Assault Intercessor Death Company - Part I

I see a Blood Angel...

...and I want it painted black.

The recently released "start painting" kit of the Assault Intercessors provided an excellent opportunity to do a bit of kit bashing on limited numbers of models, and to practice some more on Death Company. The limited number is important if I'm to keep plastic mountain from growing much further.

The models came with Ultramarine insignias that needed to be chopped off, fortunately only the shoulder pads and therefore easily hidden behind the replacement spare Blood Angels variants. So converting to Blood Angels, and readying for Death Company, wasn't actually all that difficult.

Although I'm only showing the one at the moment, priming the models was done using black, naturally, for "battle ready" there's not a whole lot more that needs doing. I wanted to do more of course, so the airbrush came next:

• Corvus Black over the entire model. This isn't quite as pure a black as Abaddon Black, so it leaves some room to maneuver when it comes to highlighting and shading.
• Dawnstone for highlighting. I normally would choose Eshin Grey, but that's not available in the Air range from Citadel, so I used Dawnstone. It is much more saturated than I liked, but this can be fixed later. In future I might mix normal Eshin Grey with some thinner and use that directly in the airbrush.
  
• Abaddon Black for shading, but owing to it being slightly thin (at least with my usage) it also served to tone down the highlights as well.

The models still come out a little lighter than I like at this point, so some brush work was still required; I prefer Death Company to have a deep black armour, to represent their descent into madness.

Normally I would use thinned Abaddon Black as a glaze to darken areas, however I also tried Black Templar from the Contrast range. This was a bit hit & miss, and ultimately I might stick to Lahmian Medium with the former black. If I can tweak the airbrush stage, then this wouldn't require as much effort either.

Thinned Dawnstone to edge highlight in places, and Nuln Oil to really make the recesses black, and that's about it.  I don't edge highlight as much these days, but it's needed to define armour plating when everything is painted black.

I'll paint the head and helmets next, just to assemble that stage before starting on filling in some red crosses and getting started on blocking in other colours.

-- silly painter.