3rd Company Colors

o/

(if you're geek enough you'll know that that was a 'hello')

So, given that ebay didn't want them, I figured I'd paint a few Dark Hands tactical marines this week (while ignoring the withering stares of the unpainted Aurora marines) They're pretty easy to paint & given that virtually all that's left is already painted, the army itself is now almost painted. All of my painted tactical marines were sold, so I was able to make some adjustments to the colors of the AoBR marines that I have now. I've never really used company or squad markings in any of my prior marine armies, so I thought I'd give that a shot.

I'd already painted the shoulder trim black and added a black helmet stripe, and after looking at the company colors in the SM codex I determined that these would be members of the 5th company, great! At least until I looked at my tanks and saw that they both had large #3s on them...shit. Apparently @ some point in the past I had decided to make them the 3rd company. Okay fine, what color goes to the 3rd company, lemme see.....red.

Red and Catachan green...oh lovely. :-(

Only having three painted, I could repaint the trim & helmet stripe. However that doesn't alleviate the problem of blood red bordering what is effectively olive drab. At this point I figured that I'd just scrap the company color idea when it occurred to me that red goes best with black. Slowly the light bulb flickered on, and I had an idea. If I paint just the right shoulder pad red, that would display the company color, while not touching any green. Here's how they came out:


Success!

After some work of course... So, Blood Red is a notoriously transparent color, and really won't cover Catachan green well. I often use scorched brown under red, so I painted a shoulder scorched brown & then blood red. Ya know, blood red doesn't cover scorched brown too well either. In fact, it takes about four coats. Actually, now that I think of it, I use Terracotta as an intermediate color between the scorched brown and blood red. However at this point I had a new dilemma, I had taken a simple paint job and added in half a dozen coats of paint for a friggin shoulder pad.

Digging through the paint box I came across the Tallarn Flesh foundation paint. One coat of that covered the green, and one coat of red covered that as well as 4-5 coats of red covered the brown. So my idea was saved. Squad numbers were easy enough, just put it on the nice and large tactical arrow on the shoulder pad.

So all in all I think they came out well without being too complicated. The red also brightens them up a bit.