Syra's commitment catch ups!

The Alphas rockin' it up in da club...

Picture heavy post incoming today... One hell of a heavy commitment accomplished!



So over the last two months I've made slow headway bit by bit on my tactical marines. This isn't quite the commitment I made (a squad and a rhino) for August... but once I got started it was only natural to just burn through as many troops as I could and get them out of the way.

So here we have it ... Definitely caught up on August and September...
450 points completed!

Tactical Squad Alpha - 225 points
15 Marines, Nuncio Vox, Sergeant Artificer Armour & Melta Bombs.

Tactical Squad Omega - 225 points
15 Marines, Nuncio Vox, Sergeant Artificer Armour & Melta Bombs.

The great thing about these models is they are all subtly different in tone and shade, and you simply won't be able to see it in the photos but when you pick them up and look at them from underneath their colours will appear to invert from blue to green or vice versa, as I quite deliberately started with a contrast colour and built up to the opposite with successive zenith highlights. 

Some leadership is required even amongst the Alpha Legion...

Hobby low for me was somewhere after painting my first 5 or so test models in slightly different variations, looking across the other 25 and realising how difficult the task of painting massed infantry actually can be. I stalled after I airbrushed all of their base coats, with my airbrush ruined by sticky paint and my lungs much the same. Then again whilst doing the basic brush on colours and correcting mistakes (the metals and so on was mind numbing in the extreme).

When I finally got through the base colours I just gave up and went on holiday. I dropped progress for over a month, but when I did get back to it I was reinvigorated - I had another trip abroad coming up and resolved to finish them before I left so I did a lot of painting in the last couple of weeks. When I came back I blended them into the bases (which was a five step process in itself that I totally improvised and somehow didn't ruin the whole lot!) and just like that the whole process was done.

There's a great deal of colour variation from model to model
but as a mass of them they all feel like one unit

The real high is seeing how beautiful they all turned out! I wanted to do it right and I put in the work and got great results. Painting those final highlights was nothing but a joy, edge highlighting being a strangely enjoyable activity after the grind to get the colours ready for that point. I have to say though I'm bloody glad to be rid of doing infantry for a while. Please don't remind me I haven't sealed them all...

These chaps started life as Emperor's Children Palatine Blades

Here's a couple of close ups to round off...