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.

To begin with, I assembled the main fuselage without the top and the cockpit as separate pieces. I was going to detail the interior and this is the easiest way to do that. To make sure the seams were nice and tight I rigged up a set of clamps with elastic bands and paintbrushes while the glue dried. The top isn’t glued in here, it’s just in place so that when it does get glued in there will be no gaps.

Because I was going to use a regular brush rather than an airbrush or spray-gun to paint the outside I could paint these parts first before the basecoat went on. Obviously if you’re going to spray yours then you’ll need to get that done first before you tackle interior detail. I wanted the inside to look used and dirty, as if this was a vehicle that had seen service and not one fresh off the line. I painted everything Fortress Grey and then washed it pretty heavily with Gryphonne Sepia.  This was highlighted pretty roughly then washed again with a thinned down Ogryn Flesh before the details were painted in. The anti-slip ridges on the floor were painted Boltgun metal and very lightly highlighted with Chainmail.  Finally the edges of the rear hatch were painted yellow in preparation for hazard stripes.

I was going to paint the cockpit before fitting it into the nose section but after a trial dry-fit I found that it made practically no difference to access with the paintbrush so I stuck that assembly together as one piece. Originally the crew were going to be wearing green flightsuits but it didn’t look right so they ended up Fortress Grey as well.

Once the fiddly work was done It was time to lay down a nice smooth basecoat. I used a Citadel Tank Brush and it’s perfectly possible to get a nice smooth finish with this without brush marks or patchiness. The key is to paint on a lot of very thin coats. The first three or four will look pretty horrible, the colour will be patchy, you’ll have streaky brush strokes and the undercoat will be showing through (this is why I started with a white undercoat). After about six coats however it will be silky smooth and with good colour depth. Once the basecoat was done I outlined all the raised plates and rivets,  painted in all the panel gaps and recesses with Gryphonne Sepia to provide shading before smoothing the lowlights out again with more Fortress Grey. This whole process is pretty straightforward to describe but takes a lot of time. Obviously with this many coats, it’s absolutely critical that each layer is as thin as possible otherwise detail will be lost and the paint surface will look lumpy and crusty. Because the doors fit into a channel between the wing roots and the fuselage, you’ll need to paint the outside of the main fuselage and the doors separately before attaching the tail booms and the wings, otherwise the doors will get in the way when painting the sides of the fuselage and the backs of the doors will be difficult to paint.

Before attaching the wings I had decided that I wanted to magnetise the different weapons systems including the nose weapon so I cast about for various ways to do that. If I ever build another one of these I will do this differently but here is what I did. Firstly I cut out the centre of each of the underwing pylons and fitted in a cubic magnet which was held in place with greenstuff. More greenstuff filled the gap in the pylon once that was dry.

The rocket pod was easy to magnetise as it’s a hollow drum – I simply stuck a magnet inside it and held it in with more greenstuff. As it happened I messed up slightly and failed to put the magnets in straight so the rocket pods have a tendency to twist off centre. I could have fixed this with a small fin of plastic to fit the channel in the pylon but I didn’t have time for this in the end – Paul, if you read this, stick a thin sliver of plasticard down the length of the pods to solve this problem. The missiles were trickier however, for a start they were solid and the available volume to hide a magnet was quite small. What I ended up doing was cutting them in half crossways then drilling out a slot to fit a flat magnet in before putting the two halves back together. This was less than ideal for several reasons. Firstly it’s hard to precisely drill out a flat slot of that size and still have the two halves line up nicely once the magnet is in place – the magnet was only slightly smaller than the diameter of the missile body so there wasn’t a lot of room for error. Secondly the magnet is quite a distance from the pylon magnet so it needs to be quite powerful, this makes it tend to try and snap itself up instead of sitting straight in the pylon. It does stay in place but if knocked it will likely move out of position. What I should have done is to put two smaller magnets in each of the pylons closer to the recieving edge and then put two similar magnets into the fins of the missiles and the outside surface of the missile pod. That would have solved a lot of the issues I had.

The nose weapons on the other hand were very simple to magnetise. I simply cut a piece of plasticard to fit in the nacelle beside the cockpit and greenstuffed a magnet to that. This was then stuck in place with the magnet behind the plasticard (to prevent it from pulling itself out). A hole was drilled into each of the weapons which a furniture tack fitted into and that is easily a strong enough connection to hold the nose weapon in place. You can see the heads of the furniture tacks in the picture below.

Once I’d finished cutting things about and painting sub-assemblies it was time to put the whole thing together and make it look like a Valkyrie. This was also achieved with lots of elastic bands. At this point everything was stuck in place except for the clear canopies. These would be ruined by the spray varnish so they had to stay off until after that was done.

The flat grey looked smooth but dull so I broke up the monotone with some red accents. The red was a mixture of Scab Red and Blood Red and was applied to the canopy frames, the rear stabiliser and a section of the tail-booms. The two pictures below show the difference with the flat grey basecoat and then with the Gryphonne Sepia lowlights (prior to tidying up).

As the red is a much stronger colour than the grey it needed fewer coats to get a good colour depth however it still had to be applied in very thin layers to avoid leaving brush marks.

The engines were done separately and mostly painted complete before being attached to the fuselage. The bare metal parts were painted Boltgun Metal and the rest was Fortress Grey t match the rest of the aircraft. I decided however that the engines should not look uniform, I wanted to give the impression that the heat of the engines had affected the finish, bluing the metal and darkening the paint. Therefore I washed the metal with layers of Asurmen Blue and Chestnut Ink and then washed the grey with more Chestnut Ink. Metal when it gets hot tends to turn a pale straw colour before going blue and I wanted to get this effect on the jet nozzles as well as the ribbed part of the engine housing. The grey turned a rather pleasing dirty khaki colour and this just needed tidying up.

Finally we were nearly done. I had to get the figure finished for Wednesday evening to take advantage of an opportunity for my wife to deliver it during a trip back to the UK. I quickly threw somebits from the 40k basing kit and some slate chips onto the base (after marking out a clear area for the clear plastic stem) and painted that up. I was going to pin the stem to the base but it turns out that the clear plastic really doesn’t like being drilled. It melted around my drill bit despite my efforts to be careful and I couldn’t free it so the hole for pinning ended up getting filled with the remains of my bit. I also painted some markings onto the hull, these were all freehand and they aren’t as neat or as uniform as I’d like but I was in a rush by this point. All the stars are freehand as is all the lettering. The lettering on the boom says ‘Traktorgrad Planetary Defence’ and the slogan at the nose says ‘Glory to the Workers!’ I then painted the various lenses to look reflective, varnished it and we were done at last. All I had to do was to stick the canopy on. At this point I discovered that I’d glued the pilot’s arms in a bad position and the canopy didn’t fit. Somehow, his shoulderpad on one side and his elbow on the other were sticking out too far. Nothing for it at this point but to shave quite an alarming amount off each to make room for the canopy. That done, the canopies were stuck down and the frames tidied up where they didn’t exactly match the cockpit line. Of the whole kit, this is the only part that didn’t line up right so I don’t know if I somehow twisted the nose section during assembly or if the canopies simply aren’t as precise as the rest of the kit. In any case there were gaps that could not be filled around the edges of the canopies which spoils the end result somewhat. Overall, I’m happy with it as a tabletop piece. It’s not as tidy as I’d like and I could easily have spent a few more days knocking some of the rough edges off it, but I don’t feel embarrassed about it either.

You can see all the work in progress shots on this gallery page

As a very final step I wrote up a formal commissioning letter from the forge-world to the Imperial Colonel as part of the vehicle’s backstory. Yes, it is very cheesy. No, I don’t care.

++дstяopathic Mдnifest++

Fяom: Fabrikator-Kommissar Vladimir Potemkin

To: Guard Kolonel Pol Feldik

EИkryptioИ pяotokol: Gamma standard

дuthoяity Kode: 3-sigma-red

TядnsmissioИ яefereИce: B0LZ-Echo-V1k

OяigiИatiИg office: Traktorgrad Munitions Forge N^o. 3

DestiИдtioИ office: Seevoo depot, Malak-IDE

Thought foя the dдy: Engage the workers in the ongoing dialektik of the imperial party apparatus

++TяaИsmission БegiИs++

Komrade Kolonel,

The Traktorgrad forges have been operating at unparalleled levels of efficiency and we are pleased to present this Valkyrie klass airborne assault vehicle for immediate kommission in your struggle against the enemies of the Imperial workers. This partikular wessel has served in the Traktorgrad Planetary Defence Force with konsiderable distinction and we are Konfident that its machine spirit will kontinue to serve with glory.

You may have heard rumours that this delivery is late. Pay no heed to these heretikal lies that are spread by politikal agitators and enemies of the imperium, some have klaimed that the initial kommissioning date was set as 1653009M41 (approx. 19 Aug in your kalendar) but this is inkorrekt and the klerikal adepts who inadvertently repeated this error are now being retasked for a new posting at the Volgaskaya Sektor Acid Mines and holiday resort. In fakt this delivery is early due to the wise and effektive 5 year industrial plan of the peoples’ Kommissariat.

Glory to the workers whose tireless efforts protekt the Imperium from ideologikally unsound running dogs!

Fabrikator-Kommissar V. i. Potemkin

++TядИsmission EИds++