Dark Angels WIP

[Jonas]

I need to paint a second squad of Terminators for Space Hulk and even though they really should be Blood Angels too (at least untill the Death Wing expansion), I have chosen to paint them as Dark Angels. Mostly because it will be easier to identify the two squads when having more than one player on the Terminator side of the game.

My first Space Marine army was an Epic Space Marine Dark Angels army. When I later moved on to 40K I painted a few Dark Angels, but quickly moved over to Blood Angels.

Lately I have been thinking that I don't really want to only have Blood Angels Space Marines and I did paint some World Eaters too. So basically I want to have the larger army of Blood Angels for gaming 2nd edition and other games which recure larger amount of miniatures, but for skirmish and such I will paint up some of the metal Marines in different chapter colours. Either single minis or small units.

These Dark Angels Terminators will fit in nicely with a small side project of Dark Angels Marines. I am painting them black of course.


Test figure WIP.


Hazard stripes and stone Crux Terminatus (of course).


Free hand Dark Angels logo.

I found that the hazard striped power fist was clashing in colours with the red casing on the storm bolter, so I decided to bring on some more colour to the model. So I did the free hand Dark Angels logo, I think it turned out really good.

The red logo with yellow border makes him look really old school in my eyes. To me the red logos/letter with red border is the most Rogue Traderish colour combination possible.

I still think the bolter and power fist is clashing, but it helps. I was thinking of painting checkers on the storm bolter, but for now I leave it like that. I might try it on one of the other Terminators though.

He is WIP of course, so highlights and such will be smoothed out a bit before he is done. But if anyone has any suggestion for bringing the colours a bit more together I am open to suggestions.

[hubbabubba]

Nice looking fig and the free hand is cool, but......

I don't mean to be a pedantic pain in the arse, but even under Rogue trader law, the terminators of the Dark Angels have always been an off white colour.

Of course their your figs so you can paint them any way you like

Once again, nice free hand.

(I know, I'm a pedantic pain in the arse )

[Jonas]

You are wrong!



They used to be black, back when Dark Angels was black. It changed with the Death Wing expansion to Space Hulk. Then they painted their armor with ashes and the Death Wing became white. Later again they changed to bone.

I will probably paint a squad of white Death Wing terminators later too, but no bone terminators 

[Argonor]

I originally chose the Dark Angels as my chapter after buying the Space Hulk game, because they were black, and wasn't one of the 4 mostly exposed chapters (Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Ultramarines, and... Salamanders). Citadels dark green colour was even called Salamander Green back then. Guess what then happened next.... 

Nice to see some black termies for a change!

[Daeothar]

Nice; you are dead right about the colour scheme of course. Back in the time when the Primarch was still called Lyyn Elgonsen! 

My first Space Marine army was a box of beakies; Dark Angels, all painted in glorious enamel black, with red transfers. I do believe the white border around the chapter logo can be traced back to the discoloured edges of said transfers. At least in my case they could...

Ah, the memories...  

[warburton]

I am painting them black of course.

Of course! What else?

Brilliant work. 

[Jonas]

Thanks.

Hopefully I will have the complete squad ready before the weekend.

[hubbabubba]

 
I stand corrected.
Your geek law is stronger than mine

[Suber]

That is so lovely! Oldskool seal of approval! The freehand is really cool, I'd love to see the rest of the Squad.

[Jonas]

I stand corrected.
Your geek law is stronger than mine

Thanks, I think 

That is so lovely! Oldskool seal of approval! The freehand is really cool, I'd love to see the rest of the Squad.

I would love to see it too, hopefully I can show it soon. I have a day alone today, so if I manage to paint instead of browsing through the internet all day I should be almost there.

 

[Major_Gilbear]

Nice colour scheme, although he looks a bit grey! Is he a re-paint?

As for colours... Originally, DA were all black, yes. However, the change to dark green occurred during RT though, so if you want to have dark green DA, that's okay and is still considered "RT-era".

The Deathwing also changed to white (which gradually changed into a bone colour over subsequent revisions) after Bill King's story for the Space Hulk expansion "Deathwing" (which also introduces the motif of feathers into the DW heraldry, along with their broken sword version of the chapter badge). Original box artwork:



In fluff terms... There were a lot of changes over the years, and I won't list them all here. Basically though, once the "First Founding" chapters were all properly established (following a revision to determine Space Marines as what we recognise them as today), the colour schemes of some were changed in order to differentiate them a bit more.

Also, the Salamanders were originally more of a dark blue-green rather than just the dark green that the DA would later use.

For anyone who is interested, the original Beakey painting guide can be found here, and there are some modern pictures of the old marines that appear in that guide here (where you can see the colours better).

Anyway, apologies for the slight hijack.  

[Jonas]

Hello.

The terminator looks grey since I still need to fix the highlights and al. He is only WIP still. Also the pictures are not the best. But hopefully the end result will look more black and less grey.

No problem about sharing more info on the subject.

To be honest, I was pretty sure that the reason why they changed from black to green was a wrong caption under a picture of a Salamanders marine. But I am not 100% sure about the story. It sounds plausible though, since they deffinatley made many wrong captions back in the days.

BTW, if anyone know the right symbol for being equiped with storm bolter or power first I would be happy to hear it. The RT book only shows symbols for bolter and heavy bolter.

[Daeothar]

I don't know if there ever were specific symbols for Powerfists and Stormbolters on Powerarmoured Marines. I know there are several symbols for Terminator-only weapons such as the Chainfist. there might well be additional symbols for the PF and SB. those were not in the RT book, but in either the Compendium or the Compilation (yellow and red book respectively).

When I get home tonight I'll look them up and scan them for you.

[Jonas]

I actually just looked through those two books myself. I didn't look specifically for the symbols, but was searching for images of Dark Angels.

I will look again 

[Major_Gilbear]

Looking forward to seeing him complete. 

A good tip I still use when painting black is to mix it 50/50 with a dark blue - that way, as you highlight it, it looks richer and less grey. When you're all done including the highlighting, glaze it with a 50/50 blue/black ink mix and a little water, letting it dry for a few hours between coats until you get it to the correct look. (In fact, I got that tip from Mike McVey's articles in WD when painting the original Rogue Trader Blood Angels studio army waaay back!) 

To be honest, I was pretty sure that the reason why they changed from black to green was a wrong caption under a picture of a Salamanders marine. But I am not 100% sure about the story. It sounds plausible though, since they deffinatley made many wrong captions back in the days.

I've heard that story too, along with the variant that a big batch of paint (not a picture in the magazine) was all wrongly labelled Dark Angels Green instead of Salamander Green, and so GW just went with it rather than trying to re-label it. I'm not sure what the actual reason was, and whether either of those stories is even true.

In either case, there was clearly a lot of shuffling around of the colours and chapter names to arrive at the currently-known 18 First Founding chapters, and I suspect that having lots of chapters that are mostly black was probably considered confusing and limiting.

I suspect that lots of the symbols and markings were also dropped because they were hard to paint, hard for the artists to get correct in all the artwork, and detracted from the overall "army look" once you got more than a few squads together.

BTW, if anyone know the right symbol for being equiped with storm bolter or power first I would be happy to hear it. The RT book only shows symbols for bolter and heavy bolter.

I'm not sure that all the weapons were even covered, and certainly I doubt they were covered for all armour types. I think markings of this type were dropped before they were all "catalogued", but I might well be wrong there. I think that Daeothar is likely right in saying that they covered the Terminators with those weapons, but not Power-armoured troopers. To me that makes sense, since Terminators didn't have regular marine weapons, and regular Marines didn't have Terminator weapons (and characters who could have whatever weapons they liked had their own personal heraldry anyway).