Dark Angel Space Marines, Games Workshop

I realise this is cheating slightly but I will be transferring posts from my other blog page, Ubique SciFi, on to this blog and then closing the old one down. There are a couple of reasons for this; it gives me something to do blog-wise and I have a few more sci-fi figures in the pipeline. I'll be tweaking the posts slightly so they make more sense. Apologies if you're already seen this:

Over the new year I was invited over to deepest, darkest Shropshire by my mate Ade to admire his new man cave. He later kindly gave me a spare box of Space Marines Combat Squad to play around with. Seeing as one of his latest projects is a Space Marines Dark Angels army for Games Workshop’s 40K I decided to paint these up to complement his figures. I considered making these miniatures straight from the box, well more or less, but as usual I couldn’t resist modifying them. I would class these as ‘soft’ modifications as they involved only minor changes and I only used parts that came in the same box.

“Never bring a knife to a gunfight? Why not bring both!”
3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Boaz

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Boaz

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Boaz

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Boaz

As the models come with several accessories including knives and ammo packs, from the start I wanted to have one figure wielding a knife. This was another easy mod, simply cutting the knife handle to fit on to the hand. As the left arm and hand is designed to hold the bolter I cut and carved the hand and rotated it in the process so that it held the other spare knife at a more natural angle.

Naturally this left me with a spare bolter. As the bolters are not supplied with carrying straps I thought they might be magnetised (or whatever is in appropriate in the year 40,000) to fit against the leg. So using the same line of thought as the helmet solution I stuck the bolter to the right thigh. It seems to fit and looks ok.

You actually get seven head options in the standard box. Five normal helmets, one of the older style and one helmet-less head. Thinking about the figure with just the bare head I thought where and how would he store his helmet? Remembering images of soldiers during the modern Gulf Wars, I recalled that they stored gasmasks on their upper left leg. This seemed practical so I decided to replicate this on the model and stuck the spare helmet on to the figure’s left thigh.

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Ahab

The helmet lying discarded on the base surrounded by spent cartridges is based on that of the Dark Angels 2nd Company, known as the Ravenwing. The older style helmet, black with a central red vertical stripe, I believe is based on the original metal space marine model from way back in the 1980’s. I spotted one of these on display at Warhammer World at the GW headquarters in Nottingham.

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Micah

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Hiram

3rd Tactical Squad, 4th Company, Dark Angel Chapter.
Brother Seth

I cut and carved two of the left knee pads on the figures so that they matched the other models. With hindsight I should have left one and painted the whole lower leg with company colours and made him an NCO type character.

The models are painted in Citadel’s paints. Primed black the main body of the miniatures were painted Dark Angel Green (naturally) and simply washed with Babab Black ink and then highlighted with mix of Snot Green and Goblin Green. The colour schemes are all based on the official Games Workshop Dark Angel Codex.

In order to maintain some continuity I’ve kept the bases similar to the ones I used on the Necrons detailed previously.

The actual chapter icon transfers supplied with the set proved difficult to apply due the curved nature of the shoulder pad. I had to slice the transfer in order in ensure that it could lie flat.

"miniatures©Games Workshop. All rights reserved. Used without permission - models painted by Matthew Perks". (Just in case any GW lawyers are reading this!)