Painting Challenge entry 12: Adeptus Arbites

I'm really having trouble keeping up with the challenge posts here on my own blog :) Oh well, it's all over soon so no need to worry about that in the future :) At least until the next edition of the challenge...

If there is anyone in the Imperium with as large steel ball as an Imperial Guardsman it has got to be an Adeptus Arbites officer. Going up against alien scum might be bad, but at least you have some heavy back up. An Arbites enforcer will have to go down into the bowels of a hive city with little else than his weapon and badge to bring order into the world of gangers and mutants. So with the introduction done these are 5 of the 7 Adeptus Arbites sculpts from the early 90's. Still missing the last two, so if you happen to have them sitting unused I'm more than happy to give them a new home.

Arbites are at least for me some of the most iconic 40k models. Might have something to do with seeing the Stallone Judge Dredd film at a very impressionable age and getting my hands on some of the comics soon after. Beefed up cops with trigger discipline that would make US cops look like girl scouts somehow just seems to work brilliantly. With the same kind of characters in my favorite miniature universe I was instantly sold on the Arbites enforcers when I saw some in Necromunda. Now looking back at some of these older Citadel sculpts and how a lot of the aesthetics is completely copied from somewhere else, it's a bit funny that now they are going after everyone and their cousin for even the smallest IPR infringements.

I wanted the bases to be urban themed to show them battling in the depths of hive worlds with some corrugated steel, rubble and rusty barbed wire thrown in. For the colour scheme I chose the traditional black and red that features quite often on the older artwork and some studio miniatures of the time. It was bit of a tricky combination as I find both red and black quite hard to highlight as red easily tends to turn into orange and black into gray. In the end I ended up just doing a dark gray edge highlight on the black areas and a bit of layering on the red. Turned out rather nicely, though the black is a bit hard to see in the pictures. Taking photos of black minis against a black background wasn't too easy either. I might have to try get some other suitable background sheets for these occasions when the miniature colours are too close to the photography booths background.

With these done I guess it's time to play Necromunda again! I think the last time I played a game was in the early 00's with my old gang, that has sadly been sold with most of my other old minis when I quit the hobby for a few years in my late teens. Still it's never too late to get back in as it's a great game system. And what would be better than bashing in a few ganger skulls while dishing out the Emperor's justice.

Painting has slowed down a bit lately with a very busy schedule at work due to some unexpected visits from a customer. And when I've been painting I've seemed to have had a series of mishaps constantly. My air compressor is acting up with apparently the power button broken so I might have to pull that apart in an attempt to fix the issue or buy a new one. I've also been extremely clumsy as of late and have managed to bump things over on my desk multiple times. As a consequence a few minis have attempted to end their life by jumping on to the floor and I've managed to spill my brush rinsing water cup onto the table a couple of times over the last week. It wouldn't have mattered too much, but on both times I spilled it right on top of some half-finished minis that had their MDF bases soaked up. A couple of them were on sabot bases with cardboard bottoms that started to swell up very badly and were a bit of a pain to fix up.