Some Thousand Sons Reinforcements - Part 2, Tactical Squad

XV Legion Marines in Mark III power armour. Plastic figures from GW.

Another post featuring reinforcements for the XV Legion Astarters, the "Thousand Sons". These Marines are clad in Mark III plate, multi-part plastic figures from GW. Nothing that special about 10 more Astartes carrying bolters, but the method used to paint these guys was a little different for me.

Really pleased with the metallic, candy red - all thanks to the "Rattle Can" approach.

As I have mentioned on different occasions over the past year, I have been keen to achieve a metallic red look for the armour of the Thousand Sons, without resorting to the logistical headaches involved with an airbrush. Previous experiments had involved use of GW's "Contrast" paints - with OK results, but with a clear limitation in that "Contrast" paints do not work well on vehicles. Any painting approach that works on the infantry but not on the vehicles will be a limiting one. So I had my eyes out for something new...

Sergeant sporting a Thunder Hammer and plasma pistol. And a few extra mystical symbols...

And another approach duly appeared! Medders' Miniatures has done several YouTube tutorials with what he calls the "Rattle Can Series" - ways of painting Space Marines models that do not involve airbrushes, but rely instead on the selection of a good spray can to achieve a base coat on the armour. I found his tutorial on the Thousand Sons to be inspiring, and so I gave it a shot! 

The armour panels were finished with a coat of satin varnish...although, still pretty glossy...

This squad is the result! I will saw that messing around with oil washes, while kinda fun, is also a much slower process than it seems in the video. For my part, using GW's "Nuln Oil" is just fine, is much quicker and less hassle. Involving oil paints required the use of multiple coats of varnish, and this impacted the detail on these plastic figures, particularly on the face plates of some of the models, where the surface detail is a bit thin.

But overall, I really do like the look of this metallic red - in this case, achieved by spraying a Tamiya Red over a matte white base coat. I am looking forward to trying this painting approach on a vehicle very soon - that will be the real test!  

An officer - AND a psyker!

Tactical squads are pretty basic in 30k (at least, I assume they still are - will be a few days before I finally get the chance to check out the new edition of the Horus Heresy rules) but they are good building blocks for a standard force, and in the case of the Thousand Sons, you can also makes these guys psykers, so they can be flinging spooky powers as well as bolt gun shells as their enemies. Plus, who knows, they probably are secret members of a cabal...right?

Thanks for reading - stay tuned for more 30k content!