Providing us with a short respite from the torrent of Nurgle Daemons is this guy – a hero model for the Minotaurs Space Marines that I haven’t done much with for the past few months. He was actually started alongside the second squad of Minotaurs, but I found him a bit hard to finish, mostly due to indecision on his loadout, his backpack, and his cloak.

I knew that I wanted to use this particular figure (torso, legs and left axe arm) as the core of the figure, and I knew that I wanted to top it with a Puppetswar head, but that’s where things got tricky. We’d used him armed with a Storm Shield, so that was fine. The shield came from my little stash of Scibor Spartan bits, and I eventually found an appropriate Space Marine hand was in the current Devastators box, so I had to buy one of those to get the hand. (Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of use for the rest of the box – so much so that I bought two!)

But I wanted to give him the option for a ranged weapon. Probably a Storm Bolter. Then of course, the Space Marine Codex for 8th edition was released, and The Primarch’s Wrath was (re)introduced to the game. (I dunno, I wasn’t playing 40k during the dumpster fire of 6th/7th). Now I had a suitable weapon for Mon Capitan, but how to represent it? He looked kinda-okay with a storm bolter in the Storm Shield slot, but anything larger just looked ridonculous. Luckily the Intercessors boxed set came to my aid, and I stole a fancy-pants bolter from them and attached the straps to a backpack that I’d pilfered from my DeathWatch marines, since it was a little more fancy than the one I’d been working with to that point.

You’ll now also see one of the other issues that held this guy up for so long. The cloak. It was a real “what to do?” problem. I kinda wanted to do a Greek Key pattern, but those are a massive pain in the arse to freehand, especially since you want them to be both straight and consistent. I also considered a giant Lambda in the centre of the cloak. In the end, I decided to do the key because I knew that’s what I really preferred. It took until last week after literally months and months of procrastinating. Because of course, February is about completing neglected models.

The shield looks better in hand than it does here. The red on it is actually Citadel’s “Gemstone” paint, Spiritstone Red over the top of gold. It’s got that nice shiny, translucent effect in hand wheras in the photograph is just looks very flat.

Remember when I was talking about weapon options? This is why I was talking about swapping in a Storm Bolter for the shield. I did this before the Codex came out, when weapon loadouts were a bit more limited. The wrist and shield hand are magnetised, and the initial plan was to also magnetise any ranged weapons. I left it magnetised for the completed model rather than gluing, because I liked the work I did on all of the parts of the model that would otherwise be obscured by that shield, and didn’t want them covered forever. I can of course also add other options to the wrist should the fancy strike me in the future.

So now – finally – the Minotaurs have a leader. I may leave him as a Captain, or he might well be replaced by someone in bigger, nastier Terminator armour down the line, and be demoted to Lieutenant.