Hi all. I've been meaning to post my work on collecting the Celestial Lions chapter on here for a while, but between wanting to wait until I was closer to completeion and also an element of plain laziness, I haven't gotten around to it.
As you probably know the Celestial Lions are actually almost wiped out in terms of being a full sized chapter thanks to a minor disagreement with the Inquisition But I really liked their limited background and the fact they had the balls / naivety / sense of honour to try and stand up to the Inquisition int he first place. All that combined with the fact they presented a minor modelling opportunity to make them at least look a little bit different to the average marine made the choice seem easy. So I began collecting a chapter's worth of them pre third war for Armageddon.
I started this project back in 2008 when GW originally released Apocalypse. Back then they released a battle company collection which included, captain, command squad, 6 tactical squads, 2 assault squads, 2 devastator squads, a razorback and 8 rhinos. The discount overall for me (expecially when ordering it from the UK instead of in Australia) was about 50% off Australian retail at the time per company. So I bought a few of them :P
This is how things began:
And this is the modelling opportunity that I spoke of:
I was going to use the helmets for all of the power armoured veterans in the 1st company, but I may or may not have forgotten about them when I started working with teh new vanguard and sternguard minis, so I have ended up limiting them to a smattering ehre and there. I figure I can make up some fluff to indicate they were the survivors of come noble campaign or something long those lines.
Initially, there was *a lot* of clipping things of sprue and tidying up mold lines etc. I've still missed a few over the course of the project though unfortunately.
The first batch of marines I painted for the chapter as part of a paitning challenge at the local gaming store:
A couple of fun conversions / banners