Epic Imperator Titan - A youth achievement !

 

Well hello there ! Today's post is rather special because I'm ticking several items from the bucket list at once !
I'm on the verge of turning 40 and 1994 was a formative year for me in terms of music, comics and models but amongst a few gut punches, I remember Titan Legions was one of those obsessions for me along listening to Infectious Grooves :

The gigantic robots, the completely insane cover box, that was pushing all of young JB's buttons like few things had before. I had a love at first sight with warlord titans in the early 90's like any sane kid but I just never got a box of any and I decided to spend my limited funds on blisters of chaos goodness bit by bit.

Fast forward to march 2018 and I finally bite the bullet and just decide to paint ONE SINGLE warlord titan for the sake of it, just tio sscratch the itch y'know... 

But the itch didn't vanish, it just got fierce and I knew I could not avoid the fact I wanted a god damn epic army.

So I collected every titan or knight from the period I loved most and got help from so many fantastic people. And this is how I slowly built a collection covering every aspects of what the ideal epic army was in my head...

...up to the point where a friend offered his Titan Legion box (after being offered a Space marine box). Now I've got to say I was speechless, and I knew I had to do things right.

The box came with a warning though : the titan was missing parts...

The plasma cannon had been granted to a metal dreadnought, the anti-aircraft volcano canon was gone along several little bits, so my first mission was to find the proper replacements...

Now, I already knew I had great friends but that was just confirmed when two of them cast copies of the missing bits I needed and I could finally complete the build !

Now I wanted to do this titan justice and not just do a factory version. It needed something special. I didn't feel like converting it to a more dynamic pose but I was sure a few extra bits so my first idea was to see if I could use optional heads :

That's when I was reminded by a friend that Emperor class titans originally appeared in that book :

Ok so that was the head settled and extra parchments on the sides as well !
Now it took me almost a year to gather all the bits to salvage that titan and complete it and at that point, I had already build a few more reavers and warlords so that takes us to August 2019 !

I think doing the base coats with the airbrush ws the best idea as it gave me a perfect and consistent base across all the titans which would have otherwise been tedious as hell.

The imperator was allegedly the biggest model of its time and well, it is an extremely big and cumbersome model to handle so sub assemblies were essential.
in hondsight, I wish I had broken the model into more sub assemblies actually !

One thing I was sure of was that I had to break the big red mass effect so I decided to paint the windows like glass, weird heh ?
I had a few colours in mind but had the help from a friend to try several and pick :

In the end, after a year and a half of painting it bt by bit, taking breaks to avoid becoming crazy and not losing the moo, I DID IT.

A bit of weathering, decals and fancy effects, a space marine for scale (didn't have a banana) and here it is, you can notice i the picture below I also added some stuff under the balcony to give it a bit more mass, those are press mould copies of space fleet ships to avoid having that flat area underneath and a few last minute added cables that give a bit of feeling of weight I find.

As you can see the red is still predominant but I think toning it down and breaking it with the glass panels breaks the monotony of the studio version.

Now in case you don't have one in hand, here's a scale shot to truly appreciate the size of that model !

And how many points does that give me with all those gigantic murder machines done ?
Well about 6200 points which isn't bad if you add it to the 3000 points of Space marines I had painted in Febuary.

Now this is the part this was all leading to : a complete Epic army with loads of titans and troops !

Now I beleive many of you can relate to the pleasure of having such a project achieved. I'm no longer an army painting guy and I much prefer working on skirmish teams (and play them as well) but I can't rub the love of a good army off it seems.

I really wish to emphasise how much I owe to all the people who helped me throughout the project, I hope I won't forget too many names but if you were part of it then you know you have my most sincere gratitude !

Thank you to David S, Patrick B, Paul S, Chris D, Chris W, Chris K, Colin M, Brian R, Jessy, Jean-François D, Jamie, Cédric, Christophe, the Hobbyshop team and others, I'm really deeply grateful for those little or great gifts of parts, models, time, knowledge, it really meant the world to me and I really wanted to complete this whole project to a sufficiently nice result to honour your kindness so once again THANK YOU !

Now with all that done, that's quite a huge void in the painting desk and a load of fresh air to get back to old projects, dive into new ones and so many great things !

Here's to those little achievements that make this hobby so rewarding !