Complete Marauder Venators Set

You don't get that many pictures of painted venators around (for now...)

1996 I'd say, yes, I think that's the year.

What am I talking about ? Well 1996 is the year I went into my local independant hobby shop in Nantes to get my fix of old lead (even at the time in the middle of the red era I was looking for older stuff...). And what did I find ? White Dwarves, old ones, a whole lot of them and amongst them these particular issues :

These contained what left a solid and resilient emotion in my teenage heart : the rules for confrontation and amongst them, this picture :

Yeah alright Jervis, we know you're here...

But I've told you that before, remember ?

• HERE where I told you how I tried to squeeze every bit of intel about venators from the rules and their inspiration
• HERE, HERE and HERE where I told you how I was going to build my own venators from plastic and putty.
• Until I came across my first venator model and realised I had wrongly thought the models to be poor sculpts when the pictures were to blame and not the models.

I'm actually pretty sure pics of painted venators from the rear are even rarer

Well today is the end of this journey, or at least the end of the first long haul...

Thanks to the dedication of some fellow hobbyists/bloggers, I finally managed to get all the models of the range. I really want to emphasise that many people tried to help me the best they could and that in the end I owe it all to the generosity of some whose humility won't let me name. You know who you are people so let me express my most sincere and warm thanks to you.

Camilla Weis knows hiring reliable bounty hunters is the way to go when she goes hunting mutants and deviant psykers...

Now if you take a close look at the picture you will have realised all models don't sport the same kind of mask. Is it due to some afterthoughts or because of a memory loss ? Not quite.

Pedes (raw recruit venator) equiped with laspistol and axe plus a couple of grenades

The first venator I painted was painted with a leather mask to fit the concept sketches by John Blanche in which the extensive use of leathers is mentionned :

Now as explained before, I've always wanted to integrate a roman/latin/italian visual vibe to the venators. But the other important part of the way I see them is that they are highly trained professionnals which means they must be very well organised (See background HERE). 

This lead me to choose a very strict colour scheme to enhance the mlitary look they have and to avoid confusing them with more rag-tag freelance bounty hunters.

Connoisseurs amongst you may remember that characters in confrontation come in 4 flavours...

Where you realise leaders are inhuman gods and raw recruits utter dogshit

...corresponding to the different ranks and profiles of gangers.

Now since venators wear masks to hide their identity, I thought it could also be a mean to display their rank without making it too obvious for underhivers who would tend to shoot at the ones with the most badges on the chest.

That's how I came up with this little system :

As you can see I gave the highest rank to the one in the John Blanche drawing with a white mask. In time I'll make a model based on that illustration to lead my hunters (because you need a leader in a good confrontation game). For now I'll have the basic troopers covered and will only have to add what I fancy from now on. The names of the Venator ranks are roman ranks that had a nice feeling.

Primus (hardened venator) equiped with boltgun, boltpistol, axe and a targetter

Primus (hardened venator) equiped with boltgun, axe and a targetter

Primus (hardened venator) equiped with shotgun and axe

The best point about this all is that for once I was completely free to go the way I wanted because there is simply no picture of "officially" painted venators (not that I know of at least) and that even non-official photos are rare as hen's teeth. Amongst a load of purple genestealer cults, red admech and all , this was most refreshing hobby wise and I enjoyed it a lot.

What's next ? Well probably some friends who've waited more than their share to get some paint and as usual the unexpected guests that somehow make it to the top of the paintqueue.

Amongst the latters lies this rogue traderish Bloodthirster (WIP which may see its axe reduced) :

That's all for now folks, I hope to be able to get back to a better output than lately (that's very few models painted for 2015 so far...).