Legio Custodes – long time no see!

So, with Khorne’s Eternal Hunt getting all kinds of love lately, some of you may be wondering whatever happened to my Legio Custodes army. And I am, in fact, painfully aware that I have been quite neglectful when it comes to those guys. However, the project’s far from abandoned! As a matter of fact, not only am I still working on the army, but I also have something new to show you today:

First up, you may remember the first two painted models for a squad of jump infantry I posted quite a while ago:

Well, the squad obviously has more members, so these are probably the next Custodes models to be painted for the army:

I couldn’t bear throwing away the beautiful GK flamer, so I used him on this member of the squad: A little flamer action never hurt anyone, after all. On second thought, hurting someone is very much the whole point in this case 😉

Then there’s the standard bearer for the squad:

I used a leftover part from the WFB Empire Knights, which makes an excellent standard for the squad. You’ll notice that the rest of the model also looks fairly ostentatious, as befits a member of the Legio Custodes:

And finally, the squad leader:

Using mostly Sanguinary Guard parts, this grizzled veteran looks like the hero he is. I added a CSM Plasma pistol as well as a company champion’s power sword to make the model’s equipment look especially ancient and well-crafted.

A Venerable Dreadnought’s shinguard was used as the squad leader’s left pauldron:

The engravings are unfortunately the wrong way around, but there was really no easy way to fix this. I still like the overall effect, though.

While these models had been built for quite a while already, I have now cleaned and assembled their jump packs, so they are very much next in line for painting.

I also built some more models for Squad Asklepian, a unit of Custodians wearing older marks of Astartes power armour. My goal was to have every armour pattern from Mk 1 to Mk 6 on display in the squad, while some additional models with suitably old and/or ostentatious looking armour were also drafted into the unit.

So here’s the model in Mk I “Thunder amour” I already showed you a while back:

I am still really pleased with the model, if I do say so myself.

Then there’s the Dark Angels Plasma gunner from the Dark Vengeance boxed set: Since his helmet looked deliciously vintage, I gave him some new arms a while back and added him to Squad Asklepian. Since you last saw the model, I added some additional detail to it:

A small lion figurine was added to the custodian’s chest, thereby creating a winged lion ornament. I also added the bottom of a purity seal, used almost like a loincloth in this case. As you can see, the model will end up as the squad’s standard bearer.

While some of the older armour variants were reasonably easy to approximate, the Mk II “Crusade” pattern had me stumped for quite a while: I’ll be honest with you, I even considered just getting a couple of Mk II bitz off ebay and be done with it. But then, I really wanted to kitbash these out of GW plastic parts. In the end, I did manage to build a model that at least looks reasonably close, though. Take a look:

First of all, I just used the clunkiest bitz I could find for a more heavily armoured and less mobile look. The weapons (taken from the Khorne Berzerker sprue) also look suitably clunky and pre-heresy. The most important part of the conversion is the head, though: It originally came from the WFB Skullcrushers: I had shaved off the Khornate bunny ears to use them on another model, and coincidentally realised that the helmet could work as a Mk. II with a little bit of work. So the eyeslits were carefully converted to a single, cyclopean slit, and the “ears” from a regular Marine helmet were added to the sides.

It may not be a totally accurate representation of the armour design, but I am still pretty happy with it. At least it manages to look pretty archaic, and this whole project was really never about perfect accuracy anyway, but rather about the joy of converting and kitbashing.

Lastly, I still had a Marine wielding a rocket launcher from the “Assault on Black Reach” boxed set knocking around, and seeing how his helmet had a nice, archaic look, I wanted to use him for squad Asklepian. However, turning his 40k rocket launcher into a 30k one proved to be quite a headscratcher. So the model mouldered in my bitzbox for a long time. I was almost tempted to just get one of FW’s rocket launcher arms, but once again, only using plastic GW parts was part of the self-imposed restrictions for this project, so I had to find another way.

And then, only recently, it hit me: I knew which GW plastic parts to use to make that weapon look like an older design. Here’s the finished model:

One of the good old Space Crusade weapons really helped me out here! Granted, it’s far from perfect, but I think it’s a pretty reasonable approximation of the “official” FW stuff, given the rules I had set for myself. As a matter of fact, I am very much in love with this clever (at least for my standard) little conversion at the moment!

Of course I also added a topknot and an additional wing ornament to tie the model in with the rest of the squad.

So here are all four models together, ready to be painted:

This brings the number of models in Squad Asklepian up to nine and means I only need to do a model in Mk IV “Maximus Armour” to complete the collection — fortunately, I already have all the plastic bitz I need for that last Custodian in the squad.

So, as you can see, the work on my Legio Custodes project continues! And I still want to get at least most of the army painted before Forgeworld release their own take on the Emperor’s bodyguard. Because once the “official” models are available, I am pretty sure no one will cast another glance at my own meagre efforts 😉

Anyway, any and all C&C are always welcome! And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!