Iron Within

So Siph has his Relictors and (the little seen *hint*) Necrons, Lord Halfpenny has his Smurfs and Daemons and I have now topped 5K pts of painted Nids and have been getting the itch to look at other armies. This started about 6 months ago and it’s not that I have gone off my ‘Nids – I am just after a change and would like an armour save and some vehicles for once...

The first step was choosing an army and after spending many hours going through various pieces of fluff I narrowed it down to Chaos Space Marines; specifically Word Bearers or Iron Warriors. I had already decided this was going to be a fluffy, show piece army, so I had a look online at what other people had done when I stumbled across this army and was stunned – it is simply amazing and sold Iron Warriors to me straight away. I then picked up the Iron Warriors novels and did some background research. I really enjoyed the novels, which show the Iron Warriors as basically your typical Space Marines, except a bit more bitter, paranoid and blood thirsty – very little of this Chaos God worshipping malarkey. The fact that they have stolen a ‘Nid bio-ship and infected it with the techno-virus to transport their Titans around, was also especially cool to me.

Over the past few months I have started picking up a few spares on eBay and the paints and conversion bits I will need and then the new CSM codex dropped with its new models – sweet! It was meant to be...almost like an architect of fate had designed it all along...

Seeing as I am juggling a few projects at the moment and I really want these to turn out nicely, I have decided that I will be focusing on producing one unit a month that will fit in line with a rough 2000pts “siege-themed” army list I have in my head after reading the Iron Warrior novels (although I have no idea if it will be playable).

I will be trying to heavily convert each unit keeping in mind the “evil Space Marines” theme as opposed to “Chaos God worshipping Space Marines” – so there won’t be many spikes or tentacles. This means that I will be primarily looking at things like repositioning, weapon loadouts (I’ll be scratch building a lot of Entrenching Tools), cyborg enhancements and detailed bases. I also want this to look like a kick-ass army – so expect to see weathering effects once I have done some experimenting.

There will be the odd Daemon Engine in there (especially with the new models) – but I will be looking at these as if they are being “utilised” by the Iron Warriors as part of their siege-arsonal.

At some point in the future there will also be a significant Cultist element to the army – and after reading the Iron Warriors novels, I have some deliciously cruel ideas for how one or two of the units will be modelled and used in game...

Anyway – enough chatter, I have done a few test models to get the right Iron-effect and to get some practice painting Chevrons (I’m not a fan...but the new GW base-paints make it alot easier).

So far the Iron is painted in Vallejo Gun Metal Grey before being washed with GW Nuln Oil. It is then drybrushed in Vallejo Gun Metal Grey & Oily Steel. The trim is painted in Vallejo Red Gold (an awesome alcohol-based liquid Gold paint) and then everything is line highlighted with GW Mithril Silver. The model is then washed with GW Agrax Earthshade to tie it all together. Not the easiest of ways to paint silver...but it came out the best on the test models.

Here are a couple Chosen from the Dark Vengence kit:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also put together a couple of CSMs from some spares I had:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am particularly happy with the light sourcing on the Plasma Pistol (it’s my first go at lighting), the heat-staining on the Melta Gun and the scratched-up paint.

The bases are only temporary – but I think I will be going for a WW1 “trench battleground” theme to fit the fluff; so lots of mud, water, barbed wire, sandbags etc.

 Anyhow – I hope you like and please let me know if you have any comments/suggestions as they will really help at this stage.