Reinforcements: What's on my table

After3 months of painting nothing but the Zone Mortalis tiles, it is good to be back painting Space Marines again.  Last weekend I managed to start on a batch of Ultramarine Breachers.  After our first game on the Zone Mortalis tiles Young Primarch Crusade Eternal decided the Ultramarines could do with some Breacher squads of their own to compete with the two squads the Iron Warriors brought to the mission. And in my mind, there is no unit more iconic of the Heresy than Breacher squads with their boarding shields.

In a future post I will explain how my modelling follows the seasons, but suffice to say for now, I have a couple of boxes of models primed and even basecoated.  So I was able to dip into my box of models and pull out 10 Breachers I had prepared earlier.  By Sunday evening last weekend, they were looking like this:



Ultramarine breachers on their painting corks

I doubt anyone reading needs advice on painting Ultramarines, and if you do, there is an excellent tutorial on Warhammer TV, and of course, Tale of Painters.  But for the record, these have been washed liberally with Drakenhof Nightshade (upside down to avoid pooling as much as possible), and then cleaned up with a scumble - that's a wet drybrush - where any of the shade had stained a flat surface (like the greaves or the top of the legs).  Then a drybrush of Macragge blue, in downward strokes from above the models, followed by a second one of Altdorf blue, helped to give the models a zenith highlighting effect.  Finally I painted a shade of Nuln Oil into the recesses I really wanted to emphasise (such as where the boots meet the greaves and the knee caps).  Pretty simple and already a lot of the detail has been emphasised.  Moreover, when it comes to the edge highlights, because most of the edges have been picked out by the drybrushing and shading, the edge highlighting is a touch easier.

I was able to make good progress this weekend, completing all those difficult (for me, at least) edge highlights, and succeeding in getting to the point where I'm ready to paint the shield arms or the bases.  Happy painting everyone!





By Saturday, I had 10 breachers to this level



By Sunday lunch, all the edge highlights were finished,



Sunday evening: the gold needs shading and highlighting. But
I am ready to move on to the shield arms.