Finally painted.

I've had a renewed interest in WH40k the past couple of days. Sabaton's new album has helped with invoking some amazing mental imagery which makes it fun to paint Hellfire Marines. So far I've only painted this guy, and I think he turned out damned well, both the actual paintjob and the photos I took of him.

Speaking of Sabaton, I think their song "Hearts of Iron" and the historical situation it's about, is the kind of situation I'd like the Hellfire Astartes and the Sisters of the Flame to meet their ultimate end with, assuming I ever decide to end them.

Fighting to the last bullet, then charging in with chainswords and power armored fists against hopeless odds, to safeguard as many innocents as possible against a terrible fate.

Kuri would survive, and he might even raise a new Hellfire Astartes army. That guy... he's pretty much impossible to kill. Well, okay, he's just as easy to kill as a human, but he doesn't stay dead when you kill him. He's reborn from his ashes, like a phoenix or something. A vortex grenade detonating at point-blank range almost took him out, but he came back some months later. I think I gave up on trying to find a way to kill him and keep him dead after that one, because it became clear it was impossible.

But then at some point, his player and I got to thinking. Suicide missions aren't suicidal for him, because he'll just reappear in the ashes of his fireplace. So what if, somehow, he managed to get into the Emperor's room, and had a nanite grenade (one of those things that can incapacitate and deprogram Battle Sisters, or heal and resurrect the dead in an area)? Could he restore the Emperor's health?

We actually acted out the RP at the time. He hopped into a small ship, alone, wearing his power armor outfitted with some nanite canisters, made his way to Terra, using non-Warp FTL technology, appeared too close to the planet for anyone to react and time, and... I forget if he teleported into the room with the Golden Throne or crashed his ship into it at high velocities... I might be making up that last one because I'm wondering why, if it were possible to teleport into the Imperial Palace on Terra, Sebastian Thor's forces would've needed to fight past the outer defenses (and subsequently failed to do so, as the siege only ended when Alicia Dominica learned something in the Emperor's room, and promptly killed Vandire and ended the Age of Apostasy.)

Anyways, he made his way in there somehow, and ended up getting the gak shot out of him by the guards, which pierced the nanite canisters and released them into the air, whereupon they followed their natural instructions to heal injured and restore life to dead humanoids, and brought the Emperor back to full vitality.

Afterwards, I suggested that even though that would be a totally awesome thing for the Imperium, because the Emperor was awesome when his functional capacity was beyond acting as a fuel-hungry lighthouse and pest repellant, I just didn't think it'd really fit with the 40k lore. Sure, you can pick and choose what you think of as canon, and make your own, and that's totally awesome, but at that point we'd be totally making things up as we went along, by creating fan fiction which went against everything 40k is about. Instead of everything getting worse and worse with no (good) end in sight, the Imperium's condition would improve (though the Sororitas would get a very nasty shock when they found out what the Emperor's views on religion were (he'd basically abolished all religion in the Imperium back before the Great Crusade) and that would probably start some sort of Ecclesiarchy-sponsored Holy War to kill the guy who's claiming to be the Emperor and manifesting obscenely powerful psychic abilities (but is in fact the Emperor himself, but why should they believe that when the guy thinks everything they're doing is just plain wrong? Clearly heresy.)

Anyways, I've rambled enough.

Back to the model. This guy's paint job was full of screw-ups and then suddenly it looked pretty great.

For example, when I was doing the initial washes on the metal areas and the tabard, I figured, "Enh, why not use Nuln Oil on the black parts?" If you've done this, you know how it went. If you haven't, DON'T. It will give you a model that looks like it's covered in KY Jelly, because it will be so, SO glossy and shiny, but it doesn't look like a well-polished piece of shiny black metal that you can see your reflection in. It looks like it is soaked from head to toe in water. Which might actually be good if I ever need to made shiny black liquid at some point, but it doesn't look good on power armor.

So at that point, I started highlighting and adding the layer paint to the tabard. And then, to kill the gloss and give it a very nice matte finish, I mixed some white glue with some water, making it nice and thin with the consistency of milk, and painted it with a brush onto everything that I didn't want to be shiny (so the armor, the tabard, the head and the tail, plus the black parts of the gun and thunder hammer). Then I quickly got out my Wash brush, and started soaking up all the areas where the glue was pooling (in the crevices, of course. It's really easy to see because when it pools, it goes from clear to white). It only took a tiny amount of the mixture to cover all the areas I wanted. (the general rule I used to determine what to mop up was basically that anything that wasn't totally clear had to go) I rinsed my brush, dried it, and kept at it whenever it collected enough liquid to make it not so absorbent. But when it dried (within minutes), all the glossy parts were totally matte. I left the metal parts shiny, of course, though the left shoulderpad's brass details needed some additional shining up, so I applied some Nuln Oil (probably should've used Gryphonne Sepia, though, but whatever).

The base... First I used that texture paint, I forget what it's called. Something Earth? Blackfire Earth? Something like that. It took quite a while to dry. Then I painted the rim black, because I'd heard that black rims (like, painted black, not just left unpainted, because of course you end up with little paint streaks that don't make it look good) look good on models. So then I drybrushed the texture paint with Belor Brown or something, then tried a grey drybrush on top of that for some reason, decided that was a bad idea and then slapped a bow on it with a very light white drybrush. Then I added some of that leftover glue to a few spots, put him in my margarine container of flocking, made sure his base was totally buried in the mounds of flocking (I have a bunch leftover from my Realm of Battle board), let it sit for a bit, then took him out and gave him a thorough uipside-down shaking above the bin, to get all the loose stuff off. Then I wiped my finger around the rim to clear the stuff that was sticking sideways, quickly did the white of the purity seal which I'd neglected, and was finished.

Oh, yeah, and I know Kuri's a ten-tailed fox, but sadly I haven't found many viable 28mm fox heads or kitsune tails, so that's why I'm using Space Wolf helmets and Goblin Wolf Rider tails from Warhammer Fantasy. I also gave him only one tail for two reasons. First, to get ten of those tails, it would cost me about forty five dollars unless I popped onto eBay, and there's no way in hell I'm spending forty five dollars on tails for each of my Kuri models. Second, I'm not going to even attempt the modeling nightmare that is modelling ten of those tails onto one model. I'm fine with cutting up parts and sticking them together in new ways, but come on, there's no way in hell I'm going to get ten tails to fit there and have them all look like they're coming out of the same spot. Not with plastic tails that are as thick at the base as a Space Marine's leg. That's too difficult a construction project for me.

Updated June 24th, 2014 with some touchups to the paint job and some different photos.