Saturday, February 1, 2020

Adeptus Arbites Wheeled Chimera APCs


While scrolling through Instagram I chanced upon a post that mentioned a 'Chimera Chassis Challenge'. The idea was to complete a vehicle based on the Imperial Guard Chimera during January.



It just so happened that I had three Chimeras that I had started on about five years ago and had never finished. I thought 'Now or never'.


The wheel conversion kits are from Chapterhouse, who have gone out of business as I understand it. They took a bit of work to get to fit properly. I also took a fair bit of time trying to decide on what I wanted the front to look like... if I wanted to go with a dozer blade or ram bar, and if I wanted them to be uniform. I decided on the dozer so I could do a slogan like 'Submit for Judgement' or something like that. I didn't like the way that fit the space so I just went with 'Arbites' :)


I ended up printing off some decals for the dozer blade rather than paint the text three times. I chose an 'Insular' style font that had a pre-gothic medieval vibe. More often than not Arbites are shown with a modern sans-serif typeface and I wanted to underscore that they're deeply ingrained in the Imperium.




I guess I need to paint some Arbites now :)

22 comments:

  1. Nice work. That's a lot of yellow, but it's come up nicely (I dread large swathes of yellow!)

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    1. I hear that, yellow on vehicles is not easy. Shading rivets without making them look overly rusty is a genuine challenge :)

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  2. Ooohhh, I love these! I made my own puny attempt on an Arbites vehicle, but these rock so much more than mine! You made quite a nice work here.

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  3. Great work!
    When you say you printed off the decals for the blades, was that in a vinyl or something, or just paper that you glued down? I’d like to add more text to my models, but my steady hand is garbage, so I’m always looking for workarounds.

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    1. Thanks! The decals are home-made waterslide transfers. I bought some sheets from Micro-Mark. At the time they had sheets for inkjet and for laser printers; as well as clear or white transfer paper. I used a clear inkjet paper. Because inkjet is water-soluble you need to spray the printed decal sheet with a good coat of clear acrylic spray to seal it up, or the waterslide process will destroy the printing :)

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    2. That’s fantastic. I had no idea that product existed.
      Thanks!

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    3. No problem, there's a few brands out there now. I have used Testor's decal paper as well.

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  4. Great work, the arbites text is a nice touch, and I agree about the gothic text rather than cyber-text the later arbites were given.

    Also, wouldn't mind seeing more of your 40k terrain set up in future!

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    1. Thanks!

      Regarding terrain, is there anything in particular you want to see? I plan to do an entry for the propaganda post in the background of these photos.

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    2. I really just wondered what your 40K stuff looked set up as a whole table for a battle; it always looks so good in the "studio" shots. :)

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  5. The wheeled look for the chimera's is fantastic. Not adding the lasgun turrets was also a good choice - those broke so easily.

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    1. Thanks! I've noticed that a lot of the chimeras out there have lasguns flopping around and/or are broken like you say, so I left them off. Plus I don't recall lasguns being Arbites kit :)

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  6. Nice work on these.

    I am curious though, why you went with the yellow tops. It is very striking, but it does not read as "police" to my (North American) eye.

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    1. I'm North American too :)
      I envision the Arbites as the 40K version of Mega-City 1 judges with a hint of Mad Max, so the yellow is sort of a nod to the yellow on Mega City Judge gear, and the Interceptor yellow. I have a couple cars I plan to do for this project and they will have a more obvious diagonal slant to the yellow, and maybe some thin stripes like the ones in Mad Max.

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  7. Oh, superb! Very neat conversions and of course an amazing paintjob. It's even hard to tell which chassis they're based on, which is a saying something about your skills.

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  8. Wow, these are very cool builds, & the striking paint scheme looks awesome!

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  9. Thos look fantastic. Well done.

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  10. Damn
    I've been away too long!
    Strikingly awesome.

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