21 - Imperial Guard Shock Troops - Flamer Trooper

Next up - the flamer trooper for my standard Guardsmen squad. He's missing the decals on his shoulder pads and a varnish, but for all intents and purposes, he's finished. I'm pretty satisfied with his paintjob - nothing special, not too much highlighting (in fact, almost none other than bringing the base color back after shading the model with Citadel Washes). As I've mentioned in my earlier posts, I've continued to use craft paints up to this point - all of my Guardsmen (Veteran and Standard) have been painted using Delta Ceramcoat Hunter Green and Bridge Grey, Americana Fawn, and Folk Art Skin Tone. While the craft paints have been, on the whole, acceptable, their covering properties are definitely a bit on the transparent end (especially after being thinned, which they must be in order to avoid being slathered on too thickly). I've recently been looking into investing in some dedicated miniature model paints - Vallejo, Reaper, or Games Workshop - but the cost of these paints still seems prohibitive to me.

I've tried to paint the Standard Guardsmen (Third Squad/ 1st Platoon) in a cleaner, less grittier style than my Veterans. The reason, obviously, is to imply that the Standard Guardsmen squads are constantly getting influxes of fresh-faced replacements to replenish the heavy casualties that Imperial Guard units are infamous for enduring. Thus, at any given time, Standard Guard squads are full of troopers in newly pressed, crisp uniforms, flak armor that still have that new factory smell, and the deer in the headlights look. This squad has the 265 decal on their left shoulder pads (and the Cadian structure symbol on their right shoulder pad), so I'm working under the assumption that they belong to the 265th Cadian Shock Troops Regiment. A cursory Google search doesn't reveal any canonical references to the 265th Cadian Regiment, so I guess I'll have to sit down and create some fluff for them on my own (Yay!).

So, this flamer trooper makes 5 Standard Guardsmen from Third Squad. 3 more lasgun troopers to go and then a Heavy Weapons Team (either autocannon or heavy bolter) to round them out. At this point, I'll have used 16 of the 20 available models from the Cadian Shock Troops box I purchased five or so months back (before they went OOP). That leaves 4 models left. I've already begun converting those 4 remaining models for my 1st Platoon Command Squad (I've got enough bits collected and set aside for a Junior Officer, a Standard Bearer, a vox-caster operator, and a veteran with a special weapon). After that, I might move on to trying my hand at converting (with green stuff) some Ogryn from an Ogre Kingdoms Leadbelcher set I have. More likely though, I'll head back to my Blood Ravens as I have plans to convert some regular Tactical Space Marines into Sternguard. Unless, of course, I'm able to find some Heavy Weapons Squad boxes cheap on eBay, but ever since the recent release of the 5th Ed. Imperial Guard Codex, it's been impossible to get IG stuff cheaply. Interestingly enough, it's also really hard to get Space Marine Scout boxes cheaply on eBay. Considering everything I've read on the Interwebs about SM Scouts are that they're not all that good, I'm a bit confuzzled as to why people seem to want them so badly.

Again, click here for more pics.