Painting: Space Marines (Space Crusade)

Here’s my three squads of Space Marines from the Space Crusade board game finally completed. Blood Angels (red), Imperial Fist (yellow) and Ultramarines (blue). I started painting figures from the game about two years ago, getting onto the space marines in October last year.

Each squad has three marines with bolters, one marine with a heavy weapon and a commander. The heavy weapons (assault cannon, missile launcher or plasma gun) and commanders weapons (heavy bolter, bolt pistol & power axe, or power glove & power sword) are interchangeable and I’ve had to do some careful filing to make sure they are less likely to get stuck together and break. (The ones that aren’t already broken that is.) For the images, I’ve made sure that I picked something different for each squad.

The plasma gun is meant to have a bright coppery-gold muzzle, but it looks quite yellow in the image, so I’ll go over it again tomorrow with bright bronze.

The special weapons were very fiddly to paint, and I wasn’t as concerned with spending as much time on them as I did with the marines themselves. As board game pieces, they will all go back into the game box soon. Everything in the box except for the orcs and gretchen have now been painted, and I have no intention of painting them. I started this because some of the pieces I could use in my Gamma World game (and have) and the marines deserve to be done if my friends and I ever decide to play again.

Last, but not least, here’s an orc who should have been painted back in Sept 2018 when I did orcs and goblins. He’s a bit paler than his brethren because he’s apparently been hiding with my skaven for at least a decade. The marines and the orc all qualify for Ann’s March painting challenge – Neglected but not forgotten!

Here’s a group shot of all the Space Crusade pieces that I’ve now painted.

Painting Chaos Warriors (GW Space Crusade)

After painting my Genestealers, I got my Chaos Warriors ready from ‘Space Crusade’. At this rate, I may end up painting the Space marines too!

The five figures – three standard warriors, one with a heavy weapon, and a commander were all simple black plastic. The three marine squads in the game are blue, red and yellow. I didn’t want black painted figures. I wanted the detail on these figures (which is quite good for a board game) to be noticeable, and decided on green as a contrast to the actual marines.

Space Crusade is the closest I’ve ever come to playing anything Warhammer 40,000, though I have read a fair number of novels. So, I don’t really know (or care much) about chapters and colours. Oddly enough, a little bit of digging on the web turned up a renegade chapter of chaos space marines with a basic colour matching what I was planning on. (Green isn’t a popular colour apparently, and I only found two separate posts with painted figures.)

The Children of Purgatos: Their Power Armour is painted emerald green trimmed with gold. They often decorate their armour with images of golden flames projecting from their armour’s golden trim. A renegade Chapter of Chaos Space Marines of unknown Founding and origin, that was declared Excommunicate Traitoris for reasons that are not listed in Imperial records.

I could have tried hand detailing flames on armour plates, but as it is I’ve spent a lot of time on them over a week and I’m very pleased with the results.

 

Painting Genestealers (GW Space Crusade)

Back in 1990, Games Workshop got together with Milton Bradley and released ‘Space Crusade’: a Warhammer 40K inspired board game for 2-4 players. While it’s possible that I bought it myself, I think it’s more likely that it was a birthday or christmas gift. I have played it quite a bit, and enjoyed it, and often thought about painting the space marines. It has mostly been collecting dust most of the last decade until I started raiding the box for various figures to use in my Gamma World game.

Both the Dreadnought and androids (Necrons) have been painted and appeared on my blog in the past. Recently Dave brought a You-tube video to his readers attention that involved painting genestealers in five different styles. This promptly got my genestealers located and put on my desk to paint. I was disappointed to find I only had three! (I haven’t lost any pieces; the game only comes with three.) I had hoped for five or six so I could follow two of the paint schemes.

 

I started with a basic ultramarine blue as a base coat, and then mixed a purple into that and went back over most of the model. A mix of flesh & purple on the head, hands, feet, and the ribbed bits on back, legs, arms, etc. Still following the video, a lightly watered down light tone (Army Painter ink), some (slightly lighter) blue highlighting, and gun-metal on the claws instead of a dark grey. Fushia for the tongue and head detail, white teeth and eyes, followed by a spot of red. I did highlight most of the claws with a bit of mid-grey (which is visible, though not obvious from the photo), and a lighter pink on the top of the fingers – which appears after drying not to have been light enough to actually stand out. Some of the blue highlighting isn’t particularly noticable either, so next time I try this I need to go even lighter, or simply do a second round with more white mixed in. I’m very happy with the final look in any case.

I’ve got the chaos marines from the set on my desk now too. A few of the people (thanks again Dave!) I follow have been using “the Tray” as a way of storing works-in-progress and a visible plan of what they want to paint in the “near” future. The figures I plan to paint, normally just sit on my desk. I’m thinking a tray of some sort will both encourage me to complete some figures, and stop me having to move the figures on my desk around when I need to take photographs, have books on the desk as I look up rules, or write adventures, etc, or my wife wants to take over part of the desk. A tray can be picked up entire and moved out of the way more easily than individual figures.

So here’s the tray – or what will be the tray once I actually find or make one:

A Mechanical Challenge for November

These five figures all come from my “Space Crusade” board game by Milton Bradley/Games Workshop (1990). I played this quite a lot after getting it, but it hasn’t been touched for a decade (at least). I’ve often thought about painting all the space marines in the game, and I’ve drafted different pieces (particularly the Chaos Marines) into various D&D adventures in the past.

My recent Gamma World game involved a crashed spaceship and I used the dreadnought as one of the ships internal defences. Putting the figure on the board got a good response from my players! I would have liked to have been painted on game day, but there hadn’t been enough time to do that. Azazel’s November Mechanical Challenge seemed the perfect reason to paint it anyway, so I’ve spent most of the last week working on it and four Necrons.

The necrons have never been used outside of the board game that I recall, but they’ll make good basic robots for Gamma World. They have been quick and easy to paint too. After spray undercoating they got a quick grey base coat, then gun metal, and black ink. I’ve brushed silver over the top of most of the surface and some copper for wiring and fluoro green in the eye sockets. Also a bit of white over the skull faces. If I were to do them again, I might go for a much lighter grey base coat so that the gun metal isn’t so dark. I didn’t want them bright shiny silver, but they did turn out darker than planned. A second coat of a different silver did help with this though.

The chaos dreadnought got the same basic treatment – white spray undercoat, grey base coat, then gun metal over legs and weapons. Red over the main carapace (and gold trim), with green and bronze on wiring, etc. White on the nose, then thorough black ink over everything.

Chaos dreadnought with missile launcher and plasma cannon

Dreadnought – rear.

I touched up the green wiring to brighten it a little, and more white on the nose. Then hints of gold and copper on some components and some black and silver to darken or lighten different parts of the legs, back and undercarriage. The three weapons (for the upper “arms’) are interchangeable, and I haven’t glued them in order to still be able to swap them in and out. They should get a spray varnish this afternoon.

Dreadnought – Chain gun in place of plasma cannon.

I’m very pleased with how these came out. I suppose there’s still hope for the space marines!