The Crusader and his sergeants

This week I took a break from the Opus and its flight wing to get some painting done on the Crusader and his sergeants. This is sort of a new-ish project, that has been hanging around for a year or so but it is only recently that spent some time on it and finished the build so that its ready for paint. Last Christmas I got Be-Lakor form my wife, but I already had bought the model (wifi forgot as I did show it to her) but not built it, so I exchanged the duplicate for a Knight Desecrator and got me some War dogs to go with as escorts.

Once in a while I come across some nice paint schemes as I am doing steps for other models. At some point I was doing my rusted metal and a bone white armour panel that I thought look like a nice combo (probably for a Northern Knight before adding the blue chevrons, might have been Entropy). As the Desecrator and War dogs are quite different models from the Knights I used for my Norther Knights I decided to paint them up in a different scheme and decided to try the bone white armour with a black/rusted trim. To give it some colour I decided to go for a brown red detailing on the armour, and that made me think of the Knights Templar, and thus the Crusader and his Sergeants project were borne.

As they will be freestanding models, I decided that I did not need to adhere to any previous standards for modelling nor game rules for that matter. That meant I could go nuts with the bases and make them more extreme than what I normally do. It also meant that I did not need to think to much about legality of weapons etc. As I have a thing for dual wielding I got this idea of a War dog leaping of a building with to chain glaives. That would leave two gatling guns for the other War dog. To get them on the same level the second dog would be crouching on top of a ruin for some better line of sight. Once I got the two bases build I needed to fit the legs to the supports and for the leaping dog it meant cutting things up and re-assemble them in a more leaping pose. For the second dog it turned out that the building was a bit to narrow to be able to do a crouching pose (could probably have done it but it would have required a lot of cutting and building custom parts as the legs are not meant to do this) so instead it is more standing upright. Not really what I was going for but I guess it will do.

I am not really sure about the dual wield thing though, it does not look as good as it did in my head, but I guess that I can always swap the weapons so that they have one of each instead. We will see when we get to final assembly.

Now I need to finish the weapons and get the bases done. Then it is on to the Desecrator (which still needs some build time) to tie it all together.