HOBBY: Meltagun bikes and Apothecary

I finished painting a few things that I thought I would share:

The bikes are in a scheme I have shared previously. I wanted them to be able to double as Ravenwing but also fit into my regular space marine army. I hate the normal bikes because they just look so stupidly chunky and unwieldy. With the addition of the Ravenwing bits - tail fins, cool headlamps, winged grills - they look much more grimdark, sleaker and they have more character. I also used raven heads for all my guys.

The fluff of my chapter is that they tend to eschew close quarters combat and the more ludicrous elements of space marine strategy like bikes and assault marines, opting instead for mechanisation and a lot of air support. However, for the purposes of competitive play (and because Ravenwing are cool), I need to have some bikes. I thus decided that the chapter would have some marines (e.g. renegades from the Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Dark Angels and White Scars) who just needed to be on a bike or flying around with a jump pack. It would make sense that these companies have a different scheme to the rest of the chapter.

The bike company is called the 'crow-wing', hence all the blue and the Raven, beaky helmets. The men are painted black (over a black basecoat I basically wash them chaos black) then roughly edged with Kantor Blue (v. dark) then thinly edged on particularly elevated spots with Mordian blue (still dark). Some details are pulled out using metals. The eyes are ice blue. I'd like to do more with them but don't have the skill. Some object source lighting effects would do wonders. The bikes are built up in blends from 4 shades of grey and with a black ink as well. You can also see weathering, which I think is critical to achieve the tombstone look. The headlights are mostly just white but with a calgar blue fade out and an ice blue section just inside that. I also paint the grills ice blue just to give the light itself a bit more definition. Spray effects are better but I don't have the tech or the space for it in my room.

The apothecary is converted from the Ravenwing Black Knights model - I stuck some spare Chaos boltguns onto the front. A bit of work but I think it look pretty solid. I can proxy a black knight apothecary with this model if I need to, but if I ever get round to taking Ravenwing to a tournament I will have to get another apothecary with plasma talons. 

I experimented with a few colours for the shadows on the wings but eventually settled on yellow to really make the model stand out and to compliment the gold on the medic himself. I used a pen to do most of the shadows but also experimented with inks. White is a pain and I want to minimise how much of it I paint in the future. If you're planning on doing an all-white army like White Scars I would strongly suggest getting an airbrush and doing conventional shading working up from dark grey. The pen technique is solid but finicky, not ideal and struggles with detail.