Concept
I try to have all my marines interchangeable so that tactical marines can be for blood angels, dark angels, ultramarines, imperial fists, assault marines without packs can be space wolves or assault marines, terminators can be strike force ultra, deathwing or space wolves, bikes can be ravenwing or white scars and assault marines can be blood angels or ravenguard. I tried to keep to that approach for my death company (and my Sanguinary guard, who will be showcased in a few weeks). I had to get a paint job that made them distinct from Vanguard but meant that they could be used as assault marines in a pinch and not look totally out of place.
I settled on a statue kind of look, which things with the tonne of death iconography throughout my marines and throughout the blood angels range. With my bikes being 'crows' and having a graveyard aesthetic it worked quite nicely to have the blood angels models look like statues. This means that if my bikes and assault squads are ever fielded together (in an apocalypse game for example), they will look cohesive.
The statue look also fits quite well with the death company theme I think, because it's like the guys have already been interred.
For the company I originally wanted to do just shades of dark grey but after I had finished that layer I felt like there wasn't quite enough pop. You can see it below. The guns were done leadbelcher. The armour was drybrushed with successive and succesively lighter layers of mechanicus grey, codex grey, 50/50 codex grey and fortress grey, fortress grey and space wolves grey, then the whole model was black washed.
To give the model a bit more pop I decided to give the details, especially the wings, a different colour of stone. The Sanguinary Guard will have this colour scheme done in reverse I think, with the pale stone base and their details done in dark stone. For these layers I based karak stone, flesh washed then did a few layers moving out towards the edges of the wings using deneb stone and 50/50 deneb stone and white.
I had a go at doing gems on these guys. First I tried the explanation from the space marines codex painting guide - black base, crescent of red, thinner crescent of orange, even thinner crescent of yellow and then a dot of white in the opposite corner. It worked out pretty well on the gems but the warm colours didn't really fit with the rest of the colour scheme, so I swapped to pink crescents.
For the eyes though I stuck with the red, orange, yellow approach to give them a fiery look.
The guns I left metal. I tried one with half the gun black edge highlighted in grey, but I think I prefer the bare metal look. Where there were details (like this wing), they were brought out using blends of chainmail and mithril silver moving towards the edge of the wings.
For the purity seals I went with a tallarn flesh base washed yellow (Seraphim Sepia is actually a yellowy brown, which is perfect). I then went back with tallarn flesh, 50/50 Tallarn/bleached bone and then finally straight bleached bone. This was a bit of a new approach and in hindsight I prefer my other method, which is to base a medium brown, go straight to bleached bone over most of the seal (so the brown is just in the recesses) and then highlight peaks and edges with bleached bone mixed 50/50 with white. I think that gives a more realistic colour and helps the seals pop from 3 feet away. You can see a similar effect on the cords, which are based dark brown and then highlighted medium brown (see last image). Script is drawn on with a micro felt tip pen. Make sure you give it time to dry (an hour or two) and then go straight over with matt varnish. If you don't the chances you will smudge the ink with use are very high and it will ruin your seals.
I'm using my standard basing procedure which is a mix of small slate pieces and various grasses (grass, moss and tufts) over an earth brown base. I think it contrasts well with the main model without being so stark as to draw attention away from the main man.
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