The Master of Signals!

Who is a deep-cover cell operative meant to call when they need a noisy exfiltration? None other than the famous harbinger of orbital annihilation and master of signals that calls himself Alpharius.

I like the kit-bash I made for my MoS, a long while back now (kudos if you can spot him in the floorhammer battle report), though the tale is a bit of a catalogue of errors. I used the body of Armillus Dynat to start with, and the FW mk4 command upgrade signals head to give it a little more of a communications officer feel. Also the baton from the limited edition character Autillon Skorr. Unfortunately in the course of gaming the baton snapped off a few times and was re-glued. And then broke again and eventually lost somewhere. I tried a few replacement arms but was never happy and eventually ordered another Skorr off eBay, just for that baton arm. That guy never showed up! So I made do with the plastic baton head from the Scions sprue.

I eventually made my own base for him using concrete chips and texture paint. The fate of the original Dynat scenic base is a bit of an embarrassing story - somehow it got over glued and even after quite a while when I thought it was dry enough to pick up the internal part of the scenic base glued itself to my whole thumb, bonding the resin, skin and plastic round base under it to not just my thumb but then to my forefinger, and everything was stuck to everything else. When I tried to pull it apart, it ripped my hand up quite badly. It was quite a pickle; I spent the next hour with my hand bleeding and stinging, submerged in acetone to loosen up the glue. Anyways, that acetone junk warped the resin pretty bad, all the details got "furry" and were prone to rub off. Oh well. I actually think the base mixes better with the rest of my army this way anyhow - It all worked out for the best.

The painting started as a bit of a gamble, I didn't have clear idea going into it but I guessed I would start like my infantry and make decisions as I went along, and hey I think it worked! Here's the end result:

I had a lot of fun with the armour panels using my airbrush and washes, having had lots of practice, I'm now used to the feel of how to get these colours to pop for me.

I'm also very pleased with the cape which I just randomly went purple on without thinking (in my head the plan as I painted the armour was to use green!). I enjoyed tracing the smooth curves and trying to pick up the light in the flow of it. I'm not great with cloth painting but I am happy with how this went because I mixed several lighter and darker variations on the purple as I went along. I even lightly tinted the lower parts with the red/brown I use as the initial step for blending my models into the bases, as his cape would definitely pick up some dirt swishing around. I did avoid making it too muddy though as I enjoy a cleaner look on these guys.

Very pleased with the smooth colour gradient on the shoulders!

And that's my first Alpha Legion HQ done (and dusted). One more model and I'm fully painted, like a real closer!

I'm close to 1400 points painted now, for my heresy weekender list, though I cheated a bit on these bad boys by not painting the crews yet:

I think I can rely on my master of signals to get them firing anyway!

Syra out.