These guys sold me on starting an Admech army, hands down. The look unlike anything else I'd seen in Warhammer 40,000 at that point, they rock a sweet jousting lance and they are powered by a quadruple amputee in a gimp suit. What's not to love?
When Skitarii launched, I ordered two of them without hesitation and now I have one all fully painted and ready to go.
| Out of all of the kits I bought back when Skitarii first launched, I knew exactly what I wanted to build these guys as, the Sydonian Dragoon lancers. They just look so cool! This guy was one the first model I finished for my army, which is funny because he's not even in my lists anymore. But it did set the tone for the look of later models. The armor plating was painted in the dark green that I had already started painting some Rangers in, many moons ago, but I pushed contrast further and only used Moot Green for the extreme highlights. This inadvertently caused the paint job to become more and more non-metallic metal green, which I actually liked quite a bit. To tie the vehicles to the rest of the army, I painted the chassis and legs of it in the same colors as the inner cloth of the coats of my Skitarii Vanguard and Rangers, which was a base of Rakarth Flesh, built up with Sepia, Ushabti Bone and Screaming Skull. I may try to go back and fix it up a little bit. But I'm not hopeful. I wanted to go with a light color for the chassis to help contrast against the green, but also because I wanted to make the gimp stand out a bit more, because I think its twisted and a I like pointing him out to people. Unlike the Onager Dunecrawler, I didn't weather the legs and metals, because I didn't really think of it. Sadly, this oversight bothers me a little bit and this Dragoon doesn't fit in with the look of the Onager now. Copper is the main metal of my army, the red/orange tint of it contrasts nicely against the green coats and armor plating. Some things were kept silver such as hydraulic pistons, rivets and anything that seemed like it needed to be made of harder metal than copper was kept silver, many of the other things were switched to copper instead, such as trim. The more I paint copper and green together, the more I like it. Its funny too, because my original color scheme for the army was to paint their coats and such the standard Mars red and switch the metals to copper. But after painting them together on a test, I realized the copper got lost in the red and I needed something different. Boy am I glad I switched it up. One of my favorite parts of the model is the instrument cluster that is in front of the rider. I really like the idea that these guys do all their computing on old Apple II computers, complete with the black background and green text. Its a small touch, but one that I get a huge kick out of whenever I have to paint one of these terminal screens. The rider was painted as I normal would paint a Skitarii infantry, but instead of the Dragoon head, I swapped it to a Skitarii Vanguard Alpha head instead. I tried to give his taser lance the look as if it were charging up and getting hot near the energy source. It turned out ok, but I'm still not 100% happy with it. This thing has a rather large base and it could have easily been too plain. I fixed that with some green stuff and an old Warhammer 40,000 terrain piece, which I buried into the groud by cutting it in half and covering it with some green stuff. I also added a Reaper Bones skeleton to the base to give it a bit more character. This base was also my first large one to get based with the Martian Ironearth and Ironcrust technical paints. It was nice to get to really play with them and see what I could do. Overall, I'm really happy with this model. It does kind of suck that it doesn't fit in with the look of the Onager and any future vehicles I do. Maybe I can get that fixed eventually. Until next time, keep an eye on my Twitter and Instagram feeds for up to date progress on all of my projects! |   |
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