Kill Team: Genestealer Cults

The Cult that Mostly Comes Out at Night.... Mostly

I've always liked the Genestealer Cults, to me they've always seemed like a cross between Aliens and Mad Max. The Kill Team boxed set gave me the excuse to finally try my hand at painting them.  I chose to go with an industrial mining color scheme, accented with Xenos influenced purple and eerie neon green light sources. The skin color is an unhealthy pinkish hue. While I was never a fan of the bright blue & pink classic Genestealers, I ended up using that same scheme - just muted a bit for darkness. After all, this is a cult that mostly comes out at night..... mewstlay.

Almost all of these models are done with inks and shades - only the metallics and the top highlights were done with pure paint. The final product worked so well (this is probably my favorite paint job to date) that I plan to do this on most future projects.

I started by airbrushing everything in a monochrome highlight of progressive greys and whites over black, to give the initial lighting effect. With a 0 brush, applied vallejo metal steel to the metal bits , and highlighted most everything else using my favorite all-purpose highlight color, vallejo Ivory. Then came the inks: brown and sepia ink on the clothing, then alternating layers of thin red, purple, and sepia inks on the skin. This gives kind of a nice living-but-unhealthy hue to the flesh. A blue ink on the hybrid limbs, and several violet and red washes to get the right shade of purple on the torn cloaks.

After this came the shades (GW Shade colors are basically a wash in Lahmian medium, not water) : black shade on the armor and brown & black mixed shade for the clothing. The flesh was not shaded - the inks were sufficient to provide the shadows, and I did not want a Shade to darken the overall skin tone which I was already happy with. GW shades are great but they do take some practice - you need to know beforehand that the entire surface will turn out darker when it dries - even if it doesn't appear so while it's wet. Plan ahead, and start with a brighter base if that isn't desired.  

Lastly, I chose a different method of basing for these guys; using slate basing material for the rocks and a yellowed grass. It works well to give the look of an unforgiving mining planet surface (and unintentionally matched well the Alien Ruins FLG mat they are pictured with!).


The Aberrant models are some of my favorites in the bunch, mutated twisted hulks. I added a few blue 'veins' streaking up through the hybridization limbs.

The Hybrids below. You know Cthulhu had to come join the party.

 

I'm not going to lie - The Heavy rock drillers and rock saws are probably what made me want to paint this Kill Team the most. Absurd but awesome!

The Neophytes

Insert your favorite Aliens quote here:

Now that this Kill Team is done and was so much fun to paint, will this lead me to more Genestealer Cult purchases towards a full 40k army? Damn you Games Workshop marketing geniuses! Kill Team a.k.a. GW's gateway drug....

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.