Having been in a bit of a painting slump recently (after a more than productive first half of the year), I was happy to discover that my recent completion of the “Chibi Knight 2.0” project seems to have returned at least a healthy part of my hobby mojo. So I didn’t lose any time and returned to yet another project that has kept me occupied this year: my true scale, Primaris-based Deathwatch killteam for my INQ28 collection.
It has been a while since the last finished member of the team, to be honest: Here’s where we left off in the summer:
In order to make up some lost time, I decided to have a go at painting the next two members of the killteam back to back. These guys, originally converted a while ago:
On the left is a member of the Castigators, while the Astartes on the right is a Lamenter — in fact, I already started painting them back in August, that is I painstakingly created their respective right shoulder pads, complete with freehand designs. A technique that still makes me nervous, I must say:
Compared with that really fiddly stuff, the rest of the paintjobs was business as usual, really, so I finally got to work.
First in line was the Castigator, a member of Commissar Molotov’s own DIY chapter, included in my killteam as a little shout out to one of the “founding fathers” of the INQ28 movement, as it were:
Incidentally, I had the idea of actually having the model wield a massive whip fairly early on, inspired by some of the artwork from Commissar Molotov’s aforementioned background thread:
When it came to the actual paintjob, I stuck to my established Deathwatch recipe of scratched black armour and a slightly 2nd edition-ish combination of bright reds and golds, and was able to mostly finish the paintjob in an afternoon:
And, a short time later and in much better lighting:
Something I really like about the conversion in hindsight is the helmet: It’s one of the old metal Deathwatch helmets that I simply used both because I wanted to have at least one relatively clean-cut Mk. VII-ish Marine in the kill team, and also because it seemed like a nice shout out to the older Deathwatch parts. I realised during painting that the features of the facemask were a bit sharper and more menacing than your average plastic Mk. VII helmet, which I think really works for the character.
He’s still missing his base and a name — I have actually reached out to Commissar Molotov in order to ask him whether he would like to name the character. It only seems proper, what with the Castigators being his chapter and everything…
While I was waiting for his reply, I began working on the second model, a Lamenter named Brother Mikhael Zephon (the first name’s a shout out to fellow hobbyist Augustus b’Raass, who was kind enough to donate the Primaris model required for the conversion):
This model was an interesting case in that it was the second member of the killteam to be wearing a helmet and because the massive weapon would shake up my usual Deathwatch approach a bit. Here are some impressions from early during my painting session:
I started with the helmet. The teardrop jewels on the right side of the visor had me slightly nervous, but I was able to come up with a pretty nice result thanks to an excellent painting tutorial over at the Tale of Painters blog.
Now the rather massive frag cannon was a big part of the paintjob, and in order to get it right, I used both GW’s own paintjobs as well as PDH’s Iron Knights Deathwatch operative here as reference material:
Deathwatch operative by PDH
Here’s a shot of the model with the frag cannon already in place (taken, once again, very late in the evening and in fairly poorly lighting conditions):
And here’s what the model looks like right now:
The one area that still requires quite a few finishing touches is his backpack:
But I am already working on it, trying to add the last tweaks and finishing touches to the actual model.
For now, here are the – mostly finished – Castigator and Lamenter:
I am quite happy with the way these are turning out — the Castigator, in particular, has quite a bit of presence, wouldn’t you say? And while I was a bit nervous about that huge gun and equally massive backpack on the Lamenter, everything seems to be coming together rather nicely, if I do say so myself.
Here’s a look at the entire killteam so far:
Once the Lamenter and Castigator have been finished, that leaves me with only the – already converted – Carcharodon as the last prospective member of killteam Ulrach, so this is a project that I might actually be able to wrap up this year 
Until then, any feedback you may have is welcome, so please drop me a comment! And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!