Bringing a Renegade Knight Together

[Commander Dawnstar]

I've been putting together a Renegade Knight as my final vow for this year's ETL and unfortunately it seems my all-too-typical indecision and lack of clarity of concept has come back to bite me in these final days before the deadline. Nailing down definite fluff concepts has never been my strong suit - my ideas tend to be quite surface and shift frequently - and as a result I've changed the substance of my plans a number of times across the last few weeks, all the while broadly staying true to my initial brief. Somewhat inevitably this has all culminated in a situation where I'm now sitting on a bundle of disparate ideas without a good understanding of how to bring them all together and make something I'm reasonably content with. That's where I'm hoping you guys come in.

 

In my approach I'm borrowing liberally from the Reefborn Awoken of the Destiny franchise, and what that means is that my aim has always been to produce something that reflects more a sort of cruel nobility than the blasphemous, battered and mutated machines you more commonly see as Renegades. I started out with the intention of making a model that didn't lean too heavily into the Chaotic aesthetic, and though I briefly had something of a change of heart and went the other way, at this time I've found myself forgoing all thoughts of covering the thing in liberal handfuls of spikes in the hope of making it look that little bit more evil. More Chaos-y. It didn't really work for me.

 

So I find myself here.

 

Outside of basing and any late additions, my Knight is essentially 'complete' at this time. The problem is that beyond its paired Avenger Gatling Cannons there really isn't anything to the model right now that marks it as a Renegade Knight rather than one of the Imperial persuasion. I've experimented with spikes and found one or two things that I like (the tusks principally), but broadly speaking it feels like the real legwork is going to come down to decals.

 

I have the means to make my own decals and had been planning to from the start. I already have a House symbol sorted as well as a few other ideas for weird runes and kill markings, but I'm not really sure how to go about filling in the Knight in a way that's going to look coherent and Renegade-ish enough. Working with decals in general is quite outside my comfort zone and visuals are rarely my strong suit, so beyond the blindingly obvious (i.e. locations for the House symbol) I'm drawing something of a blank in how to approach this.

 

In my possession I have:

 

The Imperial Knight transfer sheet

The Imperial Knights: Renegade transfer sheet

The Chaos Space Marine transfer sheet

More than enough decal paper to cover any custom designs. Some examples of those I already have set aside can be found here.

 

So where do you think I should take this all-but-empty template from here and do you have any suggestions where I could look for appropriate designs and ideas to fill in some of the blank space?

 

[Jukkiz]

Not every renegade needs to be covered in spikes, bodies and blood. It can always be just turned, scratching the insignia of imperium and ripping/defiling other elements that mark Knights past is good start too.