Sons of Malice: A Test Model

The Sons of Malice are an unusual space marine chapter with very little cannon history associated with them. They're rumoured to be the followers of the Chaos god Malal -- the Chaos power who wants to destroy the others. From time to time in various White Dwarf magazine articles and Chaos Marine codex, they've been pictured and spoken about in light terms; presumably so as not to tread on the feet of the people who own the intellectual property rights to Malal (which is not Games Workshop from what I hear). But I digress.

The paint scheme for the Sons of Malice (I almost wrote Sons of Malal there) is always depicted as black and white. Although I've sometimes seen in halved, the most common form is a quartered black and white painting scheme -- very heraldic and obvious to those that know who the Sons of Malice actually are. I decided that I wanted to paint a few of these up, primarily as I got very bored with the Night Lords colour scheme that I was planning to use on my chaos chosen load-out. Moreover, I'm also wanting to create a kill team for the new Battle Missions and wanted a unique colour scheme: I think the Sons of Malice fit the bill very well.

Hence, I decided to try out painting a single chaos space marine in the quartered black and white colour scheme. Now let me tell you, black and white are two of the top three colours (along with yellow) in the category of "hardest to paint and get looking right", as can be seen from the From the Warp archive. There are a number of good tutorials out there for painting both black and white. I tried to digest them before I set about painting this model. Sadly for me, I'd already undercoated the model in black. In hind sight, grey would have been a superior colour to use.
I first decided to work on the white portions of the armour. To begin with, I basecoated these regions in dheneb stone. I was careful with this layer to leave a little bit of the black undercoat showing through around the edges. I then gave it a wash of diluted black and allowed it to dry off. The next stage was to apply a thin (i.e. diluted) wolf grey. I then blended this colour with skull white and progressively added diluted layers over smaller and smaller portions of the white armour-work. A couple of pure skull white highlights were added as a final step. The black portions meanwhile got a small coat of grey (=black plus white) in selected areas (the back pack, portions of the legs and arms). This was washed as above and then highlighted to a lighter grey colour around the edges of the armour.

Only with that all done did I start on the trim. The trim is picked out carefully in boltgun metal and highlighted in off-white. The eyes and horns were painted with a wet blending of reds and oranges. Whilst the feet were given a dusting of brown colours to simulate them having trodden through mud and general debris. The bolter on the other hand was basecoated in bolt gun metal, washed in black, highlighted and given gold accents on the arrows.

Overall, I'm very happy with the outcome of this model and am now thinking about making a kill team of Sons of Malice.