Ultramarines, 3rd Company

Above are the Sergeant, Flamer and Missile Launcher marines from the Warhammer 40k- "Battle for Macragge" starter set. The units from the set are premolded making them cheaper, not as detailed and a bit trickier to paint than the standard models that you assemble. These guys are done to the point I am going to dullcote them, they wont win any awards, but they are surely table top quality for gaming.

Note in the left photo my 1st attempt at blended highlighting on the armor edges, basically I used a thinned out lighter color made the lines, then came back with an even thinner mix of the original color and covered the highlighted line edge. This makes a smooth looking blended transition, I dont think it came out bad for my first real shot at.





To the right you can see my homing becon and some hand painted tactical insignias. Working with the decals, despite reading several tutorials on it and buying some pricey decal solvent, turned out to be a nightmare. The number "3" on the flamethrower marine's leg is a decal despite using all the proper steps you can still see the decal edge. For me, free hand painting is the way to go. I spent about 4 hours practicing doing the Ultramarines symbol on a piece of wood. Once I got it down, the next problem was working on making them all the same size. Again I think they came out pretty decent a few look better than any of the test decals I tried. example the Missile Launcher Marine below is probably my best one, while on the Bolter Marine to the right you can see another one with a blemish I somehow didn't notice until this pic. I'll need to fix that, thanks to the pro's and con's of your digital camera's super macro function. The background terrain is made from pink stuff foam and some broken clay tiles left over from remodeling my bathroom, Its primed with flat black krylon, then drybrushed with a reaper paint called "woodland brown', then I dust spray it with some auto motive gray Krylon. *Presto* quicky paint job equals dusty rocky alien planet. I have four nice pieces of terrain done. I will get around to detailing them some more eventually, but right now they are ready for play as is. With all the terrain from the crashed spaceship in the Macragge set, I could set up a 6x4, or 8 x4 table easily.
Next up- the rest of the Macragge tactical squad and my first Rhino armored personal carrier. I will also try to post some of my reaper fantasy mini's as soon as I get some decent pics.