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Today I finally present you my reworked Ultramarine Assault Squad. Originally, these were models I painted years ago, so they didn’t match the standard of my more recently painted Ultramarine models. Thus I wanted to improve their paint jobs, but what I thought of being a couple of evenings’ work, turned out to take almost three weeks. Granted, it were three weeks where my day job has been very demanding with lots of overtime and weekend work, but it really felt like a never-ending story.

Most time-consuming to fix was the blue armour. I almost completely removed the final light blue highlight and added it anew, thinner and more evenly. There were also lots of edges where there should have been highlights by logic, but weren’t. Guess I didn’t seem to care back then. I also improved or added highlights to the gold, black and metal areas.

I refined the freehands, toos. On the shoulder guards, I removed the freehanded chapter symbols completely and replaced them with transfers. Back then, I didn’t add squad markings, so that was something that needed to be done, too.

Last but not least, I added patches of brown static grass to the base to make them more interesting visually. Something I wasn’t able to change were the often visible joints and seams. The mold quality of the Assault Squad kit isn’t really that great compared to recent kits, and back then when I assembled the models, liquid green stuff wasn’t available. When I was taking a closer look at the metal Vanguard Marine I use as the Squad Sergeant, I also realised that GW’s metal castings were far from perfect, too. Something I didn’t notice until the Finecast debacle…

Above you can see some very old pictures of the squad, before it was reworked. The pictures are rather small and the colours are slightly off, so it’s hard to see what has changed. But when you hold the models in your hands, the difference is enourmous. There are a couple more squads in my collection that need to be reworked, a labour of love that I want to distribute over the year.

Do you bother improving your older paint jobs?