Rogue Trader Chaos - Traitor Terminators

 Nothing like a deadline to get things done ! A week ago these guys weren't even on my schedule but a last minute appointment for a game next Week End decided otherwise and here they are !

Those models are meant to join the ranks of a growing chaos force for which I've foolishly decided to collect all the models as you can see HERE and HERE.

If you're not familiar with the models (quite unlikely but not impossible after all) they are the first chaos terminators sculpted during the first edition of Warhammer 40k by the talented Jes Goodwin who had already sculpted a goo load of their imperial counterparts.

Picture taken from Solegend

As you can see above there aren't many choices for the bodies especially if like me you insist on your lord being the only one with the bone armour and the squad leader being the only one to get the skull faced one...

Now that leaves us with one body option, 2 left arm options (power glove and power chainfist) and 3 right arm options (since I want the leader to have a unique bolter variant). With a bit of pinning though I managed to give  a "little" variety in the poses, trying to keep the feeling of weight and might these guys should have. The simple fact of opening their arms a little give them more dimension as opposed to the rather robotic feel you get when you just glue the arms on the pegs. Gluing the arms without pinning means you'll get a very perpendicular build which kills all d

dynamism in my view.

The fist 3 troopers received the same basic elements with only one getting a chainfist instead of the power glove. I know I've been painting a lot of OSL on my models lately but I needed to tie those models with the rest of the army and since I've already painted glowing power weapons on all of them so far so I had to keep doing that.

I have painted quite of these models back in the day and I have to say I didn't remember those organic rtextures on the bolter. To tie the models with my Dreadnought (see at the end of this post) I decided to paint those textures in flesh tones and to blend them in the black of the armour. Blending them with the armour seemed mandatory in order to avoid it looking like they had raw meat on top of thei gun.

Next models on the line were the ones with heavy weapons. I've always loved the style of that autocannon and how it seemed to fire big hellish bullets. The heavy flamer though always looked weird to me, I'd even believe this one wasn't sculpted by Jes Goodwin but by another member as I see no evidence of his "style" on this arm. 

 To give a bit more funkiness to both heavy weapons I decided to give them an inner fire showing in some recesses and in the eyes at the tip of the guns.

You may have noticed that the paintjob on those is a rather straightforward one with many shortcuts and simplifications. This has 2 main reasons :

- From day one, I wanted my renegades to be mostly black.Though I know it closed a lot of painting opportunities, for some reson I really wanted my  chaos army to be this massive black tide so I've tried so far to limit any other colour to the strict minimum. You can see that I did use some blue to make the power weapons stand  on the battlefield and the heavy weapons did get some red. All of this has been carefully thought to limit as much as I could any disturbance with the whole look.

- The second reason is that this is likely to be the only army I'll really do as my focus is more on small groups of models (5 to 12 models) now. In order to keep the mojo with this army, I therefore had to find a suitable way to paint them efficiently to get the joy of completion from time to time. The techniques used are therefore speed techniques that do not necessarily show the best of the sculpts but they get them painted. I have a bout 80 models to paint for this army and have only a 4th of them done so far so that means it's still a long haul. Knowing the sculpts, I know I will not enjoy spending time on each in its own way, one after the other and while I really like seeing others do this I simply can't.

All of this to say that for this army, I'll focus on getting everything painted and will allow myself to have a bit more fun in a few chosen like the leader in this squad.

The main body has been painted the same way as the others but I decided to spend a bit more time on his skull mask and power sword.

Funnily enough the more I look at him the more he looks like a librarian to me with all those Horus eyes and that mask echoing a psychic head gear.

You can also notice that I bent the forearm in a way to avoid having the sword perpendicular to the body. The bolter arm is also widely open thanks to pinning whish makes the build less rigid than if I had just glued the parts right away.

The right arm has a weird mix of bones as a glove which makes me think the part could have been better on the lord but I didn't know the part was like that before so he got it instead,
Since the whole painting process had been closer to Taylorism than anything else, I finshed this whole by playing a little with the sword, trying to give it a hellish look. After all, amongst all of them he has got to be the one with the fancy weapon !

Since I have quite a lot of renegades now, I just couldn't get all of them into one place for a nice group photo late last night. As these were meant to be in this WE's game I guess you'll have a group shot soon enough though as a game on Saturday will most probably be followed by a Battle report in the following week ;)

Here's a shot of a bunch of them next to the Dreadnought for now :

This week is going to be busy as I still have my Rogue Quest entry to finish and since I'd like to finish a tutorial I'm preparing on how I paint my champions of Law.

Wish me luck !