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Tactical Squad Vantas || Marines Malevolent, 2nd Company || Third War for Armageddon
Tactical Squad Serket || Marines Malevolent, 2nd Company || Third War for Armageddon
The core of any firstborn Space Marine army is the humble tactical marine, so it's only logical that I'd end up with a squad or two! Part of my goal for this army was to paint some 'true-scale' MKVII armoured marines. I built them out of a variety of 3d printed parts, as well as some plastic bits that had been lurking in my bits box for a while, including the original Space Marine Heroes blind box minis in their dashing red plastic. It was a lot of fun to incorporate classically "40k" elements into these designs like purity seals, back banners and loin cloths - things I don't really do for my heresy-era marines.
All of the MKVII and MKV printed elements were designed by Maocha Minis, and were one of the main reasons I even made this force. I also mixed in some of DMS Miniature's MKIV bodies, and a MKVIII torso by Red Warden Miniatures. The heavy stubber was modelled by Scavvon. I searched around for a lot of different fan made MKVII heads, but I couldn't really find anything I liked, so all of the heads here are official plastic ones.
Painting was fairly straightforward, following my usual yellow recipe of a white zenithal prime, followed by Citadel Bad Moonz Yellow (and Phallanx Yellow for touch ups), ProAcryl Black Brown for chipping, then a varnish and oil wash. For the bases, I used some of the cool sculpted ones from the Space Marine Heroes blind boxes that I'd been holding on to for a while. I like how they look, but now if I want more it'll be annoying to find a good match…
Feeling a little inspired from all of the Marines Malevolent fiction I had just read over the previous month, I had a bit of fun personalising each marine. One beakie features a cartoony shark tooth grin on his helmet, while another is wearing a black skull print - both inspired by descriptions in Nick Kyme's Salamander. One marine is wielding a heavy bolter decorated with the 'veteran' hazard stripes that were shown in the original Index Astartes artwork. My favorite model might be the one astartes who's opted for a heavy stubber instead of a bolter, just like the one who appears in Devil's Trappings.
I'm pretty pleased with how these two squads turned out, especially compared to the Primaris infantry I painted in this scheme the year before. Only 10 basic marines still feels a bit light on the infantry, so I think in the future I'd like to do another batch that fleshes these out to two 10 man units. But I'll worry about that in the future, lol. Next up will be a bit more heavy support for the army!!
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