A Vexing Process

In a turn of events that will surprise nobody, I've painted more Blood Angels.

Ten of them.

That makes for a second compulsory squad of 'line' troops and makes the army I've assembled for Horus Heresy so far game legal.

I still need to add transfers and I think I want to give this squad chainswords, but they are certainly useable.

However, for a number of reasons I found the process of getting through these troublesome.

Firstly, the whole sub-assembly thing, although beneficial for painting is actually slowing the process down quite significantly.

Secondly, the way I'm painting the armour is also time consuming. Painting over the base coat of Flesh Tearer's Red contrast paint is working for the shading but takes a lot of time when doing a unit of ten.

Additionally, having made the desicion to paint the studs on the shoulder pads separately and also do thin lines on the 'underarmour' joints is also adding to the process.

Thirdly, despite carefully lining up the arms to the guns each time I build a marine, I seem to get a couple of marines in each batch which are wrongly positioned by the time I come to put the guns on.

I have a rigid system of enduring that the guns are kept with the correct marine throughout painting, so I'm not sure what's going on.

On a different note, I made the decision to not have the sergeant's crest match the vexilla of the squad as not only did a yellow crest look weird, but colour coding the squads came off as proper dorky.

The vexilla combined almost all of these issues and needed recovering as a green vexilla looked weird. On top of this, for some reason I just couldn't get it to glue to the pack.

I don't know whether it was the temperature or the glue has 'gone off' but I ended up taking the connecting parts off the banner pole and pack and making a new pole section (which glued just fine) and using superglue to connect it all.

All in all, this squad has been frustrating. However, they are now done and I don't need to paint any more batches of infantry for now. I do sense a mob of assault troops on my future when GW get round to releasing them, but I have nothing larger than squads of five on the agenda for the forseable.

I'm almost back on an even keel in terms of painting numbers and in other news I took part in the chat of a livestream done by a group of content creators surrounding the announcement of the new Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game starter set. They eaven responded to one of my comments on the stresm at one points and so I feel fully justified in ticking off another box on the Hobby Bingo card.

Acquired: 120

Painted: 116