WIP: Dark Angels (just for fun)

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Angels librarian

In the absence of much to show for the weekend just gone, I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the items already on my display shelves. This post will feature a few models from the Dark Angels range, specifically the ones included in the Dark Vengeance starter set for Warhammer 40,000. For those who don't know, Dark Vengeance is a 'complete' boxed game containing all the rules, templates and dice you need to play Warhammer 40,000, along with two very small armies: Dark Angels and Chaos Space Marines. It was one of the last sets released where virtually everything in it was exclusive to the set. I use the word 'complete' loosely as the armies are very small and to play anything decent, you'd still need to buy more models and the Codex (an additional supplemental rulebook tailored to a specific faction) for your army. I bought purely it for the models...

The librarian above was painted over a number of sessions, mostly while I was working on other things and waiting for them to dry. Like most of my miniatures, it's not intended to be of an award-winning standard and was more of a fun aside to work on every now and again. I've always liked Dark Angels space marines but never collected to them. To date the models I have for them consist primarily of those found in the Dark Vengeance boxed set. It's perhaps ironic that the thing I like most about the army is the dark green of their armour given that, of the few models I've painted, most feature very little, if anything of it. Regardless of the space marine chapter they're part of, librarians, for example, almost always wear blue.

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Angels Death Wing terminators

Another couple of models I've painted for this chapter are these Deathwing terminators. The Deathwing are the Dark Angels' elite. As such, they don't wear the green armour either, favouring a much lighter bone colour. I opted for a much darker hue than most, given that I want my Dark Angels (few as they are) to remain dark. These ones were also an experiment in painting quickly. The bulk of the work is done with dry-brushing with the details painted in afterwards over the course a couple of hours. The two featured above are identical models painted at roughly the same time (one had a slight head start but the other caught up by the end). So far they represent all the work I've done on the full five-man squad. As you can see, the dry-brushing is a little rough in places: this was an early experiment with the technique, which I've since refined.

I have a couple of other Dark Angels in the standard scheme that I may visit in future. I'd love to finish painting all of them at some point, but there's quite a queue ahead of them...