Serpents of Hellfire: Call to Arms

Old friend came by last week. As we were talking about hobby stuff (40K mostly), it turned out that he had grown he´s Tyranid army up to respectable 1500 points. I also have some Space Marines laying around, but I have never put them together in a proper army form. I like to paint and convert them, and even have my own successor chapter of Dark Angels called "Serpents of Hellfire" (check out the older postings), but it´s been kind of a background project for a long time now. I´ve allways been more of a WHFB player... but maybe this is gonna change now :). We decided to arrange a game for 1500 points armies in a near future, so every now and then I´ll be posting about what I´ve put together for the Marines.

In inspiration of this, I kitbashed together a Vanguard unit from pieces of Dark Angel veterans, Space Marine Tactical Squad, and Space Wolfs...

Mini in the middle is very old stuff... It was in the "Chapter Master" competition early 2000(ish)... And after that I´ve  painted my Marines and Terminators with almost the same manner. Now I took a whole new angle to the painting. First of all, I left the dry brushing off. I painted a very dark under coat and made high lighting pretty stong... to the level of blazing orange. Finally I added some flame patterns to the minis armours and cloaks. First I was afraid to make them look like Hot Rod cars... but I think that didn´t happen here :D I´m happy with the new "Hellfires", and they were pretty fast to paint this way.

Here´s a pic of what I got together so far from my mini cupboard... Still lots of stuff in there to glue together :)

Some of the HQ personnel, two tactical squads of ten, 5 Vanguards, 5 Sternguards, 5Terminators (gonna skip the Cyclone I think), 5 Devastators and the Dread... I hope Santa´s gonna get me some heavy support in form of vehicles... And bikers would be nice :) Bye for now!