Showcase: Blood Angels Death Company with Jump Packs (inc. painting guide)

Ripping and tearing their way through www.taleofpainters.com today are the rage-fuelled Death Company. You had better hope you don’t have a passing resemblance for Horus Lupercal, otherwise they want to have words with you! In today’s showcase post, I’ll share photos of my Death Company and a recipe card showing how I painted them.

This item was kindly provided by Games Workshop. Thoughts and opinions are our own.

The Death Company are one of the staples of a Blood Angel army. They’ve had game rules in 40K since 2nd Edition (we’re on 10th edition now).Their last plastic kit came out quite a while ago and was before the Primaris redesign, so Blood Angel fans like myself were hoping for a new kit, something similar to what Black Templar players received for their Crusader Squads. Sadly, we didn’t get a completely new plastic kit, instead we got an upgrade sprue. The upgrade sprue is pretty impressive though and does feature the best Blood Angel “vampire” heads we’ve ever got. As we’re only adding “bits” to existing kits the models don’t look drastically different to standard kits, because of this I decided to have all unhelmeted models and have those incredible head sculpts on show. There are a lot of small hanging ornaments on the sprue, I haven’t used any on my models, but these would help give the models identity as well.

A few weeks ago, I played a 1250pt game of 40k using my Blood Angels against Dunk’s Astra Millitarum. We had a diagonal deployment set-up and some of his units were deployed quite deep.

My Death Company were led by Astorath and closely supported by Lemartes. I skirted the flank of the battlefield and managed to hit Dunk’s infantry unscathed by around turn 3 and wiped them out super fast clearing the objective.

They then wiped out his mortars and artillery pieces before finally succumbing to overwhelming incoming firepower from Dunk’s tanks. They absolutely cleaved through anything they touched with their re-roll to hit special Black Rage rule and their sustained hits rule. Astorath gave them Devastating Wounds special rule, which meant Critical Wounds caused Mortal wounds, but this was overkill against Gaurdsmen. Might have come in useful if I’d charged the tanks I guess.

Instead of running Lemartes by himself, I really should paint up another squad and attached the unit to him. Lemartes is pretty cool and gives the unit Lethal Hits which is automatic wounds. That’s going to be nice against tanks and monsters.

How to Paint Blood Angel Death Company

I really wanted to highlight the vampiric nature of these new head sculpts, so I decided on a desaturated skin colour, devoid of life and empty of the blood for which they thirst, I think this colour choice really helps with giving them their identity, way more than what some sculpted blood angel icons on the armour would have done.

Recently, my painting style was described as soft and neat. I can see that. I like nice, clean and tidy miniatures, it reminds me of Eavy Metal painting in the 90s, and my Blood Angels are an homage to the 90s Eavy Metal versions, with Orangey reds, hazard stripes and the like. I think modern Death Company have gold Aquillors on their chests, so I went and dug out my 3rd edition Blood Angel codex and saw that the old metal Death Company models they painted in 1998 had bone chest Aquillors, so I did the same and I honestly think it looks better. The red saltires that represent Sanguinius’ sacrifice are just painted freehand. I’m pretty ok at painting a straight line, but if you’re new to this you may want to paint the area completely red then use a masking tape cross and then paint the area black. Peeling back the tape should reveal a neat Red Cross.

When I wrote my Dante post, I said I was 99% sure Blood Angels would be my 10th Edition #neweditionnewarmy and with 1250pts painted, I’m well on my way. For the whole of November I’ll sharing more units I’ve painted, more tales from the battlefield and more painting tips, so watch bookmark this page and check back every Thursday!