Iron Snakes: Ancient Nestor Progress

Hi folks,

The past couple of days I have been working on my Iron Snakes Contemptor "Nestor", or more accurately, Nestor's pants. There were a few things I wanted to achieve with the legs, which I will run through. I'll leave it up to you to decide if I was successful or not ;-)

Viewed from the left, the outer left leg has a small shield in the colours of the Dark Angels 3rd Company. I did this to tie the Dreadnought in with the primary detachment in my collection. Lore-wise, it is a gift from the Dark Angels to their allies on the eve of a major engagement. You can also see the snake symbol on the inner right leg. I actually selectively undercoated that part white, then covered it with green tape before doing the rest in black. As you can see below, the first outline of the snake (Step 2) was very rough, which I then had to tighten up with more accurate brush strokes.

Step 1: "Mummification"

Step 2: "Finger-painting"

Step 3: "Et voila!"

Viewed from the right you can see an Iron Halo and Imperial Laurel honour badge. Again, lore-wise, these were awarded to Nestor after the battle of Penses Hive. On the inner right leg you can see a lambda symbol painted on the armour, to represent Nestor's previous assignment to Squad Lakodeme. I have a few little bits to touch up before I can happily move on; the joys of high-res miniature photography!

Sometime during the week I received my order from Scibor miniatures, which is timely as it includes the basing kits I want to use on Nestor. Here are a few pictures of what I got, with an Iron Snake figure for size comparison, and some musings about how I intend to use them.

Too small even for infantry, these are going to be used for Deathwing themed objective markers. Who wants to go hunting for Deathwing wargear in a genestealer cult temple... ? Anyone... ?

I'll use these ones for my Master of the Forge and Captain. I'm thinking the one on the left will be good for the Master of the Forge, as it will accommodate the servo-harness better.

Holy moly! I'm hoping one of these fits nicely under Nestor's foot. Another will definitely fit the base of my Storm Eagle. The others are destined for (glorious) terrain pieces.

So I whacked a few of the Spartan ruins under Nestor's foot to see what would fit and two seemed suitable. After ummming and ahhhing for half an hour I polled both on Google+. So far, the combination below is the most popular, sitting on 67%.

I'm still playing with the angle of the ruins at this stage; it will probably follow the curve of the base in the final product.

It also happens to be the one I am the most happy with, though I am a little sad the head doesn't have a plume. Basing this dreadnought is going to require a fine balance between looking good and not clashing with or drawing attention away from the figure itself. Simple right?

See you across the table,

M4cr0