Raising a Legion – Emperor’s Children – Month 6!

At the start of this year I FINALLY began work on my Emperor’s Children project.
Deadline: The weekend of June 8th for the Deuces Gone Wild doubles event in Victoria B.C. – 3500 points.

I wanted to do this army because when I first got into the Horus Heresy, probably 10 years ago now…. I started up an Emperor’s Children force. Now, this was before 30k was even on Forge World’s radar, before they even started the Badab War kits. Back then you had to cobble together old styles of armour from various GW kits, make your own, or find some of the very very few 3rd party companies making kits. This would have been in 5th ed and I built it using the standard 40k codex as far as units go. I was pretty proud of those models honestly! I put a lot of time and effort into building them up.

These photos are kinda awful, but I took them over 10 years ago…I probably had better ones and others but I will be damned if I could find those now!

I don’t think I ever even got to play with them that much, and eventually the lot was sold and I moved on. The last models I did for these were actually the first steps towards 30k that ForgeWorld did, MKIII marines released as part of the Badab supplement. I still remember seeing the email teaser for these and losing my mind like the rest of the emerging 30k community did.

I moved onto Imperial Fists after this and then later Iron Warriors which you can see in other posts….but I always wanted to return to my start one day and redo this…

 

The inspiration for this army and how I would tackle it again as far as colour scheme comes from mostly this 1 picture below. I love the bright vibrant pink, and you don’t see it often in current EC armies. The official scheme itself moved to a darker more royal purple but, wanting to be a special snowflake, I chose push that brightness instead.

I did my first model in CK Studios 101 airbrush class, a contemptor dreadnought, seen below. I was very happy with the results and it nailed exactly how I wanted this army to look.

However, it would be another 6 months until I finally got around to working on this army properly. I had been collecting and hoarding bits since sometime in 2017. As always for me, it was an event that would get me fired up to finally get this army going, and that event was our local Deuces Gone Wild in June 2019. In January I finally started mass building all my models that I had on hand. I still had to order a few but for the most part I had all I needed for my 3500 point list.

I didn’t start painting until early February. I did find that my test model was a bit different than the contemptor above, but after 6 months and forgetting to write much down in the class I had not remembered 100% on how to do it lol. So there was some relearning here.

Nearly 6 months of work has given me this:

Some of my favourites here are the headquarters, including my take on Fabius Bile:

I still have a few more units to go as of this post, 1 spartan, 2 landspeeders, 1 more contemptor, and the big man himself Fulgrim!!

I always hated the pose of the FW Fulgrim. His model and details are beautiful, but the pose…I had to fix. This led to me hacking up my model and re positioning him..I have to say I am very happy with his results! His final position on the base has changed a bit but I didn’t get an updated picture. I eagerly await painting this model…. He will be the final model I do for this project.

For basing, as you may have noticed is NOT done, I have a pile of bases I got from Russia of dead marines and rubble. As I am doing this as kind of Istvaan themed I will do them dark and ashy which makes the pink pop even more! Which you can see below on this test guy here:

I just got all these drilled out yesterday too so I can magnetize them and put them on Battlefoams Magnaracks.

When the army is 100% complete I will do another post to showcase it all. I am very happy of where I have managed to get with this in a few months time. The downside being essentially any other models have been totally forgotten about as I work on these. I’ll probably take a break once this is done, hitting random projects before I add more to this force in the future!

Random note – the Cover photo for this is an image I knocked up 🙂 I even got it on a t-shirt!

Children of the Emperor! Death to His Foes!