Recently I finished up another model/unit for my Imperial Guard Astra Militarum:

Who wants some?!

These pictures aren’t perfect, they’re a little dark, but I’m super happy with how this guy turned out. What I’m most pleased with is that the posing is pretty dynamic for a walker. It was a little fiddly to hold everything at the desired angles while also gluing the joints, but the whole leg assembly is really posable and the feet and cab are on ball joints so there was a lot of room to play.

Whoa, buddy, hold ‘er steady!

This was super fast to paint, and it came out simple but effective. I couldn’t come up with a two-tone vehicle scheme to match my Forest Guard infantry pattern that I was happy with, so I went with straight brown. In the end I think it’ll go well with the duders while also standing out from them, is more realistic than a two-tone, isn’t green or gray like GW’s demo models tend toward, and was easy to do. The core process was basically:

• Primer: Army Painter white spray
• Body: Steel Legion Drab base coat x2, Vermin Brown drybrush (this color name is no longer produced by GW), Agrax Earthshade wash
• Metal bits: Leadbelcher base, Mithril silver drybrush highlights, Nuln Oil wash
• Rubble: Skavenblight Dinge base coat x2, Codex Grey drybrush, Bleached Bone base & Skull White drybrush for the ossuary skeletons and skull, all washed with Nuln Oil
• Base: Vermin Brown base coat, several coats along the outer rim

The Vermin Brown drybrush all over the body was heavier than I meant it to be and made the model a little lighter in color than I was originally thinking, but introduced some nice subtle colorations, particularly after the wash. On some of the larger panels it has a really neat sun-faded effect (hard to see in the photos).

Unfortunately I must have let too much matte sealer spray coat collect in some places because the colors shifted and muted a bit in places, particularly the metals. Some of the finer details also frosted over a bit. It’s particularly noticeable around the skulls on the weapons. Didn’t affect the cab too much though, and won’t be noticeable at all on the tabletop.

The rubble served two purposes: It let me build up a little height to give the body more of a loping, firing-on-the-move cant, and let me introduce a block of dark grey to subtly further connect the model visually with the Forest Guard infantry two-tone.

To the left!

To the right!

The weapon side of the cab is magnetized, and I have both a plasmacannon and a lascannon ready to go.

You feelin’ lucky, punk?!

A lascannon on a BS3 chassis. Yep, that’ll scare ’em.

Painting my Guard has been really fun so far, as long as I totally ignore how few points are getting done with each session. I’ve consciously worked to keep the painting process simple and to be a bit faster and less obsessive than I had been on my Kingbreakers. That’s paid dividends as I’ve then let loose a bit on those Marines as well and they are also now getting done faster, with no true consequences on the quality. Having this other small force going also helps a lot with the monotony of doing millions of shoulder pad trims, definitely the part I hate most about Space Marines. Not doing any hard edging or highlights, and having two core colors (brown body + gray armor) rather than four (tan legs, blue torso, green arms, red trim) makes quite a refreshing change in switching to the Guard for a bit. The Forest Guard also look quite different from my Kingbreakers, though they work together pretty well visually.

More to come!