The Project

When I decided to get back into the hobby I "um'd" and "ah'd" (is that how you spell that?) about what I wanted to paint for quite a while. All I really knew was that I wanted it to be a 40k army. The only armies I knew I didn't want to paint were Chaos Space Marines and Necrons. I don't know what it is about either of these factions but they've just never really done it for me (with the exception of Kharn the Betrayer which is one of my favourite miniatures of all time).

As I've mentioned previously, my initial plan was to go with Orks but it didn't take me long before I got sucked in by Space Marines. Once I'd re-familiarised myself with the lore and the rules of chapter organisation, the idea of putting together an entire company really started to appeal to me.

I spent a fair bit of time looking at all of the different chapters and narrowed it down to Imperial Fists, White Scars or Blood Angels. I've already shown the Imperial Fist tactical squad that I painted from the Assault on Black Reach box, but yellow really is a difficult colour to paint and the thought of painting up 100 marines in that scheme started to terrify me. I still haven't really attempted painting white but from what I've read, it's just as tricky so I've settled on Blood Angels.

Another advantage of painting Blood Angels is the fact that they have plenty of their own customised units and upgrade packs meaning the models in the army can have a bit more variety. That being said if I were to get 6 boxes of Blood Angels tactical squads, I feel like it would have the opposite effect and it would actually be more difficult trying to make each model look unique. Therefore, I've come up with a few rules:

• Where a unit has a specific Blood Angels kit, each unit will be kit bashed using parts from that and parts from the standard Space Marine kit (e.g. rather than buying 2 Blood Angels tactical squads, I will get 1 Blood Angels box and 1 normal tactical squad). This will allow me to spread the Blood Angels parts a bit more thinly and also open up more combinations to allow for a bit more variety
• No moulded shoulder pads on tactical, devastator or assault marines. I'll use transfers. I don't like the idea of some marines having fancy pads but others at the same level not having them. Moulded shoulder pads will be saved for veterans and other special characters
• A helmetless head will only be used once throughout the entire army

Having researched the Blood Angels a bit more thoroughly (i.e. reading their page on Lexicanum) I've decided to go for the second company. I know things have changed a bit since the release of Primaris marines but, to be honest, I think I'm going to ignore those for now. I'm going to stick with the original line-up of 60 tactical marines, 20 devastators and 20 assault marines. I can always replace some units with Primaris later on. I'll also be sticking with the original command squad line-up to accompany Captain Aphael.

This is obviously a long-term project and I'll be mixing things up by painting other bits and bobs in between to break up the sea of red. I'm not expecting to have this finished any time soon, it will be a labour of love.

The first thing I plan to do for this project is to get a couple of tactical squads (1 BA and 1 SM, see above). However, I've had an idea of another single model I want to paint first which should be quite fun and also give me a bit of practice painting red. More on that in a future post...