Legio Damnatorium - Judgement Beckons
So, now AOP was done so I could finally get back to the Indomitus models and of course I started with the bladeguard veterans, first and foremost the captain! I wanted to make him special and so far all the chapters had been known loyalists (including the dark angels ;)). However, my view on the legio is that any marine that wants to serve the emperor and is loyal to the imperium can return. I believe that the Alpha Legion force themselves to fight for chaos because of the visions theywere given by the kabal that showed that if they did not join chaos the imperium (and mankind) would be destroyed! Plus I really really wanted to paint the Alpha legion paintscheme, love their colors. The lore also states the Omegon may have been loyal... Enough said... AL are loyal enough to be in the Legio ;)
I wanted to play around more with greenstuff so I did some larger mods to his armor and then also because the legionnaires are souls of fallen marines, it made sense that the marine being carried around on the shield would sprout out as well, bascailly, the captain is summoning him.
A fun detail I've done is that I have modified the ribcage on the skeleton on the shield! There was critique when the model was released that it was strange that the captain was carrying around a human, since astartes have boneplates for ribcages. So I added some greenstuff to fuse the ribs together :)
I also decided to make a custom weapon and tried to make it look like it was sparkling with lightning. A fun experiment but I'll leave it to you to judge how well I succeeded ;)
Next, I wanted to do the chaplain! For some reason I was inspired by his pose and I still had the necron that is supposed to lie at the captains feet to play with. With some creative modifications and bitbashing I managed to get the chaplain to hold the necron and I managed to sculpt an explosion and some fire. I also managed to make the mod in such a way that I could remove the necron and the chaplains left arm as one unit so that I could paint everything on the front of his armor.
On this model I wanted to play around more with OSL as well. In previous models I have held back on the OSL quite a loot, focusing on just doing colored highlights. Here I went more all in and in particular with the green light from the explosion. I think the final effect came out pretty great!
I did however do another experiment that didn't come out so well and that was to use photos of fire as reference for the flames around the model! If you look at fire you will notice that it is generally red at the center and that the tips of the flames are bright yellow or white! This is completely inverse to how you paint fire on models where you pain it more like stylized flames (see emojis for instance) where you have white or yellow at the center and the tips of the fire are red! It's a strange phenomenon that has to do with paint and solid material versus fire that is mostly transparent.
But overall I was super happy with the model and realized that this more extreme style with mods and quality of painting would be what I would try to achieve with each model moving forward! I had continuously improved my painting the last 10 or so models, but now I felt that I was reaching a new level of sorts. Still plenty to learn but slowly getting better :)
