Around this time last month I showed a Librarian I'd made using a variety of parts but largely based around the Grey Knight power armour box. He looked a little bit (exactly actually) like this:
To go with him I used the rest of the boxed set to produce a five man Honour Guard. First things first I had to decide how to arm them. As one of the most flexibly armed units in the Blood Angel codex a lot of people lean towards multiple melta guns. I decided to go the other route and make them into a heavy assault unit. The line up is something like this:
HG with lightning claw and storm shield
HG with lightning claw and storm shield with option for company/chapter banner
HG with thunder hammer and storm shield with option for power fist
Sanguinary Novitiate
Blood Champion (power sword and combat shield)
HG with melta gun (option to swap in in place of Blood Champion
These guys are still WiP, I altered the leg stance for each marine as it's something I've never done before and I wanted these guys to look unique.
HG with LC and SS |
Some green stuff filling |
The engraved wording is all filled in on all the torsos. Legs are regular marine ones I dug out or pulled off some unwanted Tactical guys. You can see in the second picture I've started to fill the gaps left in the legs with green stuff appropriately.
HG with TH and SS |
Same marine with PF option |
The above marine has his arm magnetised using a 1.5mm x 1.5mm magnet. These are the same as the magnets I used to give all of them the potential to swap their backpacks to jump packs (see the Sanguinary Novitiate below).
HG with LC, SS and Banner |
Banner top is a regular marine backpack icon, handily the same as the Angels Sanguine badge. 'Blood Angels' was shaved off the scroll and ignore the hole I accidentally drilled through Sanguinius! |
The banner bearer above will have a not-yet-built storm shield left arm. When he's holding the banner as shown the wing style shield doesn't fit so I need to find an alternative representation. I'm thinking about adding a rosarius or something similar to the banner to signify the protection.
Sanguinary Novitiate |
Magnetised pack detail |
You can see there on the Sanguinary Novitiate how the back pack and jump packs are attached. I'll post a brief tutorial sometime but it should be fairly easy to figure out from this picture. You can also see on this guy the Forge World Iron Armour shoulder pad I'll give to all the Honour Guard.
Blood Champion |
Combat Shield and custom shoulder pad |
Sword is Grey Knight Nemesis sward, Dark Angel Ravenwing hand and hilt. The sideways pointing arm is from the Commander model. |
The Blood Champion was a real kitbash with Dark Angel, Blood Angel, Grey Knight and standard marine parts. I've wanted to use the (Ravenwing) Crusader helmet for a long time, this was an excellent chance. The Blood Champion also has the single booster Sanguinary Guard style jump pack.
The leg alterations range from slight changes - like on the Sanguinary Novitiate where I've just cut off it's left leg and lifted it up a bit - to more complex efforts where the leg is trimmed down to it's component sections and are totally reposed with wire threaded through. A good example of this is shown below:
Wire knee joint runs from his hip, through the thigh and down through the base. |
There were limitations to this. I had a really cool mental image of the banner bearer perched on a rocky outcrop but, once I'd cut the legs into 7 pieces (including separated feet), the armour restricted the pose and I was left with this as the end result:
Squatting marine. |
The guy just didn't work out, he looked a bit uncomfortable and a little like he was using the toilet. Not quite the desired effect. I'll figure out something not toilet related to use these for.
So, there you go. Work is continuing on these at the minute (taking a break to post this). I think I'll paint them gold with maybe black heads, will have to have a play around with the space marine painter tool on B&C.
Check back soon for some progress!