The 2nd Ed Army Challenge is running for its second season now and I have entered my Blood Skulls again to finish up the remaining units and bring it towards the 2.5k mark.

My first entry was this squad of terminators. Originally, back in season 1 I basecoated them and based them… I even used them in a few games. But I never managed to finish them beyond that one layer. So now I had to do it. It was a very long haul, as these models are simple littered in detail. Every square centrimetre is full of small trinkets and details, that all demand attention. I had to resort to “when in doubt paint it red” a few times. The aiming demon on the heavy flamer got green colours as there was simply too much red building up.

The Blood Skulls are my vision of how 2nd ed. Chaos Space Marines should look. The way I paint them takes heavy inspiration from comics and toys of the 90s such as Ninja Turtles and Toxic Crusaders. This is the stuff I love simply. To make some cohesiveness to this full colour adventure, decided that all the guys should have some sort of yellow to red gradient weapon. I have recently discovered how easy it is to make this with contrast colours, and so 10 years from now I will be looking at this period as the “red to yellow gradient” epoch.

When painting these I use the same set of “rules” that I have for the normal marines of the Blood Skulls: Trims, weapon exhausts, and skull ornaments get a red coat, tubes are always green, and the black is left as is. Anything hairy gets a purple coat. By having these “rules” the painting becomes a bit more no-brainer and faster to do.

In the challenge we have a small group chat going and it has been unanimously decided that a bit of leopard print goes a long way. Therefore I have made sure to include it on the chainfist shown here. I also really like the hazard stripes next to the black and red. So of course that has been added here and there. My favourite weapon is probably the powered maul, which ended up looking really well.

One thing I did on this batch that I normally haven’t done on the Blood Skulls was to give them a coat of varnish. I was left with little choice as I could see that each time the models where moved or touch small parts of paint went off. I guess it is to do when the high weight combined with the really pointy bits. I am in doubt as to wether I should give them a coat of matt varnish also… I think I will have to test on another model first.

Thanks for looking and leave a comment if you really don’t like Eldar.