At the start of the year I was incredibly inspired by these traitor terminators which appeared on the Oldhammer group pages on Facebook.
To my eternal shame I have forgotten who posted them. Apologies to you if you see this! But know, I am in awe, but terrible with names. :(
EDIT: I'm now reliably informed it was Nico Realms on the Oldhammer group! Do go and check out his work! He's amazing!!
Anyway, they’re really top notch conversions. With the faces and shoulder detailing all sculpted with greenstuf! The skills right?? Awe!!!
So this got me to thinking. I’d like a go at this myself and as I’m a big fan of the Sons of Horus, and I’ve never had an excuse to paint them before. This seemed a good opportunity to scratch that particular itch. I also happened to have a lot of these old Jes Goodwin sculpted terminators, sitting in a box gathering dust. Ooh the plans I suddenly have!!
Now if you know me, you’ll know I’m a bit of an Oldhammer fan...honestly...it’s hard to imagine I know. And it did cross my mind that I should paint the Sons up in their original black colours. However, I’ve been painting up my other marines as original Dark Angels, and as we all know...they were black. So the thought of having yet more black armour to paint left me feeling cold.
I therefore bit the bullet and decided that for once, I would go modern. Gasp...splutter...Steady now...Quick look around. Is it raining cats & dogs?
Fear not though. I haven’t abandoned my ways. I have more Oldhammer shenanigans I can pull with this project.
With the colour scheme chosen I decided that in order to keep this as Oldhammery (New word.You saw it here first) as possible, I would recreate the Sons Of Horus shoulder icon from the Space Marine rule book of 1989. See below.
And use this on all my Sons of Horus. So despite the colour, they’ll have more than a nod and a wink to the older stuff!
Making the decals was easy. I used the reference and I made all new version using Adobe Illustrator. Once I had these laid out appropriately on a A4 sheet. I found some nifty instructions on how to make your own decals and printed them out onto decal paper. Jobs as they say...is a goodun.
Things to know about printing your own decals. There are two types of decal paper. White backed and transparent. White back you need to cut out with a scalpel and for stuff like this, it’s just too fiddly. Well...too fiddly for people like me with fingers like sausages.
Transparent decal paper on the other hand, is more like the decals we all know and love, so I opted for this. However, take note. If you print in anything other than black, and you intend to use it on anything other than bright white...It doesn’t work. I added some Oldhammery (That word again) Dark Angel icons to the sheet, and they couldn’t be seen on the black armour. Back to the drawing board for the Dark Angels. But for the Sons of Horus though, well, black works on minty sea green, so we were all groovy and the gang for this particular project.
Armed with my new/old decals. The next step was to sort out the mini itself. Now I’m no lore (fluff) master, but I was a bit worried that the retcons of late might cause people to raise an eyebrow at Indomitus Armour wearing sons of Horus. It’s kinda regarded as the newer armour since all the newfangled versions. But a bit of google foo later calmed my fears. Seems Indomitus armour was manufactured on the moon During the Heresy. And which legion led an assault on the moon during the battle for earth? That’d be the Sons of Horus. Hurrah! So essentially this project was as legit, as a legit thing, in legit town. Awesome.
All modern terminators carry the Crux Terminatus, a special badge of honour said to contain a fragment of the power armour worn by the Emperor of Mankind when he defeated Horus at the end of the Siege of Terra. Unfortunately this can’t be on my ‘period piece’, as those events haven’t happened yet. So the Crux Terminatus needs to go. As does the eagle on the chest. To do this I first snipped away the Crux Terminatus and then filed away the remains. However, I left the skull, as there’s nothing more chaos than a skull is there?
I then took a Jes Goodwin chaos terminator from the same period and I used greenstuff to create a little mould of the chaos star on its shoulder.
I then used this to create a new Crux Chaotica (is this a word?) on the shoulder pauldron of my terminators. Although with some of them, I got super confident and tried hand sculpting some arrows instead. These had mixed results. But you gotta try and start somewhere! I then covered up the chest eagle with greenstuff and smoothed it off.
Finally for the Captain miniature, I decided the head had to go. So I snipped that away and used a spare head from a Black Legion Marine from Blackstone Fortress. This kinda felt right and actually, this head sorts out the terrible proportions of the original figure. (Sorry Mr Goodwin. You are awesome, but the proportions on that sculpt are proper wrong! 😋)
Last but not least. For this particular mini, I created and oversized belt buckle. Which I planned on turning into a whooping great eye of Horus with use of a decal.
Next up...Painting the thing!!
Link here: https://planetoldhammer.wixsite.com/my-site/post/traitor-terminators-part-2
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