After a year of painstaking work, I finally finished my breachers. Here they are in all their glory. Open any image in another tab for a larger shot with more detail. I can safely say I’m never going to paint so many marines at one time again as this project dragged on and on. That said, I’m happy with the results overall. They are the best and worst things I’ve ever painted: the worst because they took me the longest, but the best because they took me the longest.

I tried a few new techniques such as waiting a day or longer before removing oil washes from the armor. This made it much more ‘chunky’ and was a painful process, but yielded pretty interesting results. I like how it eroded away my decals. As the HH books release newer and newer Iron Warrior HH fluff, I find my legion choice less and less appealing. Having these legionaries not care about their legion markings at all helps reinforce that they care just as little about their own Primarch as they do the chaos gods or emperor. Down the road I think I might even do a sergeant or two with “Iron” or “Perturabo” crossed out from his shield.

Here are the closeups of my favorites breachers. The conversions really bring these guys to life:

Here are my Vexillari (standard barers). Of all my models, I spent the most time on them. They are the best infantry models I’ve painted to date:

If there’s one thing I tried that I didn’t like, it’s the source lighting on the lamps. Even with a Sotar 20:20 airbrush it just didn’t spray a dot small enough to create a believable effect. What I have works ok, and its ok for a first attempt, but I’ll probably come back and retouch the lamps some day.

Until then, I have other projects in mind…