Guardians of Faith: Chaplains Part 1 - Rogue Trader Era

Some newer collectors and painters that I've come across seem to have an issue with the marines that came out during the original RT era. They dislike the fact that the marines often seem too small in stature, badly sculpted and look to have been given the most unlikely poses possible. But as a collector myself I've managed to amass quite a number of marines from this era and when painting them always find that the experience is great due to the quirks and odd little touch that the sculptor gave them back in the day before marines were acknowledged to be ten-foot demigods.

For most of the specialists in the chapter I wanted to use a non-codex colour scheme that still fitted with the function of the marine and kept with the darkling feel of the chapter and their medaeval homeworld. To be honest, I've never had much luck painting marine armour black and so after spending a holiday in the Lake District surrounded by buildings made from the amazing local slate stone, I settled on that shade of grey for my chaplains. A coat of Charcedon Granite provided a perfect slate effect allowing the bone highlights to stand out more than would have been possible with black.

It would have been an idea in retrospect to replace this guy's rather unimpressive chainsword with something from a later marine or paint it in bone as well, but I'd already removed his bannerpole and it just seemed to slip my mind. The bannerpole was pretty dreadful anyway, so good riddence.

The legs and shoulderpads on this chaplain make up for the fact that his helmet looks like the enbalmed visage of a particularly ugly chimpanzee. With marine plasma pistols I have been trying an approach of basecoating in Enchanted Blue, drybrushing lightly with white and then applying a wash of blue ink in the hope that it will simulate the energy cells of the weapon without drawing too much attention away from the rest of the model.

I'll be posting next some images of chaplains from the mid-nineties over the next few days and then moving on to more contempory models as soon as I have the time to post.