Dark Mechanicus; getting a force going

(Of course my new army is corrupted in some way!) How would you theme them? Would you buy a chockload of Chaos parts, perhaps a Hellbrute or a Maulerfiend and start making the ‘shockroaches’? Would you mix pieces with the Necrons, with the Skaven? Green stuff the entire bunch so that they all are unique? Would you attempt to give them a unique feel that no one else had tried?

Especially when this lands on my desk as a present from my eldest brother.

Bloody hell Nick that’s generous! Now to make it fit. This thing has to be charging, it cannot be static.

Back to the Dark Mech then. 
All these things I have considered, and starting another army project like this does make me pause.

A)     Price

Getting that ideal force is going to be extremely pricey.

Budgetary constraints mean that I’m limited to what I can get. While I would love to afford to buy lots and lots of varied and different Chaos kits just to make these guys unique it’s just a little unreasonable. With the Sons of Sek I have mainly Imperial kits with a smattering of Chaos bits here and there, the majority of my corruption and ‘Chaosification’ comes from green stuff, plasticard, an overactive scalpel and painting. The classic Dark Mechanicus is all about skeletal, asymmetrical , knifelike, evil looking machines designed to hurt people and that means bits.

Dave Taylor Awesomeness

B)      Workload

I love conversions, I’m proud to say that I’ve converted almost everything that has crossed my desk, I love that feeling of uniqueness that comes from making a generic plastic man your own. Unfortunately, with that comes time and effort. I’ve yet to finish the Sons of Sek, I’ve yet to finish the Sons of Omega/Sons of Horus. I’ve got an unassembled Knight Warden to get cracking on. How many pieces of Chaos kit will this need!

At the moment I just don’t have the time I used to, and with Resin, I’m a little wary of chopping too much up.

C)      Delay

I want to use the Knight. I want to play this guy asap and kick some ass. I want to use these guys as well, I want to play with a completed force really quite badly. Conversions means waiting for parts, means waiting for glue to dry, waiting for green stuff to set. Screw that bucko, I’ll do some token work to get bits interchangeable and useful, but I want to get moving to get playing.

Magnetise this, magnetise that.

So I've reached a compromise:

++++House Skellos++++

Knight affiliated exclusionists of distant fringe world. 

Dragged enslaved back into the fold of humanity by the Archmagos Draykavic and his coterie of Magos after the slaughter of Istvaan.

They knew nothing of the Emperor. 

They knew nothing of Terra.  

They knew of servitude. 

Nothing more.

Theme: Dark Mechanicus servitude army

The HQ units can all be converted to be extremely Dark Mechanicus. The troops and human elements (hopefully few) can show the occasional icon, or mark of corruption but in the main a Dark Coloured army, bedecked in chains.

Colour Scheme: Red, Black, Silver.

Nice and simple colour scheme for large pieces of machinery, black undercoat, start with some dark red trim and some counter-coloured OSL as well (to be decided) and then on to detail.  Clearly dark on the tabletop but great from closer in.

Major Identifier: Chains!

Apart from raiding my bits box, wrap everything with as many chains as I can find. Source some fine jewellery chain from ebay (cheap) and then wrap wrists, necks, trail it behind them, hatches sealed up, large embedded rings on the knight during downtime storage. If possible, attempt to show the chain as a Dark Mechanicus item (I.e. red/green/corrupt and evil).
If available add some simple flat surface work to further show forceful corruption of the mecha units.

An army in servitude. Easy to add, minor work that doesn’t detract from the beautiful models, distinctive, quick, cheap.

All of this is just talk, so on to some actual concepts.

This is the stuff that I'll be using, £4 worth of Black Iron small link chains from Ebay.

Started adding some chains to this guy.

Poor lighting aside, on to painting,

Red plates, some edge highlighting, washes, blending, gloss coating over the visor aaaaaand.

The flash has nicely blurred the blending of the red plates, and the gloss but in person they both have a nice showing. There are also some simple glyphs/taint marks on the carapace as well.

OSL to the rear, Done.

Now on to the rest of these beauties. In a production line these should all be fairly easy to do.

More to follow!