If you have been following this blog for the last few months you might have noticed that I am running a Warhammer 40k 2nd edition army painting challenge. You can see some links to it in the menu above.

My own entry to this is The Blood Skulls – a not particularly famous band of chaos criminals that have been plundering the worlds of Melnibonea, Pantangya and of course Khardashian Prime.

While they are painted red and black – the colours often associated with Khorne, my intensions were rather to nod back at the old monopose plastic warriors of WFB in the 4th edition era shown here. The old mugs are of course painted in a different fashion, but I always liked the with they looked. I briefly thought about goig all in and doing the same ‘half n’ half’ type scheme, but decided against it… and thus the homage will stay at simply the choice of colours.

And while they are not Khorne marines per se, I imagine that this particular squad is not opposed to the Lord of Skulls either. So I guess they are ‘cultural Khornians’ if you will.

By mistake, the squad has three identical poses (the guy with the horns coming together in a disc). I have tried to vary the way I painted the minis, but in the long run I will probably sub a few different sculpts for these, as I think it looks wrong with three identical twins.

The squad has two elements – a close combat oriented one and a shooty one. The cc guys have bolt pistols and a champion wielding a power fists. The shooty section has bolters and an autocannon. I was exceptionally lucky with the images as the red looks more or less like I painted it… and the solution was simply taking my photo stand out in the sun – or rather the clouds.

The images do vary a bit in the black, but this is mainly due to the sun popping out or not, otherwise I haven’t touched up the images in any way.

The painting on these guys was very simple. In fact the black was just that – black. No touch ups, no nothing… instead I spent time on the red. It’s not super well painted, but I went through a P3 Khador red base, then a Vallejo Game Color Blood Red, then P3 Khador Red Hightlight and finally topped with GW Sunburst Yellow (hexagonal pots of yore). Other than the red, I gave the green a treatment too – P3 dark green base, followed by COat D’arms goblin green and finally with Vallejo Model Colour Lime green. In addition to this I added various spot colours and small details… no real clear recipe there. Just various paints!

The miniatures carry quite a few grenades… and as I don’t really know what colour chaos marine grenades should have I decided that the soldiers paint them for special occasions themselves. The three examples above shows a love grenade, a magic eight ball and a flipper grenade.

Other than the grenades, I have incorporated a few additional details in the form of Necromunda stripes and a few slogans.

As a final homage I made this faux box art. It was a bit tricky to align the colours between the box and the image but anyway here we go: