Back in 2023 I painted five Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs. It was the third unit for my brand new Blood Angel army, by the time I’d finished them, I thought to myself “never again!” They took too long and I didn’t enjoy it. Fast forward nearly two years and I’ve recently finished another five, find out in today’s blog what changed my mind and I’ll also share how to paint them.

Models were kindly sent to me by Games Workshop. My thoughts and opinions are my own.

I guess I should address why I didn’t enjoy painting them, well I mentioned above they took too long. In recent years I’ve been trying to find the balance of nicely painted and painting armies. I’ve also gone down the rabbit-hole of trying to paint neat and bright in a 90s style. Any little mistakes show up like crazy on this style, there’s no where to hide like there is with a grim dark heavily weathered model, so I have to slow down, concentrate more and fix stray brush mistakes.

During the 2023 “ordeal” I was batch painting five at a time and when you’re working on several models and you’ve slowed down to be neater you just feel like you’re not making any progress.

Why, in 2025, have I just painted another five?

Wargaming is the reason. I played a 1500pt game against Dunk and afterwards I needed to make big changes! I’m a painter, not a list writer, my army was mainly made up of centre piece characters I’d painted like Astorath, Dante, Lemartes. It was so character heavy I lacked bodies. Since November 2024 I’ve been rectifying that and I’ve painted 10 Scouts, 5 Devastators and now another 5 Assault Intercessors.

This time around, I knew what I had to do to achieve my goals of fast but neat painting and that was to get efficient. In 2023, I just assembled the Assault Intercessors completely and sprayed them red. Which meant I had to go over them and paint all the helmets and chainswords, white and then yellow. This time around, I used sub-assemblies and masking tape.

Having the shoulder pads, helmets, pouches all painted separately not only made me efficient but I felt like I was achieving something. I could quickly paint all the pouches to completion and feel like I was step closer. It’a a bit of a juggling act and I overstretched myself by working on 10 Scouts at the same time but it honestly saved me weeks of painting.

How to Paint Blood Angels

Painting five models and then painting another 5 nearly two years later to complete the squad is a bit of a gap. I cannot stress this enough, that it’s important to write down your paint recipes when army painting. I make these recipe cards for myself as much as sharing the knowledge with you guys. They’re invaluable when it comes to consistency.

I actually have a long-form version of the above Blood Angel painting guide that goes into more detail, you can view that here.

Now all that’s left, is to meet up with Dunk with my 10 Assault Intercessors and drop the Hammer of Wrath on his Imperial Guard in our next 2000pt game.