+ Sword, Plough, Trowel, Quill! +
+ Happy new year, all – and welcome back to another year of Death of a Rubricist. We'll kick off 2025 with some painted figures, my own contribution to the Hidden Armies challenge event (of which, more soon). +
+ Sporting one of my favourite colour schemes in the War of the False Primarch project, and bafflingly underrepresented (in my view), are the Red Fish, a partisan Chapter that are the creation of @eatdrinkdeath. +
+ The Hidden Armies challenge event, which finished just before Christmas, seemed perfectly fitting to give them a go – though in all honesty, I’ve been working up the courage to tackle them since pretty much the start of +Some Things Are Best Left Forgotten+ got started, as there are so many neat little concepts folded into them that I wanted to include. +
+ The scheme itself is quite tricky to start – it’s based on the sockeye salmon, which becomes a vivid red. I’m not sure I’ve quite got the hue right, but I’m pleased with the pinky-maroon result. It’s a mix of Screamer Pink and Vallejo Black Red (Gal Vorbak red is a good alternative), highlighted up with the addition of Army Painter Mummy Robes (Bleached bone or the equivalent would also work). Over the top of this, I added glazes of Bloodletter Red, one of the old (and vanishing) Citadel glazes. +
+ Company colours are shown by a band on the right arm – a very cool concept that I’ve not seen anywhere else. @eatdrinkdeath’s example marines belonged to the sixth company, which had a yellow band. I followed suit initially, then changed my mind – I thought one-off models like this were a good opportunity to illustrate a different company. +
+ I opted for turquoise (Sotek Green, I think), as the Chapter has some Native American/First Nation themes threaded through, and I thought it’d work well with the rich red. Plus turquoise is a favourite of mine – and I never need much of an excuse to include it.+
+ The chapter icon is a lantern-jawed salmonid – the Red Fish of the Chapter's homeworld. The red circle is easy to lose on the deeper red field, so I added a little visual flourish of turquoise beads/dots – perhaps a personal honorific, or some form of squad marking. You'll spot similar dots and zigzags on the pouches and holsters of the two marines, which also look a bit like coarse Wild West-style leatherwork. +
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+ The addition of the gyrinx served two purposes – firstly, a nod to the Chapter creator's pet cats, and secondly a chance to say something more about the the Chapter, visually. The Red Fish are deeply embedded with the Delphurnean League, their pocket empire (and really more of a commonwealth), and so I wanted to have something that made this more of an action shot. The brief, after all, was for a diorama, so I liked the conceit of the Red Fish working hand-in-glove with the wildlife of their region. +
+ A few extra shots for your (hopeful) enjoyment +
Huh, it's strange that you got First Nation vibes - virtually everything in the Red Fish and Ishim is built out of a future-casting of multiple cultural and ethnic blocks of Central Asia - most humans (62%!) are Asian, it made sense to me that most humans would probably be descended from Asians going forward, especially given that the seat of the Emperor's power was the Himalayas. The ostensible Ishimi tongue is my attempt at blurring Kazakh into something recognizable, but changed by time and conditions - and its only one of the languages spoken there.
ReplyDeleteObviously, sock-eye salmon cast a thematic shadow, but I tried to imagine futuristic people's coming to a place that was essentially mythological (to them) Earth, what they would become in that new context, and then how that would change with events - like The Age of Strife. Break everything down, build it back - vaguely familiar markers might persist, but new things would arise; like the communal living, the clan marriages (which is where the hyphenated last names come from), the focus on cousins as a central relation rather than siblings. And wilder stuff, like, the Long Night made the stars weird, so people stopped using the stars as a point of reference - thus all their customs of divination had to come from other stuff, haruspicy, augury, various tarots, etc.
It dawns on me I wrote all this down, but I stopped engaging with the project bc my life sort of went off the rails, and stayed there. I ended up back on your lovely site bc I've been playing Space Marine II, and was thinking of using your Gatebreaker's scheme for one of my Operations marines. Just ended up reading a bunch of stuff.
Lovely models, again, I adore them, just found the First Nation thing surprising!
- Mike/eatdrinkdeath