The Big Knights

[Will Vale]

Hi folks,

 

Following on from my earlier Imperial Knights I've finished two larger versions - these are both the Cerastus Knight Lancer, which is a 1/200-ish rendering of a 32mm scale resin kit produced by Forgeworld. Thankfully the little version is in nice robust styrene. 

 

These are one-person fighting suits in the usual 40K gothic style, armed for close combat. You can get a sense of the scale by looking at the little cockpit hatch on the top of the carapace - in the usual Warhammer scale they're pretty big models, here rather less so
 

 

They were slightly easier to build than the smaller nights, with a simpler breakdown of parts, but about as time-consuming to paint. The larger (50mm diameter) bases also invited a bit more attention to ground work and I've tried to present them striding over derelict industrial machinery of the 41st millenium.

 

 

The base details are mostly offcuts of sprue with a couple of tiny 1/35 AFV parts, the knights themselves are otherwise out-of-the-box.

 

 

I airbrushed them with Alclad metallics and then painted in all the coloured panels with Citadel acrylics, generally needing about three coats to cover the metal. I used a mix of kit decals, found decals, and some modified and overpainted decals for the House Cadmus banners between their legs.

 

There are quite a lot of different gloss levels on the models - the coloured panels are quite flat, the trim is slightly-dulled Alclad and then things like the sliding parts of the lances were polished with graphite powder and given several coats of a glossy brown wash to create an oily sheen. I also made a fair bit of use of a Citadel weathering paint called Typhus Corrosion - this is a warm dark brown and has "bits" in it. I wasn't sure it was useful at first, but it's great for creating build-ups of grease and gunk when combined with their matt and gloss washes. The copper areas are also pretty bright, with a combination of Hashut Copper (Citadel) and Vallejo liquid metal copper,

 

I'm not sure how well that all shows up in pics, I should try some on a dark background with a key light at some point.

 

Anyway, despite being a bit labour intensive they were fun to build and paint, and look good next to their smaller friends:

 

 

I will probably start a Titan (bigger yet) soon but I feel like I should address something unfinished first. We'll see...

If you want to see the step-by-step, you can click on the photos and read the captions on Flickr, or have a look at the WIP thread here:

 

Thanks for looking

 

Will

[Daniel]

Awesome Will

 

I’m already looking forward to the Titan

 

Dan

[Will Vale]

Thanks Dan!

 

28 minutes ago, Daniel said:

I’m already looking forward to the Titan

In which case you might have an opinion on which chassis/which Legio to do? I've built one pair of Warhounds, a Reaver and a Warlord thus far.



I think it might be sensible to paint the Reaver (above) since while it's biggish it doesn't suffer from having to do two at once like the Warhounds, and it doesn't need some fiddly gaps filling like the Warlord. Plus despite my initial misgivings it looks really cool. For some reason GW always show it front-on which is perhaps the only unflattering angle it offers.

The big question is which Legio - I thought initially Legio Atarus (red & white/cream) who get to shoot fun firey missiles. But now I'm wondering about Legio Gryphonicus (Blue-grey/Yellow) which is right next door to where my knights come from in the fiction, and has a corresponding colour. And also Legio Solaria, (mottled green/red) which has the distinction of being mostly women and having a rather nice decal sheet available.

Ideally my choice would look coherent with the knights without being the same colours, and in some way cool and fluffy, i.e. make sense within the background.

Not sure, but at the moment I'm leaning towards Solaria.

W