The Imperial Fists Primarch-Progenitor, to your glory and the glory of him on earth!

I can't help but notice how old these figures are... oh well, they still do their job. The first five have regular kneepads. The second set of five have a single red kneepad. This allows me to separate the first squad from the second squad in case I want to divide my tactical squad into two different maneuver elements.



I've also decided I'm not doing bloody Imperial Fist decals anymore. The compound curve of the shoulder combined with the circular shape is enough to give me screaming fits. I'm just going to freehand the Chapter Badge from now on.

I've finished retouching my original Imperial Fists HQ choice. Old hands at 40k may recognize the captain as the limited edition one that came with the 3rd edition box sets.

I originally painted them ... sheesh ... 2 editions ago (has it really been 10 years!??!). They used to be in gold armor, I touched them up to make it yellow like the rest of the chapter... except for the Champion. The armor of the Company Champion is still gold. However, I added an Empire plastic shield to my original Emperor's Champion to WYSIWYG the Combat Shield. It's only hot-glued on since eventually I will probably use this fig as my Chapter Champion (with Relic Blade) and do up another fig as the Company Champion.

My 3rd Company Captain is Morgan Wolfe, originally from the sub-isle of Hibernia of the Albia region on Holy Terra. He was elevated to that post following the ascension of Captain Lysander to the 1st Company.

The banners were printed on a color laser printer. I did the art in a vector graphics program (I think it was Adobe Illustrator back then, these days I use Inkscape).



The new edition gives the Command Squad another couple of Veteran marines. Here I was presented with a minor fluff conundrum (mainly because I worry about TO&E structures far too much for my own good). I'll work it out at some point later.

This is the dried (24 hours) result of Minwax Polyshades Pecan Satin over models that have been airbrushed with Reaper Pro Paint Deep Yellow over White Primer. That's it, no other steps to get to this stage.

After they were assembled, primered, and airbrushed I got ready to dip them in assembly line fashion. I did probably about 1800 points of Space Marines in a single afternoon in the garage (only troops, no vehicles or big models like Dreads). Clip, dip, spin, repeat... clip, dip, spin, repeat...



Oh... and since it's December I'm using an old Danish Butter Cookie tin to catch the splatter of the dipping process. A spinning Marine causes a lot of splash.

So I needed to make a modification to the Milk Frother I got from Ikea. I removed the "rings" (just slip them off like a key off a keyring). Then I used greenstuff to attach a disc of plastic that's slightly larger than the size of a normal 1 inch base. In my case I used a film cannister, but styrene or anything fairly stiff but thin will do.



This is to give me a surface to which I can clip the miniature via binder clips. If I try and use the ring by itself, it's much less stable. This step only takes a few minutes to do and pays back the investment of time a hundredfold once you start dipping.



As you can also see I use two binder clips (to balance the spinning miniature).

I went down to the hardware store, Wal-Mart, and Ikea to get a couple of gadgets to help me paint my Imperial Fists.

The item from Ikea is a Milk Frother (at the time I bought it, it was less than 5 dollars. It looks like this (minus the text on the handle).



From Lowe's Hardware store I got Minwax Polyshades Pecan Satin.



From Wal-Mart I got a box of small (3/4 inch) binder clips.



Experienced army painters know where this is going... DIP! Special thanks to The Hogs of War for the idea.

Lyrics - Frontline by Pillar

It's not like I'm walking alone into the valley of the shadow of death
Stand beside one another, 'cause it ain't over yet
I'd be willing to bet that if we don't back down
You and I will be the ones that are holding the Crown in the end

When it's over, we can say, "Well done"
But not yet, 'cause it's only begun
So, pick up, and follow me, we're the only ones
To fight this thing, until we've won.

We drive on and don't look back
It doesn't mean we can't learn from our past
All the things that we mighta done wrong
We could've been doing this all along

Chorus:
Everybody, with your fists raised high
Let me hear your battle cry tonight
Stand beside, or step aside
We're on the frontline

Repeat Chorus

And we'll be carrying on, until the day it doesn't matter anymore
Step aside, you forgot what this is for
We fight to live, we live to fight
And tonight, you'll hear my battle cry

We live our lives on the frontlines
We're not afraid of the fast times
These days have opened up my eyes
And now, I see where the threat lies

Chorus twice

Instrumental Bridge

We've got to lead the way! (twice)

Chorus (three times)

A friend of mine decided that he no longer wanted to have his Black Templars (and Blood Angels Devastator squad) sitting around in boxes and gave them to me. So, these Black Templars will join my original Imperial Fist command squad box I painted in the late 90s.

Here they are being (re)primered and airbrushed with Reaper Pro Paint 19013 Deep Yellow. The airbrush is my trusty Badger 150, a classic but still a champion.



As near as I can rough estimate, he gave me about 2000 points of Space Marines! Wow!!!