Jon’s Astro 2013 Alpha Legion – Shifted Matrix Miniatures

Another year and another Astronomi-con has come and gone. This is the third time I’ve made a new army for Astro as I have a problem with the plastic and resin crack. I also have a constant nerd boner for the traitor legions so I did another CSM army, but this time I decided to do one in undivided flavour. Even though I had the better part of a year so plan and get everything done, I still ended up rushing to get the army done in time. In the weeks leading up to Astro the guys in my gaming group were all fine tuning their lists, adding stuff like anti-flyer units or more anti-armour. Instead of trying to make my list more effective, I was more concerned about figuring out ways to reduce the model count in my army as I didn’t think I would be able to finish the original army I had planned in time. I did manage to get everything done for Astro in time, but at the cost of having to take a pretty non-competitive Abaddon/chosen list which helped me get stomped in 4/6 games. Most of my games ended up being Abaddon killing a whole bunch of models while the rest of my army dies.

I went through a few different methods of painting the Alpha Legion scheme during the course of painting this army. About 1/2 of the infantry was done earlier in the year but the way I painted resulted in something that I thought was a bit too bright. So for the remaining infantry and tanks I switched up how I painted them while still using the same colours but aiming for a darker look. I ended up liking the darker look more. Also the 5 non-powerfist terminators were some of the first models that I did for this army, and I had done their armour trim with metallic paints to speed things up. But when I did the powerfist terminators I decided to use NMM, so I ended up quickly redoing the trims on the 5 terminators I had done earlier. The two batches of termis would have been in mixed squads together and having the two types of metal would have looked weird.

The method I used initially was:

Base hawk turquoise
Quick hilight with 50/50 turquoise/scorpion green
Shade with regal blue, then regal blue/black mix, then pure black in the darkest areas
Hilight again with turquoise, up to pure scorpion green
Final hilight of scorpion green/vallejo yellow green mix

The method I settled on was basically to start with a base of regal blue rather than turquoise:

Base regal blue
Quick hilight with 50/50 regal blue/turquoise mix
Shade with blue/black mix, then pure black
Hilight up again with blue, blue/turquoise, and pure turquoise
Hilight edges and brightest areas with turquoise/green mix, to pure scorpion green
Final hilight with scorpion green/white mix.

Anyways, on to the pictures

Whole army on display