Terminators: Pinning & Priming

Having tidied away the sector imperialis boards, I'm back to working on small(ish) minis again. I have 3 squads of terminators ready to prime up.

Since last post, I've cleaned up a terminator librarian and added a reworked Karlaen model which will become an ancient/standard bearer. The librarian has been magnetised in the right wrist so that the combi bolter can be swapped for either a storm bolter or an open hand.

The ancient will have the left arm permanently attached. I thought about making this magnetic as well, but the weight of the full arm and banner makes that less of an option. 

I've kept most of the heads in a 'neutral' position (facing towards the front) for the terminator squads - I figure since all the arms are interchangeable, it's better to have them all facing ahead rather than posed to look over one shoulder (and then having certain arms look out of place). 

The cyclone launchers *seem* to be ok... these are sitting on some very small magnets and embedded under the plastic torsos, so their pull strength isn't great. They won't stand up to much movement, however cyclone launchers shouldn't be moving around a game board too much either. 

Finally... I went around and took pictures of exactly which bases have been fitted to which body. While somewhat OCD, painting them separately makes painting around the legs, robes and ribbons much easier. I just need to be able to find the right base later on so having a photo record helps. 

Onto priming. All the marines are on paint pots, while the 50+ bits of gear are on pegs or sticks. 

Everything (well except the librarian) gets hit with a vallejo german red primer. The bases will get a black undercoat, followed by a layer of leadbelcher through the airbrush. Leadbelcher air made the sector imperialis boards an awful lot faster to paint - using it while the airbrush is setup will be a lot quicker than mucking around with brushes later. 

Over the top of the dark primer, I then add some vallejo light grey primer (which is pretty close to white). This makes everything look like snow, and gives some brighter areas for the mephiston red spray to stick to. 

I probably should have taken a few more pictures of the terminator bodies getting sprayed red, however it's pretty much exactly the same as what I've done with several squads of marines already. The one extra touch that I added with the airbrush was to work up some colours on the lightning claw arms. 

These have been sprayed gently with a dark blue/black colour, then a mid tone blue and finally a tiny hint of white at the tips. The result is less polished than doing these with layers of paint by hand, however are much much faster. 

Everything then gets a recess wash with agrax earthshade. 

Probably the most tedious part of the painting process is then next - blocking out base colours for a number of areas, which for marines will be armour ribbing, raised details and metallics. What makes this stage annoying is the need to be careful with each brush stroke, which includes often painting the sides of raised details, and (depending on the colour) may involve going over the area a few times. 

Leadbelcher covers the silver really well, but colours like dawnstone will need 2-3 coats (these grey areas will get washed back with black to look more like a gently highlighted black). 

I also remembered to dig out the objective marker from Space Hulk to paint at the same time. Like the Blood Angels terminator kit bodies, he also happens to have a *lot* of raised details that need some attention. Plenty of Zandri dust base colour for robes, parchment etc. 

Individually, none of these take a huge amount of time, but this will add up over a few painting sessions. While each colour might only take a few minutes to add in, it will likely need 1-2 more passes to firm the colour up, then move onto next colour... then multiply by 16 other models. 

So... slightly boring and repetitive steps ahead - I'll come back with some more progressed terminators soon, as well as a look at the rather cool resin bases they will be housed on.