WIP: Imperial Fists tactical squad (Heresy era)

Horus Heresy: Imperial Fists space marines in MkIII 'Iron' armour

Reviewing my finished models for January didn't take long. I finished one. One solitary Blood Angel. I did a fair amount of painting, especially early in the month while I was still on holiday from work, but most of it tended to be either little bits on a variety of projects or quite a lot focused on my (still unfinished) Imperial Knight. Well, it's February now, so it's time to make a dent on the targets I set at the start of the year. Let's start with some Imperial Fists.

I've been waiting a while for Forge World to release the sculpted shoulder pads for the Imperial Fists legion. I hate using transfers on shoulder pads and the legion symbol is too complicated paint consistently by hand. After waiting for a couple of years, they finally released them in December. In that time I've gathered a handful of models but I've been waiting for the shoulder pads before I really got to work on them. The models above represent the first four models for my first tactical squad. The one on the left was actually painted when the models were first released (before Forge World's Horus Heresy range was actually a thing—these being the MkIII iron armour versions, rather than the 'legion' equivalents). The rest have only just been finished, though the third one was mostly done late last year as a test for my updated paint scheme.

These two are the ones I can reasonably claim to have painted this year. The one on the right includes a legion vox, effectively a communication link. Unlike Warhammer 40,000, where tactical squads can have five to ten models, in the Horus Heresy, they have ten to twenty. I'm not planning on building full squads of twenty at this stage, but I have enough models now to finish this squad of ten and build another like it. My goal this year is to get as many of them done as possible. Any motivational suggestions welcome...