Celestial Lions Kill Team (part 1)

Kill Team has brought to me the opportunity to work on my secondary and/or tertiary 40k armies. These are armies that I want to build and do something with, but my primary armies always tend to take up my time and focus instead. With my Dark Eldar Kabalite Warriors Kill Team finished it was time to dig in the toy box for the next one.

I settled on the Celestial Lions. This is an army I have talked about doing for years. The idea would be that it would be a small Codex Space Marines army that would let me play with the stuff my Space Wolves couldn't use. As well as allow me to broaden my paint palette (way too much green, gray, red and black in my armies!). I was about to embark on building this army when my brother decided he was over 40k and sold his Ultramarines to me.

The first Celestial Lion model I ever painted was this guy:

Don't be afraid, 'e's 'armless!

And yes, he isn't done. He was a test model for the color scheme, just to see if my fast method for painting this army would work. I was satisfied with it and it turns out that right around this time a local store (The Maelstrom, for those that recall it) held a painting competition and I cranked out a Celestial Lions Terminator Captain. You can see him on the Other Armies page. Other than defending the notion of ever doing this army from the relentless taunts of Da Masta Cheef, until now that's all I ever managed to do with the Celestial Lions.

Here they are in the state they have been in for years:

Vet. SGT. 

The Veteran Sergeant was a weird experiment when I built him. For those that don't know the story of the Celestial Lions, they first appeared in the 3rd War for Armageddon Codex that came out in support of the summer campaign of 2000. They got barely a mention in the codex, but the supporting web site provided an illustration and brief history which stated that their entire Chapter had been sent to the war after pissing off the Inquistion. And after a series of coincidental battlefield misfortunes they had been wiped out down to less than a company's strength by the Orks. It was this rag-tag group that I originally, and ambitiously, had hoped to model up. This Vet. Sgt has a grot tied to his trophy pole. Not sure why, I guess war does strange things to a guy after a while...?

Grot prisoner/trophy.

The next 3 guys were probably intended to be bolter troops. For reasons that I can't explain I had never readied arms or weapons for these guys. Otherwise they were mostly done.

Ready to be armed.

So today the project was renewed. The first step was to expand their bases using Secret Weapon conversion rings.

Afixing the extensions -one half at a time.

Next, I used greenstuff to fill in the joins. Then I glued on the grit for their bases.

Slathering on the glue!

While the bases were drying I decided to finish the grot. He had been dabbled on over the years usually because I was working on other green skins and had left over paint on the brush and he was still on my modeling station. But today I completely finished his skin tones.

Skin tones completed.

 After this I finshed off their bases, primed their arms and began selecting their weapons. I scoured the internet looking for examples others have done and for some iconography ideas. But I'll talk more about that in part 2 (which hopefully won't take another decade to accomplish!).

The progress so far.