Legio Damnation - The Steel Of The Damned
That master of the maelstrom has returned to show off the largest part of his Legion of the Damned force. Emil Alegroth once more opens the door to galactic horror to shine up the skulls of the Emperor for your enjoyment.
This gets LARGE
With a small army done and now really annoyed that I hadn't won anything despite my best efforts I decided to make a project that would destroy all competition! I knew I wanted to do a Legion of the Damned model and although I never thought I would do a Knight, I decided to go for a knight and it would have LEDs, greenstuff flames, crackled paint and in my vision murals/freehands of the emperor.
So I bought the knight and studied up quickly on how to do LED circuits and also how to control it all with a wireless control. I managed to hook everything up and working right away and then reposed the knight's legs and built a custom base to hide the electronics.
Next, the freehands! I had at this point only done the simple freehands on the dreadnought but I told myself that no one remembers a coward and started painting! I did some quick sketches on the carapace with a pencil, carefully looking at the reference image and then started painting. The results came out so much better than I expected and I realized that I might be able to pull off the project!
I continued with painting Horus and once more succeeded quite well so I continued with the knight, doing the pauldrons and now managed even better with the freehands.
Done with the top carapace and adding the crackled black paint effect with Mordian earth texture paint (suggested by the owner of the local GW store) I moved on to paint the knight's skeleton. I wanted it to look like the knight had just stepped out of a bruning hell and therefore be glowing molten metal! I studied sooo many pictures of foundries, and molten metal, before I started painting and then I painted, and painted, and painted, and painted.... ....and painted and painted! An eternity later, the molten metal was done and I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel!
However, the weapons were still left. Especially the cannon that I wanted to look like it had recently been fired and therefore superheated. The reason is because I wanted to add some more color to the model. What I realized looking for reference images however is that metal cannot be hotter than white :P basically, the skeleton is as hot as metal can become before it turns into gas basically. So I had to come up with a way of painting it. So I had to study some light spectrum images and experiment! After a few versions I settled on one that I think looks pretty good :) The gun took a few days to paint though :P
After all this I just had to do the shin pauldrons, which was quite easy at this point after all practice.
Lastly I did the pilot. Some quick converting to give the pilot the same pose as the knight (roughly) and then painted him up.
Total project took 137 calendar days and more than 300 man-hours.
Now armed with the ultimate model I was ready to compete in the next local GW painting competition! Finally I had a real chance to win something! Yes! Aaannd then.... COVID-19 hit!
