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SALAMANDER CHAPTER - TACTICAL FORMATION
For my own Space Marine
army, I considered a number of Chapters including the Space
Wolves and Black Templars. However in the end the lure of
painting a Chapter I had never done before in Epic was too much
and I settled on the Salamander Chapter with their distinctive
green and black armour.
The core of any Space
Marine force is the Tactical Detachment. Equipped with Rhino
transports and able to serve a number of roles from assaults to
securing objectives, the Tactical Detachment was the first
choice for me as the starting point for my Salamanders and will
certainly not be the only one in my force. Consisting of six
Tactical units I started the detachment by basing the models as
if they were three ten man Tactical Squads, each consisting of
eight Marines, a Sergeant and a Marine armed with a heavy
weapon. For the Sergeant I used the Power Fist armed Marine from
the previous edition boxed set and all of the other marines were
from the current release.
Tip: The Heavy Weapon
armed Marine on the frame is armed with a very old style missile
launcher. This is very easily converted into a more up-to-date
style by cutting away the front and rear of the launcher with a
sharp modelling knife and trimming down the ammo rail on the top
to leave a small plate as shown in the photograph. By drilling a
small hole into the front of the launcher using a pin vice the
new missile launcher is complete.
Once the six stands were
stuck together I then added some texture to the base by painting
on watered down PVA glue and dipping them into some modelling
sand. These were then left a few hours until the glue was
completely dry before giving them an undercoat of black spray
primer.
Painting the
Salamanders.
 Before
painting the Marines themselves I first of all dry brushed the
base texture in Graveyard Earth and Bleached Bone. The Marines
were then given a basecoat of a watered down mix of Dark Angels
Green and Snot Green over the entire model. Once the base colour
was dry I then painted on a wash of watered down green ink to
which I added a drop of black ink and Dark Angels Green paint.
Being watered down quite thinly the wash seeped into all of the
areas of shadow bringing out more of the detail. A final light
dry brush of Snot Green then finished the armour ready for
detail painting. For the detailing I painted the interior of the
shoulder pads and the weapons Chaos Black, then picked out the
muzzles and ammo clips in Chainmail Silver. At this point the
models are effectively done, however if you are feeling
particularly ambitious and your eyesight is up to it then you
can also add the company markings to the shoulder pads. The only
job this then left for me was to pick out the Sergeants face and
hair in Dark Flesh and Elf Flesh respectively (The Salamanders
being dark skinned traditionally according to the ‘original’
chapter background!)
It’s also well worth
remembering when painting Marines that Codex Space Marine and
the Index Astartes books for 40K are a great source for examples
of chapter colour schemes and markings.
Transport.
As a Tactical Formation
automatically comes with its own transport in the form of three
Rhinos, I also painted those at the same time. As with all of
the other vehicles in my armies I based them onto a Warmaster
plastic base which was textured in the same way as the troops. I
then followed exactly the same steps as I did with the troops
painting first the mixed green base coat and ink wash, before
highlighting with Snot Green. The tracks were painted in Boltgun
Metal and given a Black Ink wash and all other details were
picked out using Chaos Black and Chainmail Silver.
As a last touch I then added in a single Predator Annihilator
upgrade to give the detachment a little extra firepower, which
if I need can always be reassigned as part of a larger Predator
Detachment in its own right.. All that lleft was to include a
Commander with the detachment for that extra bit of punch and
the formation is ready for action.
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