It has been a long vigil my brothers. But as we endure, so endures the Imperium.

Stolus, Ultramarines Veteran

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Something a little left field this week: an Ultramarines Veteran, based on the limited edition ‘Imperial Space Marine 2016’ model and painted in the Rogue Trader era Ultramarines colour scheme. A friend recently gave me this model brand-new-in-box as a gift. My first instinct was to paint it up as a Crimson Fist, especially as that is how the box art miniature is painted. However I realised that it might look a bit strange alongside my Primaris Crimson Fists due to the size difference, so I started to wonder if I might go down a different route…

If you’re on “hobby” Twitter or Instagram then you may have seen the #MarchForMacragge hashtag floating around. If you’re not sure what that is, basically it’s just a bit of fun to encourage people to paint Ultramarines or Ultramarine-adjacent miniatures during the month of March and post them online with the hashtag. This set me to thinking about the Ultramarines army that got me into the hobby.

Back in the early 1990s I was introduced to Rogue Trader – as the first edition of Warhammer 40K was known – by the son of one of my dad’s friends. He had a large army of classic plastic ‘RTB01’ and metal space marines all painted up as Ultramarines. He would split this army in two and we would play games of Ultramarines vs Ultramarines so that I could learn the rules. Thinking about Rogue Trader era Ultramarines gave me a warm nostalgic feeling, and suddenly I knew exactly what I was going to do with my Imperial Space Marine!

Building & Painting

The LED effects for this model used my standard LED Eye Lens Tutorial. The specific LED used was a TruOpto 1.8mm Green LED, but otherwise it followed the LED Eye Lens Tutorial to the letter. I went for a green LED mainly to differentiate this Ultramarine from my Crimson Fists, and also because I felt the green went very nicely with their particular shade of blue.

The paint recipe I used on the armour is fairly simple and uses Citadel paints: Macragge Blue base, Nuln Oil shade, Calgar Blue highlight and Fenrisian Grey final highlight. Readers with long memories may recognise some of the Rogue Trader era iconography; the chequered helmet stripe indicates a veteran and the small icon to the bottom right of the Ultramarine symbol indicates a ‘beamer’ operator. This seemed like the closest match between the ‘disintegration gun’ the Imperial Marine is equipped with and the established weapon icons from that era.

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That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this slight tangent from the normal marines that I paint and a trip down memory lane! I’ll be back again soon with more Crimson Fists, so stay tuned, and please don’t forget you can find me doing hobby stuff on Twitter here and Instagram here.