Terminators: Bodies & Basing

Since I magnetised all my terminator arms, I figured that it will be best to do the bodies and bases first; that way I will be able to attach sets of arms onto the completed bodies later to make painting easier. I've done these from the ground up. Bases & bodies first, with arms and attachments to come in a later post. 

I pretty much always do my bases separate to models then pin them together once painted. In the case of these ones for the terminators, that was probably the only option anyway, particularly for painting hazard stripes that would otherwise be impossible to get to once the model is glued in place.

Most of the MAS bases actually make the stripes really easy, with a textured/cut set of stripes modelled into them. There were 1-2 that I ended up doing some freehand stripes on instead; which always seem to take longer than I expect... 

With the bases done, it's onto the minis themselves. Usually the more time consuming (and slightly tedious) part of painting blood angels is blocking out gold, leadbelcher, black and grey parts carefully on top of the red. 

With those colours added in, highlighting the red armour is actually kind of fun, if time consuming. Going around the edges with evil sunz scarlet and a thin highlight of panzer aces wood brings the depth up and feels like a lot it's getting closer to finished. 

As with most parts of army painting... the individual models don't take huge amounts of time, but done across 17 models just adds up over a few days. 

With the red armour finished up, there are still several details to add - green eyes and lenses, gems (on the ones that have BA bling), and purity seals.  

The space hulk objective terminator is getting a matching paint job. It has a disturbingly large number of gems, icons and decorations. 

With all the armour highlighting and most of the finer details done, I peel these off the blutac to finish up the purity seals & parchment. Several of these are underneath or lower parts of the model so getting access to them is easier when unattached.

I still have the bits of paperclip from when test fitting the models (pre paint job), and these will be used to firm up the bases. I sometimes use a single paperclip in 1 leg, but with the extra heft of these and the magnetised arms being pulled around a bit all of the terminators will get 2x pins. 

Quite sensibly... I took lots of photos of the bases and minis during construction, which makes it much easier to match the right base to the right model. 

Quick round with superglue and these are all in place. Hardest part was just clipping a couple of pins to the exact size. These look like they will be pretty home in a set of space hulk corridors, but equally the grey & metal features on the bases look like they are still part of my overall blood angels city theme. 

Space hulk objective marker finished as well. I feel like he could probably do with a little roughing up or damage; this will definitely do for now. 

Over the next couple of weeks I'm hoping to finish up the various loadouts. That's 5 pairs of claws, 5 hammer/shield combos, 10 bolters, 4 heavy weapons and 14 fists. With those out of the way, the last thing to do for my terminator group will be a certain chief librarian.