If you’ve followed me for any sort of time you know that I’m a sucker for two things.
90’s era Blood Angels
NOSTALGIA.
It’s part of the reason why I still paint miniatures. It triggers the same happy receptors in the brain that fired when I was a kid. Most kids have Luke Skywalker. Others have Optimus Prime. Some have my little pony.
My formative inspiration was the 2nd edition Codex Imperilais.
I POURED over every inch of this book. I still have it on the shelf, battered and well-thumbed. The black and white artwork was like nothing else I’d seen. It was uncompromising, dark, and atmospheric. One of the pieces that held my attention more than most was Mark Gibbons Blood Angel.
The same strings are plucked whenever I read Aaron Dembski Bowden. I have no idea if this is true, but it feels like he has a similar relationship with the source material. every narrative I read of his reminds me of a detail I loved as a child or explains something that has always been part of the universe, but not explicitly expanded.
Master of Mankind introduced Zephon, the broken Angel of the IXth. It wasn’t until years afterward that I connected that character with the Mark Gibbons artwork. It’s not explicitly him, but the connection was made, and the model was planned.
Zephon was described as wearing MKIII power armour with a jetpack framing his body like wings. I would have dearly loved to have used the old Raptor kit, but the MKV jetpack gave me the opportunity to do more freehand. The basis of the model comes from the Iron Hands MKIII squad with a second edition bolter and chainsword.
The full tutorial for this was given away to patrons for the 2020 Advent Calendar give Away. You can get access to them today (included OSL flame bases, Telemon Dreadnought, purple marble, cyberpunk skin tones and a lot, lot more)