Space Marines in dresses robes, a ritualised culture with a long and turbulent history, and more secrets than you can shout ‘heresy’ at, the Dark Angels epitomise the idea of science fantasy for me. That’s why they were my choice for a new army project.

With each project, I like to work on a different aspect of painting and/or basing. With the previous Salamanders project, I worked on blending and non-metallic metals concepts and basing to match the ‘black sands of Isstvan’. This time, the focus is on cleaner, crisper highlights and precise recess shades. My recent Sacrosanct Chamber project gave me plenty of practice painting robes and cloaks which should also help with the cloth those Dark Angels are so fond of.

A project has to start somewhere, and where better to start a Dark Angels project than with an Imperial Fists battleforce? After quickly selling on the Imperial Fists upgrade frames to someone whose troops prefer to resolve combat by hiding behind a wall, it made for a great value box. First up to the painting table was the intercessors. I like to cycle the painting between troops and characters to maintain variety. The thought of approaching a large number of similar-looking models can damage the motivation. So starting with some troops to get the scheme down seemed like a plan.

Here’s how they turned out:

Not too bad for a first attempt, although the camera seems to be washing out the green. It uses the same core paints that I used for the Salamanders: Caliban Green, Warpstone Glow and Moot green. Of course, here the mid-tone is Caliban Green rather than Warpstone Glow. The shade is a 50:50 mix of Vallejo Game Colour Black and GW Caliban Green, directly applied to the recesses (no wash).

For this project, I decided to start using some of the extra gubbins included on the sprues. These are things like holsters, purity seals and other bits that I usually ignore. Turns out they help give a little extra variety to the troops.

Next up are the hellblasters, mostly so I can finish building the things – painting them with their plasma guns already attached is not advisable. I’ll be looking into some options for the plasma glow to see if there’s an interesting/different method I can find.