With the release of the new Space Marine codex and models, of which I plan to buy some just for the hell of it, I had the urge to carry on with the small Crimson Fist force that I had been working on a few months ago.

After my failed attempts at undercoating my Crimson Fists using the GW Spraygun, in the last post, I took the nozzle apart and left it to soak in some white spirit overnight. In the morning I cleaned out all the bits using an old toothbrush and some cotton buds and then had a second go at the undercoating - and here are the results:

So first off is the Captain. I'm not going to do much explaining through this as the pictures are pretty self explanatory. The only thing I've done to this model is drill out the storm bolter barrels.

Here is the standard bearer and the apothecary from the command squad.

And here is the company champion, with a few added purity seals.

Command squad meltagunner.

Devastator squad sergeant.

Devastator squad multi-melta and lascannon.

Devastator squad plasma cannon and missile launcher. As you can see there are a few bits I missed with the undercoat. This was during my failure stage when I was still trying to get the spraygun to work properly. I'll go over these sections with a brush as they tend to be in harder to reach or obscured areas.

And here is "Mr Stompy" - not his actual name. I've not glued the weapon arms on so I can choose which loadout to go with.

Here are the side on shots of the assault cannon and close combat weapon arms.

Next up are the bread and butter tactical marines. Currently there are 13 of them, but I have a few awaiting bits that I've bought which will be made up tomorrow probably.

No tactical squad would be complete without a sergeant, and a nice big banner to let everyone know he's the sergeant.

The tactical squads plasma gunner.

And the squads plasma cannon.

Below are the pictures of the regular bolter armed marines (including some snap fit ones)

With the marine's undercoated, I then moved on to their paint scheme. And in trying to keep the paint time down to a minimum, I picked up a bottle of Vallejo Model Air Insignia Blue.

This is the darkest blue that Vallejo do in the Model Air range. The camera flash has brightened it up a bit, but I think it will be a good base for my Crimson Fists.

Thanks for reading. Oh and if anyone has any tips on taking photos of dark/black miniatures please can you enlighten me. Thanks again.

I've been debating about buying some resin bases for my Crimson Fists and took the plunge on Friday morning (07/09/2012). There are quite a few companies etc that do resin bases, and I opted for Anvil Industry's "Granite Wasteland" series, which can be found here or the home page is here.

Here's the blurb that is displayed on the Anvil Industry web page about their bases:
"Traditional Resin Bases are very unstable/slippery and make it very difficult to position your miniatures on anything but perfectly level terrain. Anvil Gaming Bases are designed for gaming. Our "DARK FORGE" resin hybrid material is twice as heavy as normal resin, while "Texture-Grip" underside sticks to terrain features. The result? Your miniature with an Anvil Gaming Base will remain upright and stable on almost any gaming surface, no matter how uneven, sloped or slippery."

I decided to purchase 10x 25mm round, 2x 40mm round and 1x 60mm "B". The customer service from Joel was absolutely excellent. I'd forgotten to add the 60mm base into my basket, but luckily managed to get in touch with him and the base was added (my order was just being packed, very lucky) once I'd sent the extra funds via PayPal.

I received an e-mail update to say that my order had been shipped on Friday afternoon and when the post arrived on Saturday morning, there was a neatly packaged set of bases for me to get to grips with. The bases were packed in their own sealable bag, 60mm base in one, 40mm bases in another and 25mm bases in another. These were all in a bubble wrap filled envelope and survived the Royal Mail trip perfectly. And now for some pictures:

This is the 60mm "B" base, at two different angles. All of the details are nice and crisp and there are no faults at all. Click on the image for larger versions.

Here is a shot of the underside of the base. This shows the "Texture-Grip" to stop the

bases from slipping.

Next are the two 40mm bases. Again the detail on these are top notch. The bases are black by nature because of the "Dark Forge" resin. I've no idea what sort of hybrid it is, as I'm not up to scratch when it comes to resin.

And here are the 25mm bases. As before the detail is truly excellent. There is a nice variety in the bases and with the addition of a few bitz these could really be personalised to your own army. The bases are definitely heavy, I've not weighed them but they seem like they'll provide a nice weight to a model to stop it falling over.

Thanks for reading. I would definitely recommend Anvil Industry's for anyone who's looking for excellent quality items and customer service. They do a lot of conversion pieces as well

so take a look.

So 6th edition brought back the whole idea of allies. I expect that at some point I may actually try to start gaming again. But for the moment I have decided to build up a small force of Space Marines to be allied with my Guard.

Over the past few weeks, I've been looking through eBay for a few extra bits and pieces to flesh out the Space Marines that I've owned for a few years - sitting on a shelf made but not painted with most of my other projects.

In the picture above you can see the force as it stands, or in some cases as it lies in pieces. the army centrepiece will be the 25th Anniversary model, who is magnetised so can be on the scenic base or on a normal round base, and the flag can then maybe be used as an objective.

The rest of the force consists of:

I've had to strip some old paint jobs off some of the models. I painted up the commander in the Sons of Guilliman colours, but then decided that split schemes wasn't for me. And the devastators had been basecoated white, while the legs had received a coat of blue, so they got stripped back as well, but for £12 off eBay, I can't complain.

The Command Squad is in various stages of construction, and 1 marine has been assigned to the Combat Squad, which consists of some starter set marines that my local GW gave me to practice using liquid green stuff on. The dreadnought was a brand new and sealed item off eBay, so that was good. I can't even remember buying the Veterans, but they are metal so it's a few years go that I got them. The tactical squad is loaded out with a missile launcher and plasma gun, but the plasma gun is not glued down so I may try some magnetic trickery there.

Combat Squad and Tactical Squad

All in all not a bad little force to start with, bearing in mind that I hardly ever play. By now I imagine some of you are wondering why the Crimson Fist reference in the title (or not).  Well the reason for the reference, other than the 25th anniversary model, is that I will be painting these marines up as Crimson Fists (big surprise for those that hadn't guessed that). When I had some marines before, I painted them as Crimson Fists, just to be different. And now I'm going to do the same with these guys, plus the back story is pretty cool.

Thanks for reading through this. Comments etc are always appreciated.

P.S. this blog is almost at 100 followers!!!! So please recommend to your friends/followers so it can break the century barrier. Thanks!

And finally here is a view underneath the base piece. Here you can see the thin resin area, and also a thin area on the edge of the piece as well.

Overall I am very impressed with both the model and the packaging. Nice clear pictures and the reproduced artwork help the box to stand out. The plastic tray could have been padded out to avoid damage during transportation though.

The detailing on the model is excellent. I really hope that I can do this mini justice and get it finished. The Finecast casting faults do let the model down. As I said before, someone with more skill than me would probably be able to fix them easily, but for now I'll have to work around them.

As a closing statement, I have e-mailed Games Workshop's customer service team with the pictures I have posted here and explained to them the problems I have encountered. I hope that I can get a quick response and that they resolve the issue. Thanks for reading.