Raven Guard Space Marines Part I

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OK so this post will deal with the Raven guard marines by posting some links which will also help to explain why I choose to build the army the way I am building it.

There are extensive resources on the web to explain the history of the Raven Guard Space Marines chapter and successor chapters. To save time, and to spare anyone not interested in the fluff, I will just post some links.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Raven_Guard

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?autocom=ineo&showarticle=316

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Raven_Guard


There are also extensive resources on Space Marine power armor. Which I will also post links here.
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Power_Armour

http://www.collecting-citadel-miniatures.com/wiki/index.php/Space_Marine_Transition_Collectors_Guide

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?autocom=ineo&showarticle=43


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_of_the_Imperium_%28Warhammer_40%2C000%29

http://29thgreatcompany.home.comcast.net/~29thgreatcompany/Armor/marine_armor.htm


The history of the raven Guard explains that they don’t have access to all the resources that the other Space Marine chapters have. They also rely on stealth and lightning strikes to accomplish their missions.

In this vein I have chosen to use Mark VI Corvus armor for all of my raven Guard tactical and Assault Marines. There is even what appears to be mark VI Terminator armor, which I will use for my terminators. I don’t have all the details yet on that. Once I’m through researching I’ll have more info on that.

One of the convenient things about using the Mark VI armor is that they all have the “beaky” helmets which seems to fit nicely with the avian theme of the Raven Guard.

These are the pictures of the different suits of power armor below. I put together two marines using blue tac, just to show the differences. The two torsos to the right, I’m not sure which era they come from, still doing some research on those. They may be Mark III or a modified Mark VI/VII/VIII. Maybe for special weapons marines?




Close up of the Mark VII/VIII power armor below. The noticeable differences being the non-"beaky" helmet, the raised edges to the shoulder pads, the imperial eagle on the chest plate, and the knee pads.



Mark VI Marine below, which is the style I will use for my Raven Guard. Notice the "beaky" helmet, the left shoulder pad with the studs, the right shoulder pad without the raised edge, the chest plate without the eagle, and the legs with no knee pads.





Below is a pic to show the left studded shoulder pad. They used the studs to add on extra armor during the heresy era. The idea was that the left shoulder was pointed towards the enemy and therefore was the one requiring extra protection.

Below is a closeup of the right shoulder. I took a normal Mark VII/VIII shoulder pad and shaved down the edge with a hobby knife. Then I used a dremel tool to smooth it out. It still needs some work, and I'm still working out the best way to do this conversion so that I will have a nice smooth finish to the shoulder pad.

One problem with using the Mark VI only approach is that the poses are quite limited when it comes to the legs. So I am thinking I'm going to have to do some converting, by cutting legs and using greenstuff to try to mix things up a bit. Also I probably will use some of the mark VI running legs (from the assault sprue) as well.

That's all for today....

Dreadnought Part II

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All right.... so part II of the Dreadnought build.


Below is a closeup of the converted imperial eagle with greenstuff to fill in the gaps. I'm not real happy with the way this turned out. But I think it will look "good enough" once it's painted








Picture of the weapon arms after many brushed on coats of white. I can't wait to see what a difference spraying these will make.

The Airbrush

The cup I used for the spraying

I used clothespins and a tweezer to hold the weapon arms.

I really had a hard time with my airbrush. I had to stop multiple times to clean the the tip. This just goes to show how out of practice I am. I don't think I had the paint thin enough.

Post Air brush pics.

This picture just to show where I'm going with the color scheme.



Picture of my airbrush parts soaking in acrylic cleaner. This is the downside of airbrushing, having to clean the thing after you use it. But it's extremely important to clean the airbrush as soon as possible after use to keep it in top shape.



Here now I start showing some pictures, after I put another brushed coat of white, and filled in the areas that will be black or that needed a black base coat.









I'm not happy, at all, at the way the brass raven looks in the pic below. It's gonna take a lot of work to make it look right.

So it's starting to shape up. I need to spend some time cleaning up the over brush mistakes, which by the way are very easy to to do when painting black on white or vice versa. But in order to make contrasting colors like Black and White look good you have to get it as close to perfect as possible for maximum impact.

Also the next post will show the start of shading as I will be using some inks to shade the recesses of the white areas. I ultimately plan to use some weathering techniques that I have seen used in historical modeling and also in some of the French style miniature painters.

In keeping with my raven guard theme of olderstyle equipment I purchased a mark IV Dreadnought close combat weapon off of ebay. It has that kind of claw effect that should mix in perfectly with Raven Guard.

I've also started getting some parts for my marines, so I will post some pics of that coming up shortly.

Dreadnought Part I

Press play for some theme music!



I am starting this army from scratch, so I wanted to test out some color patterns before plunging in full blast. I have a space marine dreadnought that I had originally planned to use for my Ultramarine force. So I decided to resurrect it from my drawer of stuff for testing. Unfortunately I had already put a base coat of ultra marines blue and put an ink wash. So of course this will make the painting of the white parts much more difficult.

The first picture is of the resurrected dread with the ultramarine icon removed. I had to sand down the area where the paint and icon met. (On the left side of the sarcophagus)




Closeup of the sanded area.



Here are some brass etch I plan to use and also some plastic imperial eagles from my Bitz box. there is also Warhammer Fantasy Dwarf standard I may use, I may use the wings off of it for something, not sure yet though.



I decided to try and use one of the ultramarine eagles, unfortunately filling in the ultramarine symbol with putty turned out to be harder than expected. So I just put a purity seal over the symbol. You can see some of the putty I used to try and fill the ultra marine symbol. The putty worked OK but not good enough for me. So I keep telling myself that this is just a test model.



If you look at the top right you can also see where I cut an imperial eagle in three and glued it on the top.






I need to use a little bit of greenstuff to fill in the gaps. (I'll show this later this week)

These are a few before and after pics of the weapons. The after pics are after a few coats of wolf grey-GW equivalent = space wolf grey. I got to tell ya I usually thin my paints really well to keep a smooth finish but thinning light colors and then trying to paint over black is a huge pain. I should have just started up my airbrush and been done with it. Which I will do for the main body, also will do to finish off the weapons base coat of white.

Before & After

Well that's all for tonight...

Next time, some pics after using the airbrush to finish the white base coat. Also plan to go into the particulars of Raven Guard and how I plan to build them.

GG

First time blogging so here it goes.....

I thought I would start a blog to track the progress of my latest modeling project. That is the Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine chapter of The Raven Guard.

I will start posting pics and build information as I go.