Thousand Sons Dressing

This isn't what you think. I haven't been sucked into 40k. This is not the beginnings of a new army. You can all go about your business.

For seven editions, I've successfully dodged the grim dark lure of the far future, but 8th Edition was just too much for me. Time to turn and face the strange.

I can't quite remember what prompted me to select Thousand Sons when I finally chose an army. I had a shortlist of at least half a dozen, and my motives are sketchy in those heady days of summer, but I do remember being quite taken with this chap, back in the old Rogue Trader days.

I was Rubric before it was cool.

Also, I knew I wanted an elite army, so I could get it ready for the table in a reasonably quick time. So that ruled out some of the ones I was eyeing up: Imperial Guard, Tyranids, Orks (although the Orks are never truly vanquished - more on them later).

What better than a couple of boxes of Thousand Sons? All that durability and low model count, and I could be off to the races with less than a score of models!

It didn't hurt that I had already been bitten by the gold-and-turquoise bug after painting up my small Age of Sigmar Tzeentchians (note that they all have the same bases for some lovely cross-pollination possibilities).

However, it turns out I was somewhat deceived (my own fault in the choice of patron god) by how quickly these guys could get painted. The Rubric Marines have been sitting on my painting table for the better part of a month.

My slow pace has been a combination of:

• Moving house (which involved, more importantly, relocating my painting desk)
• A greater-than usual level of painting-table distraction. My ardour for Age of Sigmar hasn't lessened and I still have two new armies in progress.
• Having to cut in blue paint between all that gold filigree is DAMN FIDDLY!

In fairness, once all that armour was done, adding the final details was a pretty brisk process. Being a 40k newbie, I didn't try anything too ambitious and stuck fairly devoutly to Warhammer Duncan's guide:

• Gold armour: Retributor Armour base, Reikland Flashshade wash, Golden Griffon drybrush
• Blue armour: Thousand Sons base, Nuln Oil wash, Thousand Sons layer, Ahriman Blue layer
• Straps & gun barrels: Ironbreaker base, Nuln Oil wash
• 'King Tut' headdress: Blue (as armour) + Yellow (Averland Sunset base, Cassendora Yellow wash, Yriel Yellow layer)
• Loincloths: Celestra Grey base, Drakenhof Nightshade wash, Ulthuan Grey layer
• Bolter: Skavenblight Dinge base, Nuln Oil wash, Dawnstone drybrush
• Eyes: Ulthuan Grey base, Biel-Tan Green wash
• Gems: Stormhost Silver base, Waystone Green glaze
• Icon of flame: Ulthuan Grey base, Nihilakh Oxide wash, Coelia Greenshade layer
• Sorcerer's cloak: Screamer Pink base, Nuln Oil wash, Khorne Red layer 

I had to use actual layering, and tried out gemstone paint for the first time. This new universe is pushing me, I can tell you.

And decals! I haven't used decals since an unfortunate foray into Airfix at the age of 12.

(applying them hasn't gotten any less nerve-wracking)

Tricky as it was to reach all the nooks and crannies of the backpacks and shoulderplates, I did possess the foresight not to attach the weapons until everything was painted (or Khorne alone knows how I would have painted the chestplates even half-decent).

In fact, I got cocky during the assembly and magnetized a lot of the weapon options at the wrist, so I could switch between bolter and warpflamer (I'm not sure a squad of ten warpflamers would be very practical, but they'd be a hoot to Overwatch).

As it turned out, while the unpainted models could switch around their weapons snugly, that extra millimetre of paint made them such a tight squeeze that I was starting to despair of ever getting them there in there first place.

Only with a great scraping of paint, and possible breaking off the arms would I be able to change over the weapons. So magnetized or not, the weapons you see are the ones they've got. If I want to change it up, I'll just have to deploy my imagination.

A more successful use of magnets came with the big boy, above. I can equip one of the Rubrics with a Reaper Autocannon when their number reaches ten (this is my only quibble with the unit - surely it has to be nine?). But the other option is to combat-squad them into groups of five, each led by a Sorcerer - but the box only allows you to build one.

Since that means the Autocannon marine and the second Sorcerer are mutually exclusive, I magentized the arms (at the shoulders this time - I wasn't going to mess about with the hands on this one) and gave him a spare Force Stave from the Sorcerer's pack.

Unfortunately, I makes him look like he's trying to fish his hat our of the duckpond,

So I mothballed that stave, and gave him another set of Sorcerer's wargear. That works better, and now I can add a Warpflame pistol to my Warpflamer squad of fiery death.

Last but not least, the Aspiring Sorcerer himself. And if I understand the fluff correctly, the only model in the unit with a will of his own, and not condemned to be a dust-filled automation.

He even moves 1" further than the rest of his squad. As rules go, this is fairly pointless and very characterful - and therefore my favourite kind of rule.

His cloak even gets a splash of crimson, to hearken back to the glory days.

So that's the unit done. I won't deny it was a bit of a slog, but I love the final effect and reckon I've learned a few tricks to speed up the works. 

For now, they're all the Rubrics I'll have - at the moment, I'm having too much 'kid in a candy store' kind of fun to paint things in a tactically astute way (did I mention the Orks?)

I should have 1,000pts (one for each son) before Christmas. Hardly a massive force, but crucially ... our Warhammer 40,000 gallery now has an army not painted by Kraken (9:1 and counting).