First Deatwatch finished...

I was at my local Games Workshop store yesterday a sat there all day building and painting my minis.
I finished my Deathwatch model that's going to the Store Manager meeting for Northern Europe. I hope the Store Managers get White Dwarf to feature the army as I think it will look awesome (and it's probably the only way for me to get a mini featured there).
It was a lot of fun painting him up, and I'm working on an entire army of Deathwatch to fight along side him. So far I've only finished this one model, but I am a few sittings away from finishing up a Watch Master. I have also assembled the Start Collecting box with a 10 man kill team, a Captain and a Dreadnought, and I plan to prime them a little later today. I also hope to assemble some more Deathwatch minis during the day, but I need to get some painting done too to prevent my work area being overflown with primed and half painted minis.

I really liked the way the base of my finished Marine turned out, and I have decided to use that as the standard base for the Deathwatch. I am also considering using this on my Custodes Army as I think it will look good on them too. For other armies I might use the same technique but with other colors, and I think I will start to always put some drybrush on my bases after I have applied technical paint and a wash.

Here are some pics I took at the Games Workshop 40K table of my finished model.

The first real challenge was to get the Deathwatch shoulderguard to look good. There is a lot of letters on there and this creates lots of small areas to get the shade into without pooling too much. I am sure I can still improve on this for future minis, but I am quite happy with the way it turned out.

This is an Ultramarine, but I decided to keep the colors a little muted, so I didn't use pure white on the Ultramarine symbol as I think that would stand out a lot against the dark model. I think I will keep on doing this for future Ultramarines models, and maybe on some other chapters as well.

And here he is from the front. I like his stance, the way he sort of leans forward as he walks, with
the intimidating shotgun in his hands.

The shotgun might be my favorite weapon from the Deathwatch range, and I plan to feature this weapon quite often in my killteams.  There are two on each sprue, so I get some spare to use on the teams I build from regular Space Marine boxes. I will at least make two teams from regular boxes, but I might make more as I have lots of boxes of marines in my storage. I think I have 4 or 5 spare sets of 10 shoulderguards so I might as well use them as I needed the sets to get enough shoulderguards for my terminators. I plan to have 10 terminators, 5 will be from the Space Wolves (from the Storm claw box) and the remaining 5 will be made from a box of Dark Angels Terminator Knights as this box have lots of different weapons. I think I have 3 of these boxes in storage as I wanted to make all the different options that is available in the box (regular Terminators, Command Squad and Knights) and the Terminators will be a mix of the different types. I will make at lest one Knight as I can't field them in my Gatekeepers army and I would like to see how they look.