Dark Guardians Bikes contin

Last post was about the main bulk of the bikes, this post is about the characters and assault bikes of the chapter. 

There are really only two characters in the raven wing section of the army, the Captain and the Chaplain. These are both minor conversions/kit bashes and nothing special, The captain has a power sword and the chaplain a power fist. The chaplains bike also got some additions, such as the servo skull and the book, plus a skill of some foul Xenos strapped to the back.

Captain and chaplain 

The chaplain has a few extra details on the bike, such as shields on the tanks, to hide the chaos origin of the bike, can’t be having a chaplain driving around on a bike with an eight pointed star on it! The skull on the front however works in well enough.

Next up are the command squad, with champion, standard and apothecary. Again these are more kit bashes rather than proper conversions. 

Champion, standard and apothecary 

These three are very basic kit bashes but I really like how they turned out, they should stand out nicely if they ever his the table. 

Lastly we have a personal favourite of mine, the attack bikes. Here is a full unit of three of these boys, all of which are now firmly in legends. These are all armed with multimeltas, for some anti-tank goodness.

Two of the bikes are bog standard, but the third has a few extra details and plays the roll of sergeant, even if the unit doesn't actually have a Sgt position.

Flashy pauldrons for the Sgt.

This should be the last of my first born marines all painted and sorted. While a number of them are not yet varnished or based, I'm not in a hurry to get this done, although I plan to at some point, mostly just to preserve them over their inevitable long slumber. Next up should be some more guard and a couple of special projects.

Blog update.

 Ok, so there has been a bit of a quiet period for the blog recently. Again, as will previous quite periods, I haven't stopped blogging or fallen out of love with the process, rather there has been several events over the recent months that have meant that blogging time has been reduced, yet content to blog about has increased!

The first big change has been a change in jobs, meaning that I have increased my working hours from 18 across two jobs to 35.5 hours across two jobs, with the majority of these hours now coming while the small ones are at school. This means that I don't have any time during the day to sit and blog while the kids are out and when I am home, I am busy with kids clubs and house work. 

A change that has gone alongside this is the youngest starting school, which has enabled the above work expansion and not enabled the extra hobby time I thought it would!

Another change has been due to shifting around kids clubs and also my other hobbies. The my daughter is a keen swimmer and her pool sessions have changed to take up more time including weekends plus I have switched one of my clubs, from said weekends to weekday evenings, eating in to yet more hobby time.

Additionally I was away south at Northern Invasion 2024 a few weeks ago and I spent every spare moment in the lead up to that event painting and sorting my list, plus helping to sort out my son's and also his friends list, who joined us for the weekend. With all the painting and practice games I didn't get much of a chance to blog and now have nearly 20 posts sitting in the draft folder waiting to get properly written about the warm-up games, list thoughts, the actual weekend and games plus my thoughts and the others thoughts on then lists and improvements form next year. 

I have also been working on a couple of other projects, just small side projects but they have been fun. I'll try and get some pictures up of them when I can. I have also started on a bigger project for my AdMech\Knights army which I hope to get some pictures of them up as soon as I can. 

There is also some extra special news going on but I can't say anything about that yet, as soon as I can I will.

So, all in all, there has been a lot going on behind the scenes, even though there has not been a lot of movement up on the blog. I will hopefully get a chance to play catch-up before Christmas, if not I'm hoping the Christmas holidays should give me time.

Dark Guardians Bikes

Here are the first lot of bike from my Dark Guardians. This post contains all the ‘standard’ bikes, from the base Ravenwing squads to the Company Veterans and Black Knight stand ins. First up are the standard bikes and there is a lot of plasma!

First Squad

First squad is a three man squad with just a Sergeant and two bikers with plasma guns. This is the base set up for all three squads.

Despite appearances, this is actually the second squad!

The third squad, which I’ll probably call the First squad in games, given that the Sgt in this squad has the double wings at the back, making him a little bit more special than the others.

Third squad

Next up are the extras, the three bikers with bolt pistols. These could for a squad all of there own but will most likely always be joined to one of the other three squads to max out the number and help protect the plasma gunners. Given the current lack of granular points, you either have to min or max the numbers, not that it really matters to these guys, as they have been moved to legends.

Pistoleer squad

Next we jump from the base bikers to their more experienced brethren, the Company Veterans. Again these have been passed to Legends, so their appearances on the table will be somewhere between none and never, but here they are.

4 Veterans

Two of the veterans have listed their chain swords at some point in the past, and i had planned on adding power weapons to these two but given their current place in the game, it sort of seemed to much effort to go through, I mean its not like painting a whole army that no longer exists is a lot of effort! Oh, and there is four of them when the squad size is 2 or 5, so again, if they were ever fielded they would be in pairs. 

Lastly for this post I have the Black Knight proxies. These are some old school bikes that I got in a bunch of models that I brought a hill back. They even have the classic banners out the back, well two do anyway.

While not actually being black knights, they are sufficiently different from any other bikes that I want to use them as something different and I had planned on switching over the bolters for plasma guns but I couldn’t be bothered in the end, so musta lefty them as they were. Again, like pretty much all this army, they are not going to be played very much, if ever and so I’m not going to invest a lot of time to switch over the weapons. 

Next up are some of the characters and attack bikes to finish off the force.

Reinforcements ready!

While there has been a bit of a slow period on the blog, the painting has been trundling along nicely. Over the majority of the year, I have been playing catch-up with my pile of opportunity (aka pile of shame) but recently I have been painting up some new models, to fill out collections and bring other squads to legal standards. 

Firstly there are the two last Dark Guardians terminators and the Chaplain. The two terminators are a partly new, as I had both sets of legs but no torsos to add to them! 

Champion and librarian 

These are the last two terminators to add to my Dark Guardians force, completing the deathwing command squad and characters.

The last Dark Guardians non bike unit is the Chaplain. This was originally a metal chaos lord model but had been repurposed as a chaplain, which he does quite well with all the skull and big mace. 

So now that these models as the bikes are all completed, that is the entire first born Dark Guardians force completed, ready for boxing up and putting on to storage!

Next up we're some Adeptus Sororitas model. These are the three Imperium Magazine models, that while not 100 percent complete, they are missing transfers, complete the squad of sisters to a fully legal squad. I will have to look at getting these finished completely and quick shaded as I intend to take these to the Orkney tournament with me.

In addition to the sisters of battle models, I also painted up the Repentia and Arco-flagellant. The Repentia will go in to my Inquisitorial henchmen unit, which will also be going to Orkney with me.

Lastly we have Inquisitor Draxus, the only actual named inquisitor I own and will be likely to own, mostly due to weapon and mini dragon options being quite hard to kit bashing from stuff I have available. 

This model was painted using a mix of contrast and normal citadel paints and I think the mini dragon and shoulder skull have both come out very nicely with the contrast paints. The shoulder skull is actually a lot clearer in real life and does not blend in quite so much as it does in the pictures.

The last bit of contrast was the cloak. The contrast gives it a nice leather look which would have taken a lot more work just using the classic paints. 

I'm currently painting up some reinforcements for the DKoK, so I'll get them up here as soon as I can but hopefully next up will be the Dark Guardian bikes.