Ist legion begins: Pre-Heresy Dark Angels

This little spark of inspiration first came about with my experiments with painting black.

A brutal colour to get right. Do it in shades of grey, and you end up with a black and white mini like an old Disney cartoon. Unless your model exists on monochrome world this just doesn't look right. Put too much colour in it and you end up with what looks like a mega shaded colour at night. Blacks can be warm or cool, vibrant or matte. Its a bugger. And I still don't think I've got it right. But its getting there. And its fun to paint!

So in my mind I had a couple of choices.  Raven Guard are meant to be matte black. Right? Non reflective, hard lines, and brutal. Black legion are Chaos, and I wont mix with that lot (apart from the occasional foray into the bloody landscapes of Khorne).


But 30k Dark Angels? Bad ass knights of the realm, with all sorts of secrets, and gold, and shiny black plate armour? Hells yeah. And the picture below really was my inspiration for it. Look at all that blue that reads as black.

The picture at the top was obviously edited to be darker, slightly less saturated, maybe adding more grey to the final glaze to knock it back will work in the future but as a proof of concept I'm a happy man. Anyway, this is how he looks in the flesh.