Artscale Alpha Legionaires Squad

Like much of my converting work I personally wasn’t satisfied with this project until about 80% of the way in when it started to really come together properly. These follow the basic guidelines laid out in my Artscale Tutorial. Initially I had tried to pose some of the squad in a striding pose, but many of the legs just ended up looking like they belonged to ballerinas, skipping… you get the idea. I ended up swapping most of them out for a more standard marine pose, with some minor adjustments. Striding/running poses are very difficult to do without them looking weird, and with a only a small variety of Terminator legs to use, it only makes thing tougher.

The squad was commissioned to consist of 3 x Mk4, and 5 x Mk3. I began sculpting the Mk3 helmets to match style of helm used by this Space Marine Master.  The Mark IIIs are considerably bulkier than the Mark IVs but that’s intentional as they are meant to look more heavily armoured. I also added rivets to the Mark IIIs that I acquired from Grandt Line.The Mk4 bits are from Forgeworld, and I think they are brilliant, my favourite style of power armour by far. The client requested that the squad be equipped with combi-bolters, so I used Chaos Terminator arms for the Mark IIIs and regular Terminator arms for the slightly more sophisticated Mark IVs. In an attempt to make them look more combi-bolter than storm bolter I’ve removed the barrels and replaced them with drilled out plasticard rods (separately barrels rather than one piece with two holes). I’m especially pleased with how the icon on the squad leader’s chest came out.

The Alpha Legionnaire Badge on the shoulder pad was first made in greenstuff and then casts were made using Blu-Stuff as a simple one piece mold. You can find a Mini-Tutorial to making an Alpha Legion icon here.

For anyone who’s interested the client plans to use these as “counts as” Grey Knight Terminators (edit:this was before the Grey Knight codex).