So the imperial Knight kit is now available for pre-order. It is an great looking model and I will have to have one at some point. I just cant by into one right now as I have sort of a shopping ban at the moment. Well, I will have to do with my Defiler Knights in the mean time. I am making quite some progress with painting of the heavy version of my Knights. The fact that I only use three base colours in the drybrushing compared to five or nine that I have used lately certainly makes an impact. On the other hand, the weathering process is slightly slower then what I do on my infantry.
I did try to make some motif painting on the cockpit of this knight. I had the Idea that a painted skull over the front would look cool, but the shape of the cockpit made it look more like some Ork thing than a nice flashy imperial paint job. So I decided to go with a uniform bone colour instead, which is more in line with how the other mechanicum models are painted any way.
Just to say something short about the Imperial Knight. I do like to model and how it looks. I am however a bit disappointed with the way it is put together. The fact that the legs are not poseable is just strange, as they have put the effort into putting the waist, arms and head on ball sockets. Well that can be addressed with some cutting, but it would have been so easy for them
to split the legs in to two parts instead of one. The other thing is the number of possible builds. The to versions that come in the box are more or less identical, one heavy weapon and a chain blade. As the kit is about the price of the baneblade and is a bout the same size one would have expected more build options, i.e some more weapons alternatives. The weapons should also have been made so that you could build them both for the right and left hand side which also would have made for more possibilities. I suspect that there will be add on kits for this one if it becomes popular, adding other variants as extra sprues that can be bought separately like the extended transfer sheet. Well enough about this and back to what I have... next up will be the armour plating.
This will be a short post with few images as our internet quota is up. In principle I finished of the Heavy Defiler Knight just in time for the release of the imperial knight. Now I have a trio of Knights although they are not compatible with the imperial knight rules as the weapon lay out is quite different. Well that is not a huge problem. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the new kit though. They should be about the same size but not as bulky. The style of the defiler knight is quite different from the new GW design but there are still element that are similar, as the under slung weapons, large shoulder plates and hunchback. Well we will see if I can get my hands on one soon.
I have also put some time into the Opus Magna. I have temporarily assembled it to see how to proceed with the next step which is to build some structure to hold it together but still allowing me to disassemble it for painting. I was quite struck by the shear size of it. I did know how the footprint looked like and I did the inverted assembly before, but it is quite something else when you see it in all three dimensions as it will be when done. There is still much to do before I can even start to contemplate how to paint it.
