Epic Proportions Fifth Unit Completed

Ultramarines 4th Land Raider Company "The Iron Gauntlet"

The beauty of massed formations of vehicles I think is one of the strongest hooks for my love of Epic.

To be fair, this unit is 95% completed but since we were leaving on vacation and the month is coming to a close, I'm rushing this post to publishing.  I don't want to miss Dr The Viking's end of month round up for the Epic Proportions challenge since I spent so much time the last three weeks painting all these tiny tanks.  The nine Land Raiders of the the three squadrons that make up the company are fully completed but unfortunately the command Land Raider still needs some highlights and detail work.  There are many more pictures and painting details after the jump...

Look the crafty command tank is intentionally blurring itself to hide the lack of highlights, stealth mode activated :-)

I waited for months until I found this paint set at my FLGS when I was fourteen but was so disappointed that my copy of the set was missing the Space Marine Painting guide that supposed to be included.  I have only recently closed that loop after 27 years of waiting by finally getting to read that guide when it was published in Codex Apocrypha a few years ago on the 30th anniversary of the introduction of Space Marines.

This was what the inside of my paint set was supposed to look like, but I got unlabeled paint pots packed in foam...

They were painted very old school, using the still viable paints from my O.G. Space Marine Paint set that I bought in 1991.  The paint set had two colors for each of the four chapters on the box cover "a base color and a top color" as GW referred to it back then.  For the Ultramarines that was Marine Dark Blue for the base color and Ultramarines Blue was the top color.  After those two coats I kicked the blue up another notch by washing all the blue areas with Drakenhof Nightshade.  I am lacking the recent layer paints used for Ultramarine highlights, so I painted the highlights on the Land Raiders with Ahriman Blue and then Blue Horror for the smallest spot highlights. 

Between the deep blue of the armor panels and the so light they are almost white highlights, I feel like these tanks might look more Night Lords than Ultramarines.  However I love the way the color turned out and I have enough of those two pots that I haven't really found a use for in the intervening thirty years that I will continue to use this paint scheme for as many of the Ultramarine vehicles as I can.  The headlights were painted with Mephiston Red, Wild Rider Red and Fire Dragon Bright.  I kept the metallic areas more simple than the Salamanders Land Raiders I painted last month.  Using the Boltgun metal, also from this set and seemingly limitless since I have been painting bolters with it for three decades and it seems to still have the same amount of paint in it, I painted the tracks, lascannons and the pintle mounted bolters.  I washed the Boltgun metal with Nuln Oil Gloss which is now my go to on metallic areas because I think the shine of the gloss helps highlight the areas of silver that are not darkened by the wash as it sinks into the recesses.  After the wash I painted a few spots on the lascannons Brass Scorpion to break up the dark silver color a little bit. 

The right sides of all the Land Raiders appear as above, green doors for the 4th company and red skulls
in the Ultramarine symbol for the lead tank in each squadron.

For the unit designations I dug into a book on English heraldry I bought on a trip to England when I was a teen.  The hobby has to be one of the only times when hoarding has a positive aspect.  I wanted a different style of separating the squadrons than just numbers so I used the 4th company green in a bar or bend (that's the heraldry lingo) on the white hatch doors of the left side to denote the three squadrons and then named them after the heraldic descriptions of Dexter, Pale, and Sinister.  I then used some small black roman numeral transfers for individually numbering the tanks in the company from one to ten.  As I mentioned in my last post about the challenge, this level of unit designations was usually only seen on Imperial Guard tank companies but it was always one of the things in 'Eavy Metal that fired my imagination about what I wanted to do with my painting so it brings me a lot of joy to modify these schemes for my Marine Companies.  Thanks again for following along with another long post and be sure to check out the rest of the participants at Dr The Vikings amazing blog.

Squadron Dexter

Squadron Pale

Squadron Sinister