Vorax

More progress to report today, I have pretty much completed my first assault unit for the mechanicum in the Vorax. The hope is that these are going to be either a brutal counter assault force or more likely a aggressive force for heading deep in to opposition territory and threaten opposition objectives

I have assembled one with a irradiation cleanser for added viciousness, I love the rad weapons for their brutal ability to slaughter the enemy and while this is not quite as excessive as the ones carried by the myrmidon destructors but it will certainly help with murdering troops holding objectives. I am planning for generally the rotor cannons to be upgraded with bio-corrosive ammunition.

Reaver - the beginning

So during the summer I was able to get a forge world reaver titan at reduced price due to being pre-owned. It has already been painted and it looked OK on the battlefield but I knew I was going to want to go back over the paint job and redo it to be more inline with the rest of my mechanicum army.
The reaver is such a massive project I am simply sitting back and doing parts of it here and there when I am working on other models, so when I applied the candy coat red to the thallax I was also applying it to the first of the Reaver armour plates.

I have only worked on the one armour plate so far and it is still a fair way off completion, I am desperately trying to not rush this project since the Reaver has the potential to be an utterly awesome focal point model for my combined heresy era force and the model is simply so cool it deserves to be done right.

So with that said here are the initial photos of the carapace armour plate which I am currently working on, I aim to have this at the very least completed in time for the summer apocalypse game, I am not priortising this since I simply have set myself a massive target for that battle in terms of model painting and trying to squeeze the whole titan in at the same time would lead me to rushing it and ruining the effect I am trying to achieve

So far all I have done is the candy coat and oil paint wash on the main body of the armour plate, I have started to work on the scroll using some of the ideas from the new Horus Heresy Modelling Masterclass book as well as doing the very initial stages of adding the gold work on to the eagle and trim.
There is still a long way to go, the rest of the trim needs to be completed with an initial coat of balathazar gold and then various washes and layers need to be employed to make the gold look as vibrant and deep as possible and really show off all of the cracks and detail in the eagle. The scroll work needs several more layers of paint to build up the colour properly. I have purchased a nice stencil with some elaborate text which I am hoping to use that to add the name to the scroll. From what I can see the space where I would actually like to add the name is not especially large before the scroll starts folding which in my mind suggests the name should be pretty short and catchy - I am now having looked at the stencil and the scroll thinking of calling this beast "Dominus" which links in to the mechanicum quite nicely.

Once I have everything else done I will be adding decals to the armour plates to add some more detailed art work which is beyond what my painting skills could achieve, I have the Legio Fureans decal sheet and while I am not using their colour scheme I think the decals will work perfectly well on this battle titan.

Ler me know your thoughts.

Thallax

So the next forces I have completed for my army are the thallax, I have four units of them ready to rock, each one three models strong. Two of the units armed with photon thrusters to give me some threat at range plus a good option for taking down annoying terminators. The remaining two units have a multi-melta and will be upgraded with the destructor option to get them tank hunters to make those guns as dangerous as possible.

 Here you can see the shoulder makring denoting the units, some nice decals from the adeptus mechanicum transfer sheet.

I think they look pretty good and they are definitely a very useful addition to the army, they add some very useful movement due to the jet packs, the weight of tank hunting fire power is always going to be of great use in helping deal with some of those annoying tanks out there although if I have the heavy support slots then the photon thruster units will probably be given the icarian upgrade to allow them to provide some really nasty threat to flyers - minus two to jink saves is really going help against some of those annoying flyers.