Showcase: Blood Angels‘ Reiver

Check out today’s post, where I try to justify painting an orange Blood Angel model instead of finishing off my Cursed City set. I also share the paint recipe for the orange armour.

For months I’ve been 6ft deep in painting the undead, summoning more and more painted units to my growing Soulblight Gravelords but then Stahly asked me a question. He said “Are you still going to paint your Part Works’ Imperium Space Marines as Imperial Fists?”. I replied pretty quickly with “I’ve been thinking about painting them a vintage Blood Angel scheme”.

Firstly, rewind a little. What’s ‘Part Works’? Well, it’s a term used for weekly magazines were you build up parts or things for a build or collection. In this case it’s a magazine with models on the front. The magazine is called Imperium. We’re going to be sharing reviews and we will be painting up some of the Necrons and Imperial forces.

Now, back to the Blood Angel. If you’re not aware, Blood Angels can suffer from the red thirst, even for Space Marines they’re exceptionally long lived. In short they are Space Vampires. Painting this Space Marine Reiver model isn’t really that big a departure from my Soulblight Vampires I’ve been painting recently.

You might be wondering why I choose a vintage colour scheme over the more current richer red for Blood Angels. It’s as simple as nostalgia. Back in the 90s, my first model was a Space Marine that I received in a mail away offer. I painted the Space Marine as a Blood Angel and I used my Dad’s Humbrol enemal paints. It was awful, the glossy oil based paints were hard to work with and took forever to dry. It wasn’t long after that I bought a Blood Angel paint set and one of the paints was an orangey red. It was how the 80s eavy metal team had painted theirs too and I idolised the models in White Dwarf magazine. So in short their is an emotion connection for me to Old Skool Sons of Sanguinius.

If you’d like to paint your red armour the same, here is my recipe. If enough people are interested I might do a full tutorial

Red Armour

• Undercoat Wraithbone Spray
• Basecoat Wild Rider Red (a few thin coats)
• Glaze some shading sparingly with 50:50 Contrast Blood Angels Red + Lahmian Medium
• Line armour carefully with Word Bearer’s Red
• Area highlight with water thinned Trollslayer Orange
• Edge Highlight with Jokaero Orange

Not a fan of the orangey red? I got you covered with another tutorial.

Stahly has a great Blood Angel Guide as well.