When assembling my Imperial Knights, I found that my sprues didn’t seem to contain all of the required bits. In fact, each of my most recent two nights were missing two of their five handles that go on the top hatch. Come to find out, this isn’t all too uncommon of a practice–as my friend Sam reported the same issue when purchasing from the same vendor years ago.
Well, rather than let it stop me in my tracks, I looked for a solution. Rather than going the route that Sam took (and just skipping the “extra” handles altogether), I opted to take 5 out of the six handles I did have and build a single “complete” model, but that left me with one that had but a single handle. I opted to glue that lone handle on the left side of the carapace, but that left four very naked spots on the right side.
When I started the process, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with that, but I knew I had to do something about it–as it looked tacky. I figured that I might just putty over them and leave that hatch completely smooth (which would’ve been a totally acceptable solution). 
Whatever I was going to do, I knew that it wasn’t going to include sculpting four more handles from scratch.
I eventually opted to find a spare piece of Ultramarines brass etch and affix it to the carapace. It did a reasonable job of covering most of the holes and I felt that the single Omega on it was not overly obvious (well, at least it wouldn’t be if I didn’t bother to paint it that way, right?).
Then it really came down to color scheme.
House Terryn became the defacto house for me based upon a few facts:
- The scheme of red/blue/white would work well with my Ultramarines and keep things from looking too outlandish
- House Terryn seems to have worked with the Ultramarines, at least according to this wiki article
- It’s the one house that Forgeworld makes resin options for–so, no free hand!
With that in mind, I started painting the carapace blue. But, since I didn’t want it to match my ultras exactly, I opted to go with a darker base and not quite as bright of a highlight. The result here is that the schemes look relatively close (And honestly, they don’t look as good from afar without the bright edge highlights), but still look different enough to pass for a different force.
Well, I’m not 100% sure about the last part.
I’m also not a big fan of gold traditionally. I know that in “recent” editions, Ultramarines’ second company has switched from yellow to gold, but I’m still a big fan of the primary color scheme. As a result, I don’t incorporate that many metals into my figures. However, House Terryn clearly uses them, and it was a chance for me to add a little extra differentiation between them and the armies of Ultramar. Though it’s not typically my thing, I think I kind of like it–you’ll see why in my next post on the subject…
Warhammer 39,9999 