Kill Team: Catachan Jungle Fighters

Kill Team's release has continued to get me excited to paint small batches of various troops and factions, giving me a reason to do a deep dive into old models that are gathering dust on the shelf. Go take a look at your collection for some old hidden gems that are desperate for a paintjob. I'd never painted Catachans before, so I am thankful Kill Team gave me the excuse - because these guys are fantastic! The old Catachan imperial guard figures are simply hilarious looking. They're a cross between every bad 80's action movie (and by bad, I mean Awesome) and over-the-top video game. This seemed a natural fit to make a Kill Team out of Awesome Action 80's All Stars. 

Catachans are basically three things: Camouflage, Jungle, and huge sweaty muscles. I used a camo technique of airbrushing a basecoat of medium green (vallejo's American Uniform green), then using a 0 size brush to make small repeatable lines, of vallejo Black Green, vallejo Goblin Green, and splotches of Flat Brown. One thing to keep in mind when doing a 3 or even 4 color camo pattern on clothing - do not worry about "realistic" or precise camo patterns. Because you'll also be applying an oil wash for shadows and a light green color for highlights, much of the camo pattern will be in the background of the clothing. You just want to make the color separations take up roughly equal real estate on the figure - the precision of the lines of that real estate isn't important. Think forward to the final product as you're doing it - it may not look perfect now, but after the oil wash and highlight steps, it'll look good.

Catachans' cartoonish musculature is good practice for your skin blending and highlighting techniques. As for the sweaty muscles in the jungle heat, I applied a final layer of satin varnish (though it was tempting to go all-out gloss!) on the skin. For the jungle bases, look no further than the Aquarium Plants section of your local pet store. The kinds of bizarre plastic flora they have there make perfect Catachan plants for cheap. Adding a little here and there to bases goes a long way; I plan to do a series of dedicated jungle scenery bases in the near future with more detail on this.


But in all honesty, the MOST important piece of putting together a Catachan Awesome 80's Action Kill Team is the names! The Kill Team rulebook's name generator doesn't go nearly far enough with all of the over-the-top cliche 80's movie references you can come up with!

Sgt. Dillon 'Action' Jackson and Corporal Chest Rockwell

Cadillac Cooke and Lincoln 'MAC' Steele

Doc Dolph Braddock and THE Bill Duke

Brock Hardstone and Sgt. Lorenzo Lamas

JJ McQuaid and Sgt. Ray 'Double Deuce' Steele

Johnny Blades and Captain Max Stryker (a.k.a Lord Humongous)

Frank TJ Lazer and Major Slade Dudikoff

 Xander Cage and Lt. Mason Storm




The possibilities are endless; need to paint more guys just to give them names...

Snipers in black!

While not technically featured much in Kill Team (ironically), snipers have become a favorite of my space marines in standard 40K games. They're not terribly effective but I think they're a cool presence on the table, one of the few units who really make terrain a factor. I decided to expand the Scouts and Reivers I'm painting for my Raven Guard Kill Team into the scout snipers I had laying around. They were so much fun to paint they got finished fist! Adding in a couple of Vindicare assassins for good measure.

The first challenge to consider is how to represent light and shading on black armor / black clothing. There are several good painting articles online that go into options on how to avoid blacks looking too much like 'grey'. What I chose to do is directional highlight with the airbrush Vallejo's German Grey (which has a blue-ish tint) over the polyurethane black primer. Painting with the airbrush almost entirely from 90 degrees above the model's head, so to speak, so that the light source appears coming from the top only. After this I would highlight the edges and highpoints with a German Grey glaze (adding water to a consistency halfway between a wash and your straight paint) on the brush. Once the glazed areas dried, I'd go back over a smaller highlight area with straight German Grey.

Then the fun part part. For the Raven Guard scouts, I applied several thin layers of a purple ink wash to the figures, until getting the purplish black tone hue I was after. For the Assassins, I did the same except with a blue ink wash. Applying a colored wash to the black will help in the final appearance and avoid the "grey" black issue. While it's difficult to tell from the final products below, it is much easier to see when doing a side-by-side comparison: I will have a more in depth step-by-step using this black technique on the Raven Guard kill team proper.

Using a combination of colored ink washes/glazes and the black oil wash technique, you can achieve highlights that really pop and retain a deep, rich black tone for the shadows.

The Sniper Scouts Camelioline Cloaks gave me an opportunity to try out some basic camo patterns. I wanted a dark, subtle pattern. Using the Badger Sotar 2020 was good for painting small, soft-edged lines of alternating dark green, medium green, and light green camo lines. After applying some Citadel Shade paints and the black oil wash, the final result of the camo became almost too subtle, but I think it works for Raven Guard anyway!

Raven Guard is one of the original Astartes chapters, and is a popular space marine choice for 8th edition 40K given their very useful chapter tactic of being hard to shoot at. Which makes it all the more curious of a choice on GW's part to not produce transfer decals for their chapter insignia - like they do with basically everyone else. In order to get official transfers, you need to purchase from Forge World, which can cost $30 or more for a single sheet! Instead of going down that route, I've been wanting to try home-made transfer sheets (the same problem goes for my still unfinished Imperial Knights of House Griffith - out-of-print official limited edition Griffith decal sheets go for over $120 a sheet on ebay!) . 

The home-printed decals were a success! To try this at home, you'll want to have a laser printer. The blank transfer printer sheets are typically only for laser printers. I have a cheap $50 black and white laser printer and it works just fine. Blank printable transfer sheets comes in packs of 20 sheets, and can be either transparent or white. The important thing to know, even if you have a color printer, is that you can't print white ink on home printers (I'm assuming you don't own a thousand dollar industrial printer that is capable of this, but if you do, ignore this!).

To solve this problem, when you want to print a white decal - such as the Raven Guard insignia - you'll actually print a black "outline" on a white sheet. Then, cut out the shape with a hobby knife inside the edges of the black outline. When you then transfer the decal onto the miniature, using Micro-sol as normal, you'll have a very slight black outline on the model. This is not noticeable when going on to  a primarily black model, such as Raven Guard, but you'll want to paint over that edge anyway. use shading layers and even weathering pigments on top of the decal to make it seamless.

I found the Raven Guard insignia on a google search, there are several print-ready versions out there.  You can do this technique with any other pattern or graphic you wish to make into a home made transfer as well! When I get around to my Word Bearers, they are going to be covered with heretical inscriptions - printing those on home made transfer sheets will save a ton of time and look much better than free hand.

Kill Team: Adeptus Mechanicus

Despite this being the first blog post here in about 6 months, there's been a flurry of painting activity in that span. Trying to keep up with Games Workshop's pace of quality releases is a daunting task! Between trying to finish the Death Guard horde and going all-in on Adeptus Titanicus, the GW release that has me most excited recently is Kill Team - if for no other reason than it has gotten me to paint a variety of different troops and factions. If you're like me, you have quite a few infantry that have been sitting on the shelf, waiting their turn to go under the brush. Well, Kill Team means their turn has finally come!

First up was the Adeptus Mechanicus. Adding a box of Sicarians and a Tech Priest to the Skitarii that came in the Kill Team boxed set gave me enough for a "full" team to paint at once. I prefer to paint full teams at once, or large batches at one time, to keep consistency of appearance.

The Ad Mech's unique weaponry gave the opportunity to add some custom paint jobs you won't find anywhere else in the 40K universe. The taser goads and trans-sonic blades offered some fun choices that appear to be crackling with energy.

Late in the process of finishing these guys, I realized that their burnt-orange robes looked a little dull. One of the most iconic looks for the Adeptus Mechanicus is the block pattern that line the edges of their cloaks. Given the rounded flow and angles of the miniatures, there was no practical way this could be done with transfers, so the patterns need to be hand painted. I decided rather than mask off the areas on all the figures for precise angles (which would take hours to do), I'd free hand the designs. The result turned out surprisingly easy to do, and well worth the time savings! Even if you are not confident with your free hand skills, I'd highly recommend adding a pattern to your Ad Mech cloaks - even a straight line will make them look so much more visually interesting.

Everyone has their favorite colors to represent power weapons and plasma light sources; mine is blue. However a splash of green contrasts so well against the burnt orange that it really makes the eyes and backpacks stick out. I will be experimenting more with OSL lighting techniques in the future, but for now it's enough to make lights sources 'pop' via the contrasting sides of your color wheel choices. 

Hey - Tech Priests don't belong in Kill team! Yes, but you've been staring at me from my shelf forever. 

I also chose to experiment with different basing; the Martian landscapes of the Ad Mech forge worlds are well represented from Citadel's line of textured paints, such as Agrellan Earth and Martian Ironearth. Though you could leave them as-is and unpainted, I chose to add some highlights as well and some burnt sienna/rust weathering pigments. I'm mostly satisfied with the results, but will do some further experiments with these textured paints and other crackle mediums. Just remember when applying, the bigger the blobs, the bigger the cracks.