Warhammer 40,000 – Imperial Fists Call to Arms Pt 8

We need to catch up on how I got my Imperial Fists ready for the Chaosbunker Classics. This article picks up where we left off in part 6 of the Call to Arms, with more progress on the core of the regular Space Marines.

I finished the base colours on all the infantry and added a first coat of wash, Casandora Yellow, on the marines. For both the backpacks and the shoulder pads, it was easier to paint them before attaching them to the miniatures. I finished the base colours on the backpacks and kept them on the small sub-assembly holders. That was incredibly practical for priming and further painting. I prepared everything that would get a metallic colour with a black primer.

Warhammer 40,000 – Imperial Fists Call to Arms Pt 7

The next thing I painted for my Imperial Fists was the Dreadnought, the heavy armour in my small force that supports the Space Marine units.

The old Dreadnoughts were chunky blocks of pewter and certainly a challenge for any hobbyist. You get a full metal kit, and quite often some of the smaller bits are missing, like the auto-launcher or the banner top. Sometimes the banner itself did not survive the 20+ years of service, especially once it was dropped from later edition boxed sets of the metal kit.

I managed to sub-assemble mine and left off the banner for now. I want to replace it with a brass rod, as the original metal banner pole is too soft for its size and tends to bend or break.

I assembled the pieces, cleaned up what I could, and unfortunately noticed some damage in the cast that I will have to turn into battle damage. I primed it white first and then added another coat of Imperial Yellow by Titan Hobby. Spoiler alert: do not do it that way. Unless you own an airbrush, prime that hulk of metal black, give it a heavy drybrush of metallic paint afterwards, tape off what you want to keep dark, and then go for the main colour of your Chapter.

Painting all the dark parts in the recesses without spoiling the yellow was certainly time-consuming. And after blocking in the base colours, I ran into my usual problem with this project: how to adapt the contrast colours for the 3rd Company of the Imperial Fists. As you can see, I made a collage from the Angels of Death and Ultramarines codices. I think there is a picture of an Imperial Fists Dreadnought somewhere in the 3rd edition, but I could not find it in the later codex. Most likely it was in a battle report. (Update in White Dwarf #226 from October 1998 includes an Imperial Fists Dreadnought, but I could not find proper pictures.)

We had a lengthy discussion about the Dreadnought’s base (not just mine, but the Chaos Dreadnought as well and so on). In later editions this is not an issue, as you get the 80 mm round base, but in 2nd edition there was a mixture of DIY solutions: some people crammed those models onto 50 mm squares, used the old flat Titan bases, or simply did not use a base at all.