Creating a better Ultramarine. Part 3. Assault marines continued.

I've been doing some work on my assault marines, and like I wrote about previously the first thing I did was mix the parts up from the sets I was using, they'd look too uniform if one squad had all the Sanguinary Guard and the other had none. Here's the results of what I ended up with...

At this stage as I was pondering where to go next with them I thought 'but anyone could do this and end up with the same result'. Out came the bits boxes. The boon of having hobby ADD is that my collection of unused parts is rather vast. I have a separate container for each force, and after much rummaging I found quite a few bits that I wanted to use. There's obviously still a few weapon swaps to do, changing some of the blades to chainswords and stuff, but that'll come during the next stage, mold line removal and taking off all the BA iconography, can't wait for that!

For the bases, my friend Dean recently introduced me to the concept of cork. I've been having a play around with it and it's awesome stuff. I still need to take it a step further and grab some polyfiller and some thin wire to sink into it as pipes. Then I need to investigate snow effects. I bought a tub of GW snow flock ages ago but it doesn't really do the trick. After that it's a light sprinkling of Necron parts perhaps, they'll have been fighting on Damnos, but it might make them look a bit amateur, what do you guys think?

The next thing I'll need to consider is battle damage and dirt. I've never done that to my minis before, but I'm already planning to do it on my heresy army. At the moment I'm thinking that I'll avoid things like chipping, but will add some weathering powders around the legs, and a soot effect around exhausts and things. The other thing to look at is the paint job. Because I'll have spent so much time building these guys I feel the paint job needs to be suitably epic to match. I don't currently have an airbrush, but want to try my hand at some OSL effects on them in places like the coils on the plasma pistols and on the vents of the jet packs. Any advice on how to achieve this with a regular brush would be greatly appreciated!

I'm hoping that in my next post of the series I'll have each of them built and primed, although that really depends on the horrible Welsh weather letting me get outside for  long enough! See you soon...