Last Days of the Horus Heresy

Land Raider

I painted the Land Raider the same way I did the other Imperial Fists but did a lot more weathering on the armour! I’m a big fan of enamels and I’ll dip in and out of several different pots when I’m distressing armour. It’s less of a defined process and more of a tweaking-as-I-go approach, determined by what looks good at the time.

The beauty of enamels is that you can blend, reduce or remove with enamel thinner/white spirits/mineral spirits long after you’ve applied the paint, so there’s no such thing as a permanent mistake! (Unless you spill some on the dining room table…)

My favourites to dip in and out of are:

• Streaking Grime (Mig)
• Engine Grime (AK)
• Streaking Rust Effects (Mig)
• Track Wash (AK)

I also use Rubble (Ammo) and Smoke (AK) Pigments that I fix with Vallejo Pigment Binder to give me gritty finishes on the tank tracks and around the exhausts.

Gore

Again, more of a scrappy approach than a process, but I used a lot of these:

• Blood for the Blood God (Citadel)
• True Blood (Green Stuff World)
• Coagulated Blood (Green Stuff World)

Diorama base

Lots of messing around here to get this painted, and almost impossible to list everything that I used. The painful part was waiting for it to dry after each coat to see what the final effect would look like.

Vallejo Asphalt texture paint for terrain is my go-to for scorched battlefields, and I also dry-brushed various grey and brown tones to add some tonal variation. This is a nuclear-scorched hellscape, so there’s no green. I had to rely on the teal Sons of Horus and the sunny yellows of the Imperial Fists to not have this look monochrome!

Finishing Up

Everything was superglued or PVA-glued in place, and I added a little more gore to the diorama to match the injuries sustained by the Space Marines.