Screaming Eagles Space Marines

Well, tomorrow son & heir and myself will be boarding a coach at the unearthly hour of 6am as we embark on the South West Warhammer World Trip! I'm just intending to potter around, have a beer, listen to a seminar by Jervis Johnson, have another beer, potter around etc. Saul however, is entering a 40K doubles tournament with a friend from school called Chris...

Now Saul isn't the most experienced 40k player in the world and has never played in a tournament before, let along a doubles one, but he wanted to do it and he wanted to use his Space Marines... For the tournament your army has to be 750 points strong with all the core choices, but if you both have the same army as your partner you only need to have one lot of core choices for 1500 points therefore increasing your choice of optional units. Now Chris is also taking Space Marines but in typical teenage fashion, neither have actually talked to each other about what they're taking (there may be have been some one word - sometimes one letter - texts, which Saul is so fond of sending, but who knows!), so they'll probably have a lot of grunts on the table and not much else...

Anyhow this meant we have had to blow over 400 points on the HQ and core unit choices alone which kinda limits your remaining options... So out went the land speeder, attack bikes and devastator squad and all that remained were 5/6th of his terminator squad and a dreadnought (total 748 points). Whatever, it will be somewhat a shooty army and he'll have plenty of opportunity to throw lots of dice which is the main reason to play 40K.

The Chapter is one of our own making. Initially I was planning a grey with distruptive green camo look with WWI iron crosses as chapter markings, however with our Eldar being black with white helmets I thought this was all too monochrome so did some experimenting and settled on this Dark Angels green overall with blue shoulder pads look which is a doddle to paint using drybrushing techniques.

The miniatures are largely from the Assault on Black Reach box set with some odd ones from the MacCragge set and others that just happened to be hanging around. The dreadnought is from the Black Reach set and is a very nice and easy to construct model.

The chapter is the Screaming Eagles, named after the famous 101st Airborne (guess who had just watched Band of Brothers?). With hindsight this proved to be a big PITA as my printer could not print the 101st unit insignia small enough to use on decal paper and in the end I had to hand paint the eagles. Some are good, some ok and a few look like ducks, seagulls and geese, but if you don't look too closely the effect is ok. Hopefully I can one day address the decal issue and overpaint the hand painted designs with some neater and more consistent in appearance.

The Space Marine sergeants are the only regular troopers bare headed as I am not keen on helmetless marines but didn't have enough helmets for the complete squad. One sergeant had a pronounced mould line across his forehead which I could not remove well enough so in a flash of inspiration it became a pair of talon scars (this guy is obviously a veteran of MacCragge). The other sergeant is black, an unusual choice in 40K, but inspired by the black Sergeant Majors seen in war films and because it's boring seeing just white Space Marines. 

It did get me thinking about painting up a black chapter with assegais as hand weapons and a camo pattern based on zulu shield designs, but thankfully I came to my senses!