Imperial Knight Phase 1

"A kid in a sweetshop" comes nowhere close to describing the excitement I felt when I knew that Imperial Knights were being released.

Having developed a large Dark Angel Army, a super heavy walker was just what I needed to round things off.

Being very fluff driven in my choice of colour schemes/armies, I wanted a model that was not similar in colour to anything I had painted before and I was also keen not to have something that matched any of my existing armies. I also wanted something that would compliment my DA in terms of fluff.

I settled on House of Hawkshroud because:
a) I loved the colour scheme of yellow and black and I had always wanted to paint some yellow armour, and;
b) I love the idea of the fluff associated with this house. House of Hawkshroud Knights are known to swear long term oaths to Imperial Allies and then basically go AWOL with their allies until they die.

Knights from this house tend to adopt their ally's symbol on their front right shoulder pad, and I have been able to take things a little bit further by adding some Dark Angels iconography (scrolls etc) to re-enforce the link between the two factions.

The photo below is WIP with base colours pretty much complete. I won't go into the detail of my approach as it can all be found on the official GW Youtube painting guide that they released in support of the launch. There are 4 parts, the first of which you can find here.

I take my hat off to GW for starting these tutorials. They're full of great tips and can give you real help, even if you're not actually planning to paint the model in the tutorial (tutorial 4 on applying transfers is particularly good).

The GW tutorial outlines a red colour scheme so I have adapted the colours for a Hawkshroud scheme. This means that some approaches were slightly different from the tutorial as follows:

• All armour plates were primed in white, whilst the skeleton was primed in black, I think this lifts the yellow a little more and makes things a bit brighter
• I've had to apply 2 coats of Averland sunset to every area. It's a much better yellow paint than the old paints, but it still needs that second coat
• I've also had to apply 2 coats of Abbadon black on the white armour plates as it's surprisingly not great for cover over white.

Key learnings to date:

• I made the error of glueing the cowl armour plate (that sits over the head) and the shield onto the skeleton rather than leaving them off as per the other armour plates - this just makes things a little hard to access certain areas.
• The GW assembly and painting tutorial gives some great tips and is well worth using as a start point to know how to approach things.
• I found painting the shield on the gun difficult to do once it had already been glued on to the body. It's worth painting and basing the weapon before gluing the arm on.

So here's the WIP model - defending a bowl of fruit. The armour plates are currently held in place with blue tac as they won't be glued on until they are complete. There are a few more pieces to finish in respect of base colours and then...it will be onto the first phase of detail - using the washes!

GW have created a masterpiece with this model...this will not be the last knight in my army!