5th Company Command

Sooooo... what a crazy few months! With my beautiful fiance moving into my apartment, along with her very sick mother, kitten and puppy, life's been a bit hectic of late. Thankfully things are settling into a rhythm quite quickly, and whilst I'm not spending four hour blocks at the painting desk like I used to, I found my first hour-long snippet of time to sit down and get some work done.

With my soon to be mother-in-law as ill as she is, and living in our loungeroom (it's a 1 bedroom apartment), I can't exactly crank out the airbrush for a while, which kind of puts the kibosh on finishing my Land Raider painting experiments. It's a very small sacrifice to make for her (she's a beautiful lady, and it's an honour to have her stay), and in the true spirit of making lemonade from lemons, I've shifted my plans slightly.

With the new GW paints released, and the appalling coverage of Vallejo's DA Green paint, this is actually a good opportunity to change up my colour scheme slightly to try to match the old DAG I've used thus far.

Reading a crap-tonne of forums and articles, I'm going to try replacing DAG with Caliban Green with a Waywatcher Green glaze BEFORE I start highlighting. I know glazes are supposed to integrate highlight shades back down into the base colour for a smooth tonal transition, but I'm happy with my old highlighting colours and technique and don't really want to mess with it. What I do want to do, however, is add back the lovely warmth the old Dark Angels Green possessed, but sadly the Caliban Green lacks. The forums seem to indicate this is the best way to do it.

So, where to now then? In my hour of fun I sat down and starting building the Command Squad for my 5th Company deployment. I've actually got almost all of the 5th Company in boxes now, minus most of the transport units, so I really need to get the ball rolling with cranking out painted units.

It's a pretty typical Command Unit, complete with Apothecary, Standarad Bearer, Company Master and Company Champion. The only item of note is some minor conversion work for the Standard Bearer. I clipped the cross-pole off my Brother Bethor who was fully painted for the last couple of years but without a banner, and I've used the moulded banner from the Command Squad box instead. It fits nicely on Bethor's existing pole, but given he'll be carrying the Dark Angels Chapter Standard, I though it could use some tarting up.

To that end, I've pinned a DA angel from the Chapter Upgrade sprue to the top, added a sconce and DA pendant on rope to the top of the banner itself, and I've attached some large clusters of purity seals from the FW Purity Seal pack to the front and back of banner, along with a long scroll on the back.

Now updated with pics of the un-painted squad ready for priming (though I've since added a DA icon to the Champion's backpack just to make him stand out a bit more).