Old-school Alpha Legion Chosen Marines

Hello All!

Hmmm been a while!  Time has moved on quite a bit since my last post, and of course being the typical hobbyist, so has my focus!  Was just packing up some old minis to make way in my carry case for my (current) new project (a loyalist chapter of Space Marines!  Who'd have thought it, eh?) when I came across my much underused squads of Chosen Marines, So I thought I'd take a couple of pics and post them up here.

 I'm putting these guys away as they're a bit redundant thanks to the changes in the new Chaos Marines codex.  I mean - nobody gets Infiltrate?!  Nobody even gets Scout?!  What's going on there I really don't know, seems ridiculous to me that an entire force should lose both of these abilities - are we saying that Chaos Marines are incapable of sneaking around without being seen?  What about the Alpha Legion, FFS?!

Anyway, the whole reason behind these two units is that they were my "sneak up behind you and blow up your heavies" guys.  2 identical squads of 5 marines - one champion, 4 toting meltaguns, mounted inside a Rhino each, and Outflanking just when you didn't expect it.  A full move of 12" for the tank, followed by a swift dismount, meant that anything in the outside 24" of table was gonna get a melta round up the wrong'un.

Sadly due to the rules change this can no longer happen, losing the element of surprise means the Rhino more often than not gets taken out before getting anywhere near behind enemy lines...  so into storage they go for the time being.

As I may have mentioned I run a pure Nurgle force, but was getting a bit bored of painting green, and also I'd just read Legion, so I had (and still have) a soft spot for the Alpha Legion. Outflanking, sneaking around and blowing stuff up seems much more their tactics than the plodding antics of Nurgle, so I grabbed the Legion shoulder pads and got painting.

For some reason, in my head Alpha Legion armour is super shiny.  Don't ask me why, it just is.  I love the dark, dark blue, with green highlights and the snake-scale motif, and I just thought it needed to be polished to a high sheen, an effect that usually I can't stand, so dunno what happened there!

For anyone interested in reproducing the paintjob, all I have to say is "Good luck!" cos it's using some of my oldest paints, in fact a mix of previous generation GW paints, and first generation Citadel Inks!

I painted all the armour in Regal Blue, then went straight to Ice Blue for a highlight with nothing in between.  I then gave the whole model a wash of Citadel Blue Ink.  I then put another finer highlight of Ice Blue, again with no in-between steps.  Then I washed the whole model again in Citadel Green Ink.  I then painted the scales, chapter number and hydra head using the same base of Dark Flesh, mixing through to Knarloc Green and highlighting with Rotting Flesh.  Then I used the classic Boltgun Metal, Badab Black Wash, more Boltgun Metal, Chainmal, Mithril Silver combo to edge the armour.  Finally I painted the blue armour parts in GW's shiny varnish and that was it.

They were painted pretty quickly as I was desperate to get them into a game, so apologies for the splodgyness in some places!

Anyway there you go - got some other pics to put up of one of my Blood Bowl teams, so there'll be a new post soon!