my traitor guard

I have been wanting to do an imperial guard army for ages and with the new allied rules decided to do a traitor guard army based around a general allied to khorne. i spent along time thinking about which models i wanted use for the body of the army and was really considering using the krieg models from forge world as love the sculpts, this all changed when i was clearing oiut my room and found a load of caidians still on sprue under my bed so i looked at how to convert them. 

It was pointed out to me by Greg that the renegades that forge world do would work  so i went along with them and so glad that i did. While i was waiting for this these to turn up i started work on the army.

The main idea behind the army was that yes it would be guard but i wanted it to be all quite in your face so have gone for some of the less used units that seemed to follow the theme like  the penal legion a group of convics who have just been thrown into the fight. for these i used the cultists from the dark vengance box set converting them to all be holding lasguns (this took some time) and doing a couple of head swaps to bring a bit more variety to the unit.

The most noteable of these is for the unit Custodian who now has a head from the marauder horseman sprue this completely changes the look of the model along with the weapon swap to a las pistol from the shotgun. The next bit took some time which was deciding on how to do the bases.  I wanted a bright base as all the models in the army were going to be dark and the contast would make them stand out. this wasnt the hard bit doing desert bases is now really easy painting the base first with Armagedon dust then dry brushing this with underhive ash. the bit that i could get my head around was what colour to do the edge of the base so it was put to the vote on a gaming night in the reading store. After lots of debate and voting i decided on XV-88 to edge the bases.

With the first unit done and the dilivery from forge world on my door step i put together and painted the first 10 guardsmen for the first platoon of the army.

I already had the idea for the colour sceme in my head after painting the penal legion so set to work trying out the new shade paints (nuln oil) from Games workshop. i hadn't used these before so used them the same way i had used the washes like devlin mud (used on the penal legion) this ended up giving quite a dusty look to the models when dried which really worked after i highlighted them back up.

the part of the model i wanted to stand out was  the gas masks as this is what is really different from the standard cadian models i played around with doing them green like latex gas masks but decided on what you can see a sort of sack cloth colour this was done by basing with Tallarn sand (yes its a layer but works) washing with Nuln oil then rehighlighting back with Tallarn sand and woking up to a mix of Tallarn sand and Ushabti Bone this effect really worked  and doesnt take long to do. All guardsmen have symbols on their shoulder pads so i wanted to do the same i tried out a few ideas from painting blood splattered hands to khorne symbols but settled with the white chaos star which really stands out on the black back ground.

After complating two infantry units i wanted a bit of a change some went out and brought my first tank i decided on a leman russ demolisher as had always liked the close up and personal infantry support this tank offers plus it has a big gun!

I wanted this to have the same set of colours on it but decided to do the colour scheme reversed so mostly black which i find quite hard to pant over large areas. to do this i heavily dry brushed the tank with a very dark grey to pick out all the edge detail then i ran i lighter grey along all the edges as a final high light. this ended up making the tank look grey which wasnt what i wanted so i cut back in all the large flat areas with abaddon black to darken down the whole look of the vehicle. 

The skulls on the chaos icon where painted up first with a coat of ushabti bone, then washed with nuln oil this was then highlighted back up to nearly white. to finish the skull off i took inspiration from mr Chris Blair who always seems to put runes on his skulls, so i painted the symbol of Khorne on the top skull.

At the moment there is no battle damage or weathering on this but i plan to do this with all the vehicles at once to get a constant look across all of them.

i had been toying around with some idea for a commisar and priest to go in the infantry platoon i wanted them to stand out from the rest. the preist was the first i did work on, i wanted some one that looked like he had devoted himnself to khorne and just become a complete nut job that had hulked out. the idea came to me to base him a bit on bane from batman  so i looked about for a suitable model to work from. the  newish plastic savage orc warlod for warhammer fantasy took my eye i could really see him wielding a huge chainsaw and with a smaller head  so thats what i did with the addition of a back pack and some copper wire as tubing i set to work painting him up.

I had no idea how to do viens on a model so sort out the help of mr palmer at GW to help out as he had done some on his spiffy ogre army. the process is quite straight forward but just takes some time the veins are painted on nearly at the first stage of painting, you then layer up very thin layers of paint (nearly water with a hint of colour) over the top of the model, ths was a prcess started from tallarn flesh and worked all the way up layer by layer to kislev flesh. all the layers were a watered down mix of kislev this ment there were no crazy mixes to worry about if they dried up. I am really happy with how the skin has turn out and will be using this technique alot more in the future.