“One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness, 
One final blade, forged in defiance of fate. 
Let them be my legacy to the galaxy I conquered, 
And my final gift to the species I failed.”
– Inscription upon the Arcus Daemonica,
attributed to the Emperor of Mankind.

Before starting this, I looked at my previous Oath Of Moment article… dated June 2014… bollocks. Despite the best of intentions I haven’t written any regular updates even though I have been chipping away at painting the army over the past year and a half.

So what started as a small army to pass some time has spiraled into 2000+ points, which I’m actually totally chuffed about. It’s my first good sized army and also the first fully painted army I’ve ever owned. It’s a nice feeling being able to throw down a selection of stuff and try some different things in games.

I finally finished all my terminators, then added some falchions to my pool of magnetised arms thinking it’d be nice for the extra attacks. Needless to say, they’ve made it into combat once out of five games and even then there were only two of them left. They look cool as fuck though so they normally make it into my lists regardless, one day they’ll earn their points back somehow.

Strike squad, interceptors and more falchions, also because they look cool. But then a 30″ shunt move to burn stuff out of cover or for long distance objective scoring, what’s not to love?

Photo overload on the land raider as i’m really happy with it. I totally bottled doing any freehand and just used some decals instead but they fit in well. It was awesome just going to town with the FW weathering techniques from the masterclass book and trying stuff out like sponge chipping, oil washes, pigments and inks for heat discolouration. I wanted it pretty mucky as i’d been reading the Vraks books at the time and pictured it in the middle of a campaign with no time for the servitors to give it a good scrub.

I love this model, Forgeworld have done a really good job on giving a dreadnought some personality. I got it 2nd hand and had to strip it then fix some stuff up on the back like the exhaust vents. This was another one where I got a bit carried away on the weathering but it was really fun to paint and I liked using weathering pigments on the base and legs in particular. Despite missing with his multi-melta pretty much all the time, so far he’s managed to crush Clarke’s riptide and Chris’ Chaos terminator lord in close combat. I should probably stick some battle honours on him somewhere to keep him happy.

My brother captain and librarian, both just made from the regular GK sprues with the addition of an eagle on top of the librarians stave. I made him up before the new plastic librarian came out, but I think he still looks pretty cool. The captain has magnetised weapons but I haven’t managed to use him in a game at all, he just costs too much compared to the librarian. I also made his back banner out of the top of the force stave and a bit of halberd haft as I wanted him to stand out a little from the justicars.

Purifiers… these are the bane of my fucking life in game and I really need to learn how to use them as they’ve done nothing! Whenever I go to cast cleansing flame it’s like all I can do is roll ones and twos. When the twat does go off I end up rolling 4 hits on 2d6 and doing bugger all. That said, I do like the white helmets as a contrast to the sea of silver in the rest of the army so I’ll keep using them in the vain hope that I roll well one day.

First up as work in progress, the rhino and storm raven. The rhino is almost there, it just needs some highlights and weathering which i’ve been trying to do for about a year now. I gave some freehand a go on the sword and it came out ok, I just found myself in absolute awe of people like Andy Wardle who can put insane detail on the tiniest of areas when I’m struggling with a massive fuck off sword on a flat area.

Last up is Solomon Lok, who I started over a year ago now and I keep chipping away at him when I can be bothered. I want to try some of the techniques i’ve been watching in Painting Bhudda videos since he’s a character but I still haven’t even switched to a wet palette yet so who knows when that’ll happen.

After those I’ve got some more stuff to go like Draigo, purifiers and another dreadknight, but I think I’ll give it rest for a while. I want to get stuck into a Night Lords Horus Heresy army and I’ve also got an Age of Sigmar army to paint as well, so I’ll be juggling those with a small diversion for Frostgrave. But I’ll probably get distracted by something else like Infinity and paint absolutely nothing. Sod it, I’ll just see what happens.