In addition to my Hobbit models I am also working on a small number of Astral Claws. I really like the new colour scheme devised by Forge World a few years ago and the background of the chapter really appeals. Now that I am nearing the end of the Dark Vengeance set it seems like a natural stopping point for my Dark Angels collection. Therefore the marines I bought at Christmas are now destined to become Astral Claws.
The reason for this is the fact that I am more of a painter/modeller than a gamer and therefore I would much rather just paint what ever I feel like at the time rather than working towards building usable armies. The Dark Angels were a nice little project but I don’t really want to carry on painting yet more green power armour. At times like this the gaming side of the hobby seems like more of a straightjacket to me than a source of inspiration and so, after much thought, I decided to break out of the army building mindset and just paint them as Astral Claws. I must say, I’m glad I did as these have been great fun to paint. The silver armour is much quicker to paint than the green leaving me more time to paint interesting details such as chips and scratches on the armour.
The chips are painted freehand over the armour colour using Rhinox Hide. They are then highlighted with a lighter mix of the basecoat. For the silver this is pure Mithril Silver and for the blue this is a 50/50 mix of Lightning Bolt Blue and white. This gives the chips the illusion of depth and really makes them pop.
The iconography on the models is applied using decals from Forge World and Games Workshop respectively. I applied a bit of wear and tear to the markings in order to make them look like part of the armour. As you can also see in the above photo, the eyes were painted amber to tie in with the leonine theme of the Astral Claws. At present the base has been left black as I am not sure how I am going to paint them yet.
I can’t foresee myself embarking upon any more army sized projects (or at least not for quite some time) instead I am going to focus on individual models and squads so this project should be fairly small.
