5000+ points of Traitor Sons of Horus! (WIP)

7 Hq choices , 4 man terminator command squad, 4 man regular command squad, 40 Tactical marines, 15 odd Veteran Tactical marines, 10 Heavy marines (now 15, oops!), 10 Assault Marines/Reavers, 5 seekers, 5 Melta support troopers, 3 dreadnoughts, 10 Justaerin, 2 Rhinos, a Phobos and a Dreadclaw.

That’s what I’m now up to, having won a great auction for 25 marines, and associated bits so I managed to successfully arrange all of the army. A grand total of 106 bodies to throw at my foes. These are all now either using Mk5 heads, or have a topknot bare head, or an archaic helm. Peppered throughout are around 30 sons of Horus shoulderpads, some converted combat kilts, lodge medals on strings, topknots and as many older generation armour marks as possible.

That has left the remaining items in my old marines box, there are only 5 Terminators, 5 Scouts, 4 Bikes, 2 Speeders (my beautiful Tempest!), and around 10 more stock pose marines that have now been sidelined! Heresy or bust!

With that mass of work ahead of me, I wanted to get cracking on my Sons of Horus colour scheme, get it cemented and habitual, and so now I’m plugging away at getting these guys completed.

The Terminator Command Squad then. These are on Dark Vengeance Deathwing without iconography (no Emperor armour able to be ground up into the Crux Terminatus!) I’ve only added a Reaper autocannon to these, and in the future may make them taller as compared to the Justaerin they are short!

My scheme for the is a baselayer of 2/1 ratio of Caliban green/White scar. Wash with Agrax in the recesses and tidy up with base mix. Then with a bit more White Scar in the mix, dilute and lightly zenithally blended. Sponge weather with 1/1 Mechanicus grey and Abaddon black and detail the chips with Mechanicus grey. Then a nice set of weathering with white-spirit-diluted Burnt umber for added grime, an armour edged ‘scratch/chip’ of a soft lead pencil, and then the Tamiya classic blood.

The Sons of Horus ‘dirty gold’ effect took some working to get looking right and still probably needs a bit of tweaking. I started with Bestial brown. Based with diluted Runefang silver + Auric gold, then highlighted with pure Auric + washed with Sepia. Drybrushed with Runefang as needed.

Abaddon (prophetic?) Black on bolters and backpacks and line highlight with Mechanicus Grey, Silver metals painted with Leadbelcher, highlighted with Runefang silver (or similar)and then washed with Nuln. Reds were Mephiston red base, washed Agrax, retouched with the base, then added a small amount of Trollslayer orange to the base colour for highlights.

These guys were fairly easy to do as a lot of their colour palette was similar to their last scheme, the terminators I knew were likely to be a test, and I’m not sure I’ll use them again. But at least the practices are being tested and by the time I’m working on characters, I’ll know what works

After the Termies, I went to these Assault marines (some of my first proper conversions when I re-joined the hobby), to those I’ve added some studs to helms to see how they work. Mixed opinion from me.

Painting worked well though! Happy with these!

Next will be finishing my first big tactical squad, just armed with bolters (for table top identity).