Ultramarine

 In my continuing quest to pick a space marine legion I've finally painted up an ultramarine. Picking up a combat patrol magazine I was able to get a terminator captain and a Tyranid beastie for the low low price of £2.99. 

Way back in the long long ago I was the proud owner of space crusade. I won't go into how great a game it was the only important part is that you had a choice between three legions - Imperial Fists, Blood Angels and Ultramarines. My legion of choice was always the Ultramarines I'd like to give a sophisticated reason why but it's probably because they were blue.

When I first got back into painting I made sure to pick up a predator tank, it had long been a favourite of mine, which was painted up for the Ultramarines. Since getting better at painting I've tried out three colour schemes but none have really stuck in fact my favourite so far has been a space wolf which is still only half painted. It was definitely time to try out the blue boys.

It was a relatively easy process with the blue being done by airbrush and me not putting so much effort into the silver and gold. I really don't think they suffered from less attention and may even have turned out better. The biggest problem I had was with the cape. I tried wet blending but just couldn't get it looking right so it ended up being good enough to get by. What I was really happy with was the face and I think a large part of that was ignoring the eyes. While painting the face the cruel passage of time decided to pay a visit. My hands shook, my eyes blurred and a lot of the high lights became guess work.

There was three problems with the mini but nothing major. First was what to do on his two shields. I did briefly consider doing checks or free hand but then I remembered some very old transfer sheets I had which solved problem one. The second problem was that on an even older transfer sheet I found an ultramarine symbol which eventually worked great. Sadly this ties into problem three. I couldn't get the front and back to join when gluing them together I'm sure the hood is ment to be flush with the top of the armour but it's sticking out quite a bit. In an effort to jam the two pieces together some of the shoulder transfer got stuck on my thumb. I decided to call it battle damage and move on. I had a similar problem when sticking the head on but I don't think it's noticeable. When I'm painting in sub assemblies in future I'll have to remember to cover the pegs to stop paint getting on them.

Thanks for reading.