Terminators

I didn't have any gaming ideas for this army. It's been purely made from the models I've wanted to paint or that I felt fit well in a Space Marine army. So there's Tactical, Assault, Devastator and Terminator squads, as that's been my idea of a Space Marine army since the '90s. The Vindicator fit both with Imperial Fists and as a model I've always liked. For that reason I plan (at some stage) on a Predator and Whirlwind. They're both models that are very "Space Mariney" to me. Later iterations of squads like the Vanguard and Sternguard don't really do anything sentimental to me, but my assault squad is made of Vanguard Veterans simply because they had the lightning claws, and they are iconic. It's for that reason I painted a standard squad of Terminators next.

I was starting to get a better grasp of highlighting with the airbrush at this stage, but still hadn't really worked out a shading method that I was happy with. At this point I was priming with Vallejo white, base coating with VGA Golden Yellow, shading with VMA Burnt Umber (I think it's a Model Air paint), toning that down with another coat of Golden Yellow, then zenithal highlighting with white then VGA Moon Yellow. The yellow coats after the burnt umber were taking on a slightly green tone. It's not something you can see in the finished product, but it does neutralise the shading to a level that I wasn't happy with. I persisted with this, making little tweaks here and there for a while (for the next few units really) until I worked out a method I was more happy with (It wasn't until the Vindicator that I really got my colour scheme worked out to a final version. I don't think the variation in colour is really notable on any of the units other than the Rhino, which seems quite a bright yellow in comparison to the later units).

Despite really loving the design of Space Marine Terminators, I wasn't really a fan of these miniatures. They seem like a much older sculpt. I don't know if they are, but they are much more static and really lack the dynamism that we have become so used to. The sergeant's power sword leaves a lot to be desired too, I really should repaint it...

It's probably worth mentioning here that this army was always intended to be tabletop standard. Whilst I've been really pleased with the results I've got, I haven't nit picked too hard about little things. At this early stage the highlighting of the grey gun casings are probably the most obvious area that speed has limited the end result. I think I've made better progress with this as I've gone along - I've also changed the highlight colour(s) so that it's not so stark (or blue). I've never really managed to paint anything more that a mini here and there and one really small force of The Purge Chaos Marines a number of years ago, so I really wanted to try to churn these guys out as fast as I could. Nevertheless, I hope that as I document the army I can see improvements in the more messy areas.

This squad is also fairly heavily weathered. I didn't want them to look like they'd walked through Armageddon, but I wanted them to look as though they'd been around a bit.