5th Company markings & iconography

The 5th Company has some of the obvious elements captured well in the guides/codex - the single black blood drop as the company marking on vehicles, right shoulder armour on troops... and the squad markings are all defined by squad number standard for each company. But for marking up the banners and some of the captain elements, it might be worth pre-planning what to do and where it might be used...

Banner Design:

Following some various heraldic guides, the 5th company patterning *should* be based on a chequered pattern... at a basic level, dividing the area into 4 squares, or arguably you could do do finer grid of 16 squares, etc. 

I can't remember exactly where I saved this image from, but you'll see it's consistent with the way the 1st, 2nd, 3rd are shown in GW photos of those companies. The bottom line is arguably how the Blood Angels would colour those patterns to reflect the red/yellow system. Tycho has the diagonal stripe (3rd co.); the terminator banner of the 1st has the cross... etc. 

Company Icons: 
The other aspect is having some kind of motif or logo that reflects the specific company spirit/role/whatever... and let's just get it out of the way that the Angel's Blade/codex images have some crappy ones made by using a couple of generic decals on the company banner. 

Teeef over on Bolter & Chainsword threads had done some decent mockups and grabbed the existing 1st/2nd co banners for inspiration (below). The 1st company banner includes the wing & crux; 2nd co ("The Blooded") carries a cup; 3rd co ("Iron Helms") has Tycho's bloody wing; 4th co ("Knights of Baal") teeef added a sword to the wing. 

  
The "Daemonbanes" don't seem to have an existing icon to work with either in fluff or in discussion threads - so I have some creative freedom... albeit, needs to be apt to the character and be suitable on banners/elsewhere. 

I kind of like the idea of doing the wing holding a daemonskull (if anyone remembers the mid-90s ultramarine banners, they had an excellent company banner of sword-through-genestealer-head). 

The other option is to draw some very oldschool inspiration - 1998 codex excerpt below... "each Blood Angels Captain has a unique heraldic device which is reproduced on his left shoulder armour and on his banner". Below the quote is a little image with a chequered background... could this possibly be the personal banner for the 5th company captain?

Very interesting... the skull chalice seems quite fitting for the daemonbanes - it's also symmetrical so I can square it up on the yellow/red quarters of a banner. It can also be... stolen... from 40k bits in kits - eg, using the Baal predator icon for a command/captain tank (below) and there is even a small one on the deathcompany dreadnought armour. These could be worth casting or getting copies of to go into various places.

There are also a set of chalice decals in the BA sheet from Games Workshop (mid-righthand-side). Hell they even come in a few sizes on the sheets if I want to use a little one on a small back-banner or large one on the company standard:

End result:

Shoulder: black blood drop

Banner colours: meph red & averland sunset in quarters

Captain icon: skull chalice (and probably a black drop somewhere)

Vehicle/dreadnought numbers: yellow on vehicles? white on dreadnoughts?

Helmets & squad markings as per BA codex. 

I think that should give something a little more unique and stylised for the company without going too difficult/rogue.