90s Blood Angels Tactical Squad with Modern Minis

My dabblings in the Warhammer hobby these days seem to be almost entirely driven by nostalgia for the early to mid 90s games of my youth, in an almost certainly doomed attempt to recapture the excitement of that glorious era. In that frame of mind, a couple of years ago I had a go at making a mk 7 Blood Angel in the new primaris scale, but with only limited success. Reflecting on that project I thought that maybe the old armour marks don’t scale that well to the more realistic proportions of today (or it’s beyond my skill to make it work well) and in any case, the old style bolter just looks a bit underwhelming against a primaris size marine. Apparently marines need comically oversized guns to look right!

I still had an itch that I needed to scratch, so I thought it would be interesting to use the current primaris intercessor kit as a base to try to make a Warhammer 40k 2nd edition style Blood Angels tactical squad. I’ve got loads of old space marine bits lying around (in common with most hobbyists I suspect!) so the plan was to use those to try and bring a bit of the old flavour to the new kit.

My first test model is on the left in the above image. For this I used the same colour recipe that I outlined in the previous post, and went with the 2nd edition style of a yellow chest eagle and black pauldron rims. The knee pad is my own variant on the classic red blood drop on black background, as I sometimes feel that the red on black doesn’t have enough contrast, so the addition of the yellow stripe is intended to help with this and also serves to echo the chest eagle. Since it was just a test model, I thought I’d also take the opportunity to try adding some battle damage, which is something I normally prefer to avoid. Although it adds a certain air of gritty realism to the mini, I thought it felt a bit out of place for this project, which is all about the bright colours and cartoony look of 2nd edition, complete with goblin green bases of course!

Despite painting many Blood Angels over the years, I’ve never succeeded in finding a recipe for red armour in the edge highlighted ‘Eavy Metal style that I’m totally happy with. The modern Citadel reds are fantastic, and have much better coverage than the old paints (I’m definitely not nostalgic for that!) but somehow they just don’t quite have the vibrancy that I’m looking for. After doing some more experimenting I hit upon the idea of introducing some fluorescent paint into the mix, so in the marine on the right you can see the same recipe but with a basecoat of 1:2 mephiston red and fluorescent pink from Warcolours, which I applied over a very pale flesh undercoat to maximise vibrancy. I’m much happier with the final result this gives (the effect is somewhat diminished in photos) but unfortunately using such a high proportion of fluorescent paint makes the mix a pain in the backside to use, as the coverage is terrible!

Although it’s not in keeping with the 2nd edition vibe, I decided I prefer the glowing eyes to the old school gem-style lenses, and I also decided not to use left pauldrons with sculpted Blood Angels chapter symbols. The problem is that the sculpted symbols have to be edge highlighted, and then they just don’t give the vibe that I’m after. Rather than use blank pauldrons and faff about trying to get transfers to sit nicely I digitally sculpted my own that have a barely perceptible outline of the chapter icon on them. It’s just enough to act as a guide for painting and ensure uniformity, but doesn’t create a noticeable step that catches the light.

Here we have the tactical squad sergeant. I used blender and my trusty Elegoo Mars 3 to create the decoration on the left shin and backpack, and also the banner, which is pinned into the backpack. I have no idea why banners went out of fashion – I think no sergeant should leave the battle barge without one! Anyway, with these changes he’s about as close as I could get to the original metal sergeant that I remember from my squad back in the day.

Finally here we have the squad so far. I had to go with 3rd company because Tycho is my all time favourite Blood Angels character, so I need to leave the door open to including him in the force at some point in the future. I’ve stalled a bit at this point because I need to get hold of a suitable melta gun to complete this half of the squad, and it looks like I’ll be needing to buy a box of the primaris eradicators in order to do that. I’ve also become distracted by all the shiny new eldar minis that have been coming out recently and may have painted one or two Alaitoc guardians. Well, the marines need someone to fight, don’t they?