Blood Angels Champion - Part I

 

Looks this pissed without the Black Rage.

I've been assembling a couple of models in the background, having finally decided to get started on some of my "Bladeguard" stand-ins. I don't see the official models as particularly evoking the aesthetic taste of Blood Angels; the official models are simply too generic and lacking the detailing that Blood Angels would surely include on their armour. So I decided to look around for a way to improve upon that and stumbled across the Seraphim Knights from Kromlech. I also bought some shields from Kromlech as they also seemed more ornate than hunting down more official variants. The result is that I have five main bodies, but only three shields. I'd have to do something with a couple of them.

I struck upon the idea of a Champion, dual wielding power swords, striding forward to engage his next target. The body and shoulder pads are from Kromlech, with the left arm from a Primaris upgrade sprue. It has a vial attached with rope that was at the wrong angle for how I positioned the arm, so the vial needed to be removed and reattached, with a little green-stuff to blend it back into the model. It's not visible in the photo above.

The backpack is very plain for now, and I intend to hand paint some filigree there later. I could try sculpt more, but lacking time for such things right now I just wanted to get the model started. I did need to fill in the attachment point of the backpack just because the back of the Kromlech model is a smooth surface and there wouldn't otherwise be anywhere for glue to find purchase. I might need to pin things later anyway as superglue doesn't seem to stick very well to whatever resin Kromlech use.

The helmet in the photo is a stand-in. I'll be using a plain one instead, leaving the squad leader marking for another model.

The right arm ended up being a little more tricky than everything else combined. I found an arm from spares that had roughly the right angle and trimmed away the boltgun and hand. I then found a hand from another spare arm which was holding a knife, which is more suitable to the handling of a sword. There was a lot of careful cutting away to preserve that hand. I then took the power sword from a terminator arm on the Primaris upgrade sprue (which really took a lot of very careful cutting) and glued in place on the hand. Next the bottom of the sword was added, with a small amount of green-stuff to fill gaps and solidify the connection. Next the hand was pinned to the arm at a slight angle to better position the sword how I wanted, and some green-stuff ribbing used to fill the gap. More green-stuff was used together with super-glue to attach the arms to the torso.

The shoulder pads were also attached by using a small amount of green-stuff to give better surface contact for the glue. I was a little impatient in doing this so not everything is perfect, but it's good enough. While I was using green-stuff, I also padded under the feet ever so slightly to give room on the base for later adding texture paints. This avoids trying to keep the texture paint free of the feet to not "bury" them, while allowing for a better connection to the base and more stability on the painting handles. The downside is that I need to be more careful painting the bases themselves, but it will probably be worth the tradeoff.

Now that everything is primed, I'm probably going back to an airbrush soon with my old forumla of painting red (without Contrast) to build up the initial highlights. The photo above will serve as a reference for that, but I'm expecting to need a few manual tweaks later as well. The intent of the airbrushing before was to get the volume highlighting entirely done, but now I'm starting to see it as an initial basis to build upon. this should let me be more free with the airbrushing stage, but I'll want to match paints better so I'll stick to the normal and air ranges of Citadel for that.

-- silly painter