XenonMage was out to visit recently for a convention, and while she was, I jokingly called these “Skittles” because I joked that I’d painted them with every color of the rainbow. I laughed, she laughed, and her Tyranids laughed just before eating their fill of them. But it was a very good visit all the same, and made for a very good game. As much as I’ve been enjoying Fire Dragons as my army’s new Aspect Warrior golden child, when I took comparison pictures of my Aspect Warriors a while back it really struck me that I could probably do the Dire Avengers more justice now than when I painted and posted them originally.

Self-rescues are some of my favorite projects and this speed-painting job was no exception. I managed to get this lot done in less than a week and was also able to add a sixth member to the team – one of my test-model Guardians had served me well with the Shroud Runner project so I rewarded them by cobbling them together with some bits and giving them a new lease on life. I also switched up and added bits on the two helmetless Dire Avengers just for flavor’s sake, redid all of their basing, and tried to go with a paint scheme that was somewhere in the middle between my army’s color scheme and their more traditional Dire Avenger colors.

Their tabletop debut might have been short-lived, but I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this squad in the future, especially since they’ve accumulated enough Crusade xp now for some juicy new upgrades in the XenonMage campaign. I’m very happy with how this rescue project turned out, and I think there’s a pretty stark difference between the original Dire Avengers I painted and this latest batch. Part of me still likes that deep blue better on the originals, but at some point that might just give me an excuse to repaint those too and keep the deep blue but make them look a little more fancy, shiny and new.