A man’s soul needs to be a fortress.

Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists

I’m back again with another MKVI Space Marine, but this time it’s not a converted Primaris Marine! Brother Lydus is built straight from the new(ish) Legion MKVI Tactical Squad kit. Just like my Custodian from a few weeks ago, this Imperial Fist is an individual test model for another upcoming project.

Modelling & Painting

I haven’t done a lot of conversion work on this model, by my standards at least. I’ve just given it the very basic LED helmet eye lens treatment, as detailed in my LED Eye Lens tutorial. As this model was so straightforward to make, I took the opportunity to document the process and refresh my LED Eye Lens tutorial. It is essentially the same, with a few minor improvements and clarifications, as well as new, clearer photos. I know from my website stats that this particular tutorial is one of the most visited pages on my website, especially as many of the other more complex tutorials reference it as a starting point. It’s a few years old now so I thought it was worth bringing up-to-date. I haven’t deleted the original August 2018 version though, that is now archived here in case anyone still wanted to reference it.

Previously I’ve used blue LEDs for Imperial Fists, but I decided to switch to red for this project. This is for two reasons: firstly it more closely matches the current Horus Heresy artwork for the Imperial Fists, and secondly I find the red LEDs are more vibrant than the blue equivalents, especially on camera.

For the paint scheme, I mostly stuck to my traditional yellow recipe, but with a few tweaks, detailed below. I decided to try applying the shades slightly later in the process, but also applying different levels of shades in different areas of the yellow armour to give a bit more depth to the large smooth surfaces that characterise MKVI plate. The whole miniature was undercoated with Chaos Black spray.

• Yellow Armour
• Averland Sunset basecoat
• Yriel Yellow layer (2-3 thin coats)
• Casandora Yellow shade
• Fuegan Orange shade in darker areas (slightly watered down)
• Mournfang Brown shade in deepest recesses
• Yriel Yellow edge highlight
• Flash Gitz Yellow fine highlight
• Dorn Yellow fine highlight on sharpest edges
• White Scar dot highlight on sharpest edges

• Black Armour
• Chaos Black basecoat
• Eshin Grey highlight
• Dawnstone fine highlight

• Silver Metallics
• Leadbelcher basecoat
• Nuln Oil shade
• Stormhost Silver highlight

• Martian Base
• Mournfang Brown basecoat
• Martian Ironearth technical paint
• Reikland Fleshshade shade
• Jokareo Orange drybrush
• Lugganath Orange drybrush

The Martian base was a bit of an experiment, but I’m mostly pleased with how it turned out. I think I’ll go a bit less heavy on the drybrush stages next time. But it still provides a lovely contrast for the yellow armour of the Imperial Fist.

While I was carrying out experiments with the model, I also decided to have a go at making the eyes look better when the LED is switched off. These models spend the majority of their time in my display cabinet with the electronics turned off to save batteries, so I thought it might be nice to not simply have ‘blank’ resin eyes. I applied a very thin glaze of red all over each lens, followed by a thin glaze of orange towards the bottom of the lens. Lastly, a very watered down dot of white in the opposite corner. As you can see in the images below, it works very well – the off-white colour of the resin is an excellent base for the glazes, and the glazes are still thin enough that it doesn’t noticeably effect the LED glow.

That’s it for this week. The plastic Legion MKVI kit is absolutely wonderful – although I might be slightly bias as a real ‘Beakie’ fan boy – and I’m looking forward to revisiting it in the very near future. Anyway, as always, thanks very much for reading, and please don’t forget you can also follow my work on social media at Twitter, Mastodon and Instagram. I’ll see you again soon for some more LED miniatures!