To start again after my glorious return to the game, I painted two simple five-man scout squads. Scouts are quite useful if you’re just starting out. They’re cheap points-wise, but they can scout and infiltrate. They are a troop choice so they can take objectives.
The first was a squad of the old metal scouts with bolt pistol and close-combat weapon. I did only a few small modifications:
The veteran sergeant originally had a chainsword. I replaced this with a power sword to give him a small boost in effectiveness. First I cut off of the blade just above the vents and removed the part next to the vents. I then cut a power blade from my bitbox in shape to fit around the grille and pinned it in place. I filled the edges up with modelling putty and sculpted it into shape.
Other than that, a few of the models had some battle-scarring added to their armour plates. This was done by drilling a shallow hole into the model and scoring the edges of the hole with a sharp knife.
For painting, I went with an urban camo theme. I decided on this for most of my army when third edition Codex:Cityfight came out. I feel it’s a good look for a 40k army, and suitable for many situations. It also meshes well with the gray basing-style I’m using.
The second squad is a fire-support unit with sniper rifles and a heavy bolter. Again, these are the old metal models. The normal snipers received no special treatment aside from a decent base and some scarring. I did do some converting on the sergeant and the heavy-bolter trooper though.
I wanted the sergeant to have a sniper rifle too, as a close-combat sergeant in a sniper unit seemed a bit pointless. I started out with the Sergeant Naaman special character and removed his chainsword. From ebay I obtained a fancy looking rifle, for which I made a scope using the scope from a space marine tactical squad combined with a laspistol barrel (bigger is better, right?). I used the hand from a space marine biker to grip the weapon, thinned out a it to match the smaller size of the scout. Since the hand was originally faced palm-down, I used putty to rotate the greave to a palm-forward positioning, and repositioned the skull on the back of the hand to match.
The heavy-bolter trooper was the only one in the squad without a camo-cloak, so I used putty to make one. The basis was made using ProCreate, and I then used liquid green stuff to fill up some rough patches. I left most of the detail on the left and right (sword and ammo belt) open, so the cloak is less all-compassing than those of the snipers, but it still makes the scout fit in better with the rest of the squad.
The snipers were painted in the same urban camo scheme as the first squad, although the cloaks make it more visible than when only the legs and arms are painted. Especially from the rear, obviously.
Here’s the full album with pictures of the two squads:
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