Ultramarine - RTB01 Beaky Marine

Last year I was on one of my periodic Space Hulk fads. These usually go nowhere but I'd always been keen on the idea of using regular marines in the game after seeing the rules for powered armour in White Dwarf 120. I think I played a couple of games using them back in the day with my plastic marines.

Anyway, I still have most of my original plastic beakies, albeit stripped and mostly in bits, and not having any real idea what to do with them (apart from a a few specially earmarked squads) I realised I had enough to use in Space Hulk. Now most of my plans go nowhere but I did end up fixing up a squad of models before stalling at the question of colour schemes.

Various ideas came to mind but I ended up deciding I wanted to revisit a colour scheme I'd used on a few marines back in the 90's. It must have been around '97 that I painted up some Ultramarines, two or three terminators and a couple of plastic beakies. All stripped years ago but I remembered the blue was nicely muted and would fit well with my current penchant for toned down colours. I tried a few things out on a spare model to get the colours down but wasn't happy and that was that. Models went back in the box and I moved onto something else.

A few weeks back I had one of those eureka moments right out of nowhere, so tried some slightly different colours and ended up with exactly what I wanted for my Ultramarines! Sometimes it pays to not think too hard about things I guess.

A base coat of VMC Luftwaffe Uniform WWII highlighted up with VGC Ultramarine Blue and then some VGC Cold Grey and finally VMC Silvergrey for the edge lining. I used VGC Heavy Charcoal to dark line between the armour plates and put a thin glaze of GW Nuln Oil over it all when done. I added a little rust on the seams of the lower legs and around the studs on the shoulder pad (to try and disguise how badly sculpted they are).

The shoulder insignia is an over painted decal. These are old decals and I realised they've become brittle with age. A bit of decal film helped a little but they still proved tricky to use, not helped by trying to apply them to such a convex surface. I had to use my old techniques from when I painted my Imperial Fists marines which involved cutting into the decal to allow it to conform to the surface. Then it took a few cotes of decal softener (Micro Scale Micro Sol) to even out all the creases. The arrows are part of an assault decal that I cut up and added. With all the cutting, the distortion of the surface and the crumbly nature of old decals it didn't look great but it was just a guide so I could paint over it. A bit of hassle perhaps but easier than having several attempts and freehand that I'll never be able to reproduce on the rest of the unit (if I do them).

I made my own base top too. Just plastic sheet and a bit of inspiration from the original Space Hulk tile set. I made a few more just in case I do get more models painted. I did wonder about looking into getting some moulded and cast up to save on time but that's another thing entirely.  Didn't go for an exact colour match as I wanted something a bit more muted, but it's similar enough.