see how it plays and hopeful that it'll help with Primaris playability on the table - I recognise that they aren't deemed good currently. The Redemptor looks great, I am interested to see what build options it has, something with a smaller central plate would be good, and I'm really wanting an exposed helmet sat in there instead of the sarcophagus, but think I may be able to convert that using spare BA dread bits anyway. The HQ models all look good, albeit a little unexciting, but they'll also likely be where I focus most of my conversion efforts. The Reivers show great promise in concept, and I absolutely love the stripped down armour, but the poses aren't great, so I'll see what I can do there... a fellow Frater over in the BA forum suggested they might look good with Alabaster Death Masks... and now I need to at least look at that for an option!.


Anyway, if you got this far, thanks for reading! C&C welcome as always.

Edited August 27 by Blindhamster
embracing sons progress!

[Replica]

Really looking forward to seeing these progress! - those shoulder pads from shapeways?

[The4thHorseman]

Did you just trim down the shoulder pad the Primaris came with? Or did you completly cut the shoulder off and reconstruct the arm and put the new pad on top?

[Blindhamster]

Really looking forward to seeing these progress! - those shoulder pads from shapeways?

Thanks :)

 

Yeah, none other than our own plokoons ones!

 

 

Did you just trim down the shoulder pad the Primaris came with? Or did you completly cut the shoulder off and reconstruct the arm and put the new pad on top?

I trimmed the shoulders off and the cleaned up the arms and in some cases elbows so the desired pads would fit over them. Hope that helps. It definitely is easier on some more than others.

Edited June 28, 2017 by Blindhamster

[terminatorAM]

Looking forward to these. Also, it's nice to hear some positivity around these guys for a change. I love their look too and think everything else should just be secondary.

[Sagentus]

Looking forward to seeing these painted. Even with the subtle changes you have made they definitely shouts BA

[Doghouse]

Very nice work mate, I look forward to seeing more of this. :tu:

[Mr Yellow]

Where did those bases come from?

 

Cheers

LM

[Achinadav]

Love the lieutenant with auto rifle and the sergeant's arm. I'd been thinking of getting hold of them to try it out, good to know it works.

[cretacianborn]

Having just started my own Blood Angels Primaris army, I will be following this thread with great interest. Keep it up mate! 

[Blindhamster]

So, small update.

I have done small bits of work on the rest of the marines in the form of adding some more details here and there, and i sculpted hair for the lieutenant I really like, but it was too large so will be re-doing that.

I also made progress on the Inceptors! The reason I'm working on those first, is they havent had conversions done to them (no interest in adding bling to them as it makes less sense on a unit that has to go through atmosphere to get into battle. I sprayed them but the undercoat had a horrible malfunction and I ended up with gritty paint so ended up getting the Detol out, stripping them and starting over.

Below is where I'm at! As with above, all images can be clicked to see the larger version.

Nothing too exciting as you can see, they are red, and the helmets are yellow (hard to see but its actually tau sept ocre base, up to averland sunset, then yriel yellow, and shaded with seraphim sepia. I'll probably try and paint eyes tonight or tomorrow. The models arent stuck to their flight stands for the time being, I'll need to at least paint the area around where it attaches first I think.

And the bases:

With the bases I wanted to keep a relatively simple colour palette and scheme going on, They're going to be themed as an urban army, but on a world similar to armageddon (so sand/dust). I'll be adding weathering powders, but not till the models are finished.

Looking forward to these. Also, it's nice to hear some positivity around these guys for a change. I love their look too and think everything else should just be secondary.

yeah, I'm really excited for primaris in general, has left me considering shifting my regular astartes though...

Looking forward to seeing these painted. Even with the subtle changes you have made they definitely shouts BA

Thanks, since those pictures I've added blood drop pendants to quite a few of the models (chopped from BA shoulders, guns, arms, backpacks etc). Want them to be clearly BA but reasonably understated for the most part

Very nice work mate, I look forward to seeing more of this.

Cheers! I'm finding bigger marines exciting again! Haven't done bigger ones for a long long time, its funny that they make my Tycho (who is a giant next to regular marines) look short

Where did those bases come from?

Cheers
LM

The bases are the imperial sector ones from GW, they are nowhere near as rubbish as many people made out. I used them on my regular angels too, but tended to do more with them than I've done with these. Again, trying to keep things relatively simple for a change!

Love the lieutenant with auto rifle and the sergeant's arm. I'd been thinking of getting hold of them to try it out, good to know it works.

It isn't actually the sergeants entire arm, only the hand, although to be fair, the full sergeants arm would work just as well!

Having just started my own Blood Angels Primaris army, I will be following this thread with great interest. Keep it up mate!

Thanks! Do you have a thread??

Edited June 30, 2017 by Blindhamster

[Blindhamster]

I got an hour or so in for some painting, so managed to get the eyes on the Inceptors done.

This has highlighted:

• How horribly out of practice I am with painting
• The fact I may need new glasses as I definitely struggled to focus for a long time, making little details like eyes difficult.
• The Red undercoat on the actual bodies is worse in some cases than I initially thought - too late to do anything about that now, I'll just have to hope I can smooth it out with the rest of the painting a bit.

I'll try and get the yellow of the helms plus the silver bits on the helms done today too. As part of that, I'll probably also try and tidy up a few of the eyes a little where possible.

Edited July 1, 2017 by Blindhamster

[Doghouse]

Nice job on those lenses, despite the problems you had I have to say those look seriously nice mate.

 

One thing I've been pondering with the Inceptors is whether or not to do minor atmospheric entry burns on them. I know it's often seen as a cop out in most cases when base spray paint goes wrong but could something like that be used to disguise it if it's too bad?

[Kordhal]

Loving the subtle little conversions running through your primaris! Fantastic job on those lenses, and really nice yellow for the helmets, am excited to see the inceptors finished!

[LutherMax]

Blimey – you weren't kidding when you said you already had a sizeable Primaris force!

 

Very much looking forward to seeing this come together...

[Blindhamster]

Not the most exciting of updates, but mostly wanted to show I HAVE been doing something!

I've sanded down a lot of areas of the Inceptors red armour to remove the worst of the grainy finish, and then they've had a coat of mephiston red/evil sunz scarlet mix. Silver areas on their helmets are done and yellow has been smoothed out (but needs highlights).

I also messed about with the totally stock Ancient and ended up with the one you see next to the captain, I used an arm from a lieutenant and a little knife work. Other than that, everything has had an undercoat of red, a couple of models (sergeant of back right intercessor squad, and the marine to his left) have a strangely light finish and I noticed the paint was a bit thicker - I believe this was because I was spraying shortly after getting home and it was a bit too warm, I stopped and did the rest about 3 hours later with better results.

Anyway, plan is to try and get the red on everything evened out with an evil sunz/mephiston mix... possibly via the airbrush. I'll also be doing the base colours for the blue helms and gold helms. Then I'll probably batch paint all the eyes as apart from anything else, getting eyes done always makes me feel like good progress :P

[Brother Callidan]

The sea of red is looking good man. Keep it up

[LutherMax]

Yep looking good - nice conversion on the Ancient!

[Blindhamster]

Hey guys, I've not been totally idol!

My progress has been limited to the following:

I've basecoated and shaded all the blue helmets of the hellblasters, I've "finished" one and am mostly done (need to finish the silver bits) on a second. As with the Inceptors, the eye lenses were pretty hard work to do as my eyes are just not what they were.

Outside of that, I've given all the hellblasters and one lieutenant plus all the inceptors a coat of 50:50 mephiston/evil sunz which is the base tone I decided I wanted to go for with these, I really want to get a bit of the classic vibe which the eavy metal teams primaris have.

Outside of painting, I also built the captain model (I have two) and the librarian model, only the most minor of conversions on both of those.

Anyways, small painting image update:

Helmets with the one mostly done helmet.

Hellblaster with the "finished" helmet.

The reason I say "finished" is because I'm not sure if I need to take the highlights brighter, or just stronger, it's already going up to Calgar Blue, but may be that I need to do brighter (LutherMax suggested maybe including a little white in the Calgar). I'm also wondering if I need to hightlight more parts of the helm up to calgar (all lines are highlighted with Altdorf)

Edited July 13, 2017 by Blindhamster

[LutherMax]

They look good to me mate but in my experience when you get to the point where you think you've highlighted enough it's worth adding one more - especially effective when viewing from tabletop distance!

[Blindhamster]

Small update (well, huge for me, but small compared to most people on these forums lol)

Firstly, I spent some time yesterday morning with my almost three year old getting him to help me build the easy build primaris marines because he was interested, i had to take them apart again afterwards to clear moldlines and switch their bases, but it was fun all the same and I like that he's interested in "Daddys models".

As always, clicking on an image will load the large version of it.

Overall, whilst I'd not get more than one set of them considering their reasonably low price point, the fact they have different poses is nice. Details is just as crisp as the other kits too, which is good.

I also took pictures of the primaris captain and librarian, they aren't finished, I still need to add some blood drop pendants and the like to both, I've filled in the gaps where purity seals slot on the Librarian, because I hate them.

I've actually ordered the BA librarian head too, which I'll probably swap into it too - will decide once it's arrived. Overall I really like this model, and it went together very easily too.

Captain: The observant among you will notice that he has the head I made for my Aphael model, It isn't stuck in, I'm waiting for the codex to see if they get any other weapon options before I do, I have a second unbuilt captain and some lieutenants to play with, so may end up making something different, I'd like to use the other captain model to do a more drastically BA captain, with winged blood drop on left leg, replace skull on torso with blood drop etc.





Again, I like the model a lot, the detail on it is very crisp and clean.

Onto the painting side of things, and this is where I'm honestly pleased with myself

The yellow helmets still need a highlight, but they look fairly good "as is", blue helmets have been highlighted with a couple of layers, and given a couple of glazes, eye lenses are all done on all helmets you can see. I need to highlight silver bits on all but one helmet in this image though... But still, for me, this is probably more painting than I've really done since 2013 or so

I expect I'll do a final sharp edge highlight once I've had a bit more time getting back into the swing of things, that'll probably be using fenris grey or something equally bright. Sergeant head looks like it has a bit of bobbly paint on it... guess I need to fix that too.

Edited July 16, 2017 by Blindhamster

[LutherMax]

Coming along very nicely indeed!

 

Captain looks good with Aphael's head - was the shoulder pad swap easy?

[Blindhamster]

Coming along very nicely indeed!

 

Captain looks good with Aphael's head - was the shoulder pad swap easy?

Thanks man :) getting there slowly, I did do most of the heads yesterday during a couple hours of free time so also a little quicker with each one.

 

The captain is nice because he's more like a traditional space marine kit, so his arms and shoulder pads are distinct pieces

[Blindhamster]

I've not been totally idle, though I've not done as much as I'd have liked lately, I worked on the inquisitor model for LutherMax, which is now headed back to him for painting.

Outside of that, I've undercoated the snap fit intercessors and reivers, undercoated the librarian, and started working on shading for the red armour on the hellblasters (nothing interesting to show for those yet - they're at the early/yucky phase!).

I did however decide to redo the captain, below is what I've got:

So, he's made from the Primaris captain kit, but with the right arm from a lieutenant with the sword from a gravis captain, standard captain right shoulderpad. I filed the chest down and then made a mold of one of the lieutenant I did with sculpted blood drop on chest. I then carefully aligned that on this model, which has come out fairly well (I've been able to use it to make primaris blood drop torsos very quickly actually but I'll leave that for a different post). The pistol is from a different lieutenant model, I added a blood drop pendant to back pack and one of his legs, and sculpted a large blood angels chapter icon similar to the one on the sanguinary guard kit. He has a sanguinary priest shoulder pad.

[LutherMax]

He looks fantastic! Very Aphael ;)