This week I’ve added to my growing Silver Stars Kill Team with a heavy bolter gunner. As regular readers may recall, the Silver Stars are the mysterious chapter leading the Partisan forces in the War of the False Primarch. This miniature will take the role of ‘Heavy Intercessor Gunner’ in my Silver Stars Angels of Death Kill Team.

Modelling

As with all my previous Silver Stars, this marine is built using a Primaris marine body and legs. The arms, pauldrons, backpack and heavy bolter are from the previous version of the plastic Legion MkIII Tactical Squad set. To give the legs a more “antiquated” look, I added Mixed Micro Glass Balls from Green Stuff World as armour studs on the legs. 

The head is from the Horus Heresy Melee Weapons Upgrade Set. As I’ve mentioned previously, all of my Silver Stars are either wearing helmets or rebreather masks that cover the lower half of their face. I want the members of the Kill Team to be anonymous to add to the sense of mystery surrounding their chapter.

The LED techniques used here are based on my Simple Muzzle Flare tutorial, only using a TruOpto OSHR7331A-KL 1.8mm Yellow LED and a 20 ohm resistor instead of the smaller 0805 SMD chip LED specified in the tutorial. I used a larger LED so that the heavy bolter muzzle flare was larger than the bolt gun muzzle flares that already exist on other miniatures in the squad. You can see how the LED was integrated into the heavy bolter in the images above. A larger LED also requires a larger muzzle flare sculpted around it. As mentioned in Steps 14 – 16 of the tutorial, the Water Splash Effect Gel used to construct the muzzle flare should be built up in thin layers and allowed to dry between applications. This is especially true for this larger flare.

Painting

I don’t have anything new to discuss on the painting techniques used for the miniature, as I’m using a well establish recipe that I’ve used for the rest of the Kill Team. You can find my Silver Stars paint recipe in this post, plus this post which expands on techniques for painting Silver Stars insignia.

Back in January, I mentioned that one of my hobby goals for 2025 was to finish my Silver Stars kill team. While I now have six members of the team – which is technically enough – there is still one final member of the team on the way…

As always, thanks very much for reading, and please remember you can also find me sharing my work on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. I will leave you with a shot of the Heavy Gunner and his Marksman battle brother engaging the enemy in a deadly firefight!