I finally start a Dark Angel army

I finally started a Dark Angel army. Oh, and it's my army this time!

I had done some work on my friend's Dark Angel army over the years and together we came up with a unique paint scheme for them that was sharp, fairly easy and quick to execute. Indeed, I think that the Dark Angels are the fastest models I have ever painted that came out looking the way they do. You can see some of the character models here,

Sometime last year I picked up GW's current paint starter set to try out some of their new reformulated paints and they came with 5 Dark Angels. In fact, if was this starter set that sort of started the ball rolling on rumors at the time the 6th edition starter set for Warhammer 40,000 was going to include Dark Angels, and sure enough that was correct. However these exact models are definitely NOT in that set. And once you hold them up close you quickly see why. They tend to have slight casting distortions on the shoulder pads, unlike the rather crisp quality of the Dark Vengeance models, and for 'plug-and-play' models none of the guns want to stay 'plugged' and they don't want to join properly at the right wrist like they should. GW's painting instructions in the box show the most laughable technique for speed paining I've seen employed on one of their models since the crude techniques they showed for speed painting orcs in the Freebooter's book. The finished product looks dreadful.

So what the heck, I painted them anyway. I just got the new Dark Angel book for my birthday (see the last post) and I wanted to see how fast I could do up a squad of them. I also wanted to find out if I still had both a knack for painting them and more importantly, an interest.



This is the level they were at the mid-coat stage.

Highlighted and pretty much done.

Close up

I am happy to say, at least to my satisfaction, that I have done these models far better justice than the examples in the paint guide that they came with, They still need a few minor touchups mostly involving the gun, and some flock and they will truly be done. Scrutinizing these photos at a bigger size that the real model, I can see a few mistakes that I want to wrestle with, but for the base troops these will work fine as is.

Now my Cypher model has new friends to play with! I'm sure they will get alone well.... ;)

I look forward to painting more, but we'll see if that interest can pull me away from finishing that Orc regiment or not...or Space Wolves...or....*sigh*