Heretics!

Part Two

The 2nd and 3rd gentlemen from the left are the only metal models in this unit.

Previously on 1st Legion Chronicles ...Staring down my first ever entry into the Nova Open and knowing I would be playing next to the corrupted forces of my friend's Death Guard Army I was unable to bring myself to field my Dark Angels army in concert with the decrepit heretics...

There was a solution to my problem that would involve a race against the clock hobby project for what remained of the spring and the summer before Nova 19 in August.  When 3rd edition 40K came out in the late 90's my brother, his dad, and I played 40K on an almost weekly basis for a few years.  At the time my brother played a Chaos Space Marine army as they were known in the days before the addition of extraneous latin for the purposes of copyright differentiation.  His army served him well for a few years and traveled with us along with mine when we moved to Colorado in 2002.

The red areas on all the models are a standard Mephiston Red, shaded Carroburg Crimson, and then highlighted with Evil Sunz Scarlet and Wild Rider Red

Unsurprisingly in retrospect living in a town for many years where every aspect of life revolved around outdoor activities, we never found any gaming opponents for anything other than Risk, nor did we get in any games ourselves.  So when I moved back to the east coast to get married and start a family, my brother was downsizing living space and his mothballed chaos army went into storage and transport alongside my miniatures in order to save it's classic 2nd edition models from a thrift store or garbage bin depending on my brothers downsizing drive.  As I returned to gaming and playing 40K five or so years ago, my brothers CSM army would fill in as most frequent opponent for my Dark Angels whenever I was playing against someone who didn't have their own 40K army.

Everybody Conga!

  

As a result they were in a perfect position for a mad dash painting project that would satisfy the needs of my loyalist head canon.  I would repaint the whole army as Red Corsairs and play them in doubles narrative 40k games at Nova 2019 next to my companion's Death Guard army.  It was quite a project to take on, I love painting miniatures and had been progressing with my skills since coming back to the hobby, but I had never attempted to paint 60 odd models in 20 weeks.  Having not had much experience with paint stripping at that point I decided to paint right over the minis not so great paint jobs from 20 years ago.  On the models that had a dark or black base coat I was able to save some painting time by using Nuln Oil a few times, which was much faster than trying to paint those parts of the models black one body part at a time.  Even with some trick like these and despite painting for a hour or sometimes more each day through that whole period the task was more than my painting abilities could conquer in that amount of time.

I love the old CSM backpacks, they somehow exude steampunk evil...

It took five weeks to finish the first ten models and I knew I would never finish at that pace.  So I painted through all the models laying on just the base coats.  After I finished all the models initial coats and with only two weeks to go until Nova 19, I added shades to as many models as I could and finished a few more models all the way to edge highlights.  At least I was able to put a fully painted army on the table at Nova, even if they were just "battle ready" in the current parlance of Games Workshop.  The models in this unit are one of the squads I was able to finish before the gaming weekend began.

The detail on the sculpted metal backpack is great but I probably should have matched it with one of my many spare missile launcher arms.

Many things were learned about timelines for big projects and what kind of paint jobs I can achieve trying to paint a lot of models on a deadline.  To some degree I paint in an overly complicated and old fashioned style, but I realized it is the way I like to paint and rather than change it, I look at it as a good exercise in setting realistic deadlines.  I probably won't field this army at Nova again, I had so much fun that it's crazy that I didn't use the army I've been playing for twenty years.  However these chaos space marine units will see a lot of use in games of Betrayal at Calth and Kill Team as my son already likes to play as the forces of evil.  He will also at least initially use this army as he learns to play 40K until he settles on a faction of his own and they will still serve as the "red team" for anytime who's playing on my table who needs an army.  I will finish painting the units of the army one at a time as a break in between my mass painting or finishing of my main Dark Angels army so these Corsairs comrades will show up here in the future as I swell their ranks with completed units.  Thanks for reading.