Crossing the Rubicon Primaris

Rapidly becoming the second most over used phrase after "perfect storm", I feel like someone needs to send GW a note to point out that if everyone crosses the "Rubicon" then it ceases to be significant.  Has a sacrificial lamb of a current character tried to become primaris, failed and died yet?  I bet when the Dark Angels eventually get their new codex supplement one of the many named 1st Legion special characters is going to bite it in the name of Rubicon crossing consequences.  However that's enough old man griping for one post, onto the pictures of the models...

Uncle Ezekiel wants you for the 1st legion!

Don't get me wrong, I love everything they have done with the lore and the new models.  I pre-ordered Dark Millennium and picked it up in July 2017, and my enthusiasm for primaris marines can be seen  in the fact that it took me two years to finish my first squad of the new miniatures.  JK, what these guys really are is proof that my hobby "butterfly/squirrel" ways needed to be refined to help me get through the mound of plastic crack and really enjoy everything I have for the hobby.  I had these guys assembled and primed by September 2017 (they're push to fit for Pete's sake) and I commenced painting shortly afterward but they kept falling to the back burner as other projects caught my eye like the many shiny seductive acorns they are.  Not that I was finishing these distraction-ary (I think I invented that word) models either, I have far too many things on my painting table in a state of half finished base coats or highlights.

After painting their smaller cousins for twenty odd years, these relative giants are so easy to paint.

I tried for many years (decades really) to follow the GW recommended ways of batch painting models five or ten at a time.  This was always challenging because I would get through base painting and shading 5 models and be burnt out on the repetitive nature of those first layers and before it was time for clean up and highlights, I would have moved on to a new project.  This led to the aforementioned mass of half painted models, which is only slightly less demotivating then the giant pile of grey plastic that haunts many a gamer.

I like how the vivid filter emphasizes the highlights on the dark colors but I'm afraid it washes out the bright colors.

What has worked in the last few years of painting is painting two miniatures at a time.  It makes zero sense but somehow I can finish a unit of five or ten at the pace of two miniatures at a time much more consistently than if I tried to paint all the models in the unit batch painting style.  I think I need to reach the final details and highlights stage faster to keep myself interested because that's when you get the gratification of seeing how the model comes together.  Painting them two at a time allows me to get to this stage more quickly before I get burnt out painting the same dark green colors and shades on five models at a time.

So short story long, which seems to the case with every story on this blog, I finished the line troopers two at a time, over last winter.  However I drug my feet on painting the sergeant, mostly because I don't have a lot of practice painting bare heads.  One of the many reasons I play space marines is so I don't have to paint miniatures faces!  I always build any model I can with full helmet, but the sergeant in this squad came with bare head and a helmet sculpted on at his waist.  Not relishing the idea of sawing and sanding that helmet off in order to use a helmeted head instead, I bit the bullet and went with the bare head.

I add a layer of 'ardcoat over the decals to hide the edges, but boy does it make them shiny in pictures.

That choice led me to not finishing the unit for quite awhile since the head painting was intimidating.  As mentioned at the beginning of the story, I've been trying to have more discipline in painting since Nova and finishing half painted units was at the top of the list.  These guys came up second in rotation after Dreadtober, I'll post about the first unit I finished in the near future.  The sergeant's head turned out okay and I think they looked really great once I added unit and chapter decals.  Wow!  Five paragraphs of text and no talk about what colors I used or why I paint my Dark Angels slightly differently than current practices.  Just more ammunition for overly wordy posts of the future.  Thanks for reading and tune in again next week, same chronal interval , same vox channel.