Valkyrie
This is a project that was supposed to be a birthday present for a friend. Because I am rubbish (see the chronicle of my Fantasy Daemon army for more on this) I missed the birthday deadline by a hair over two months. A three week trip to the US didn’t help but there was still plenty of time to get the thing done if I’d applied myself. Anyhow. I finished it yesterday and it’s currently on its way to its new owner so here is the project journal.
The Valkyrie is a really nice kit, I like the look of the vehicle and the image that it projects. It’s also made very well, this is a pretty solid kit and is actually fairly heavy despite being all plastic. The different sub assemblies slot together with a high degree of precision and the mechanical joints are very strong.
Before I painted it, the first step was to decide on a colour scheme. The best solution would have been to paint it to match the rest of my friend’s army but, as he’s in a different country and I wanted this to be a surprise, getting a colour match would be a problem. So I decided to pick something interesting and let him worry about the thematic continuity. As Paul is something of a military history buff, I wanted to reflect that in the theme and the obvious parallels to the Valkyrie in the real world are troop carrying assault helicopters like the Mi-24 Hind or the UH-60 Black Hawk. Having looked at a few colour schemes however I found that they didn’t really work for me. 40k is a very idealised setting and so I wanted something that was almost a caricature to reflect that. In the end I decided that my theme would reflect Cold War era Russian jet fighters like the MiG-21 or the MiG-15. I decided against camouflage and went with a flat grey scheme with some dark red to break it up.
