Heroes of the Imperium - Salamanders Command Squad

It's Heroes of the Imperium Month here at Fresh Coast Gaming. That means lots of sweet conversions and painting being done by FCG members. This post will highlight some of my inspirations in building and painting my Salamanders Captain + Command Squad.
Anyone who's paid attention will notice I'm not much for playing 40k right now. (I think I've played two games of 6th edition, to give you an idea.) But I still love the setting, and Salamanders were my first and favorite army. I'd always had an itch to build some of the special Salamanders characters from Imperial Armour 11, so this was a great excuse to do so!

First off, I knew I wanted to do my command squad in Mk4 armor. I love the look of Mk4 armor, but I'm never going to do that big grand Heresy-era army. So this was a nice compromise. I can even fluff justify it through the Salamanders novels. (A huge cache of old Heresy-era armor is discovered in one novel. I could say that my command squad was bequeathed a set.) Ultimately Mk4 is its own justification though, because it rules. It also gave me an excuse for purchasing these sweet models:

The captain model above was  intended for use as a conversion into Pellas Mir'San, Captain of the 2nd Company, who was featured in IA11. I exchanged the right arm with cloak and helmet for another power sword, and gave him a helmeted head. I used the leftover arm and head on a different model in the command squad instead. The standard bearer got a different helmet as well.

My squad was rounded out with a bolter marine, melta gun marine, and a dude with the old metal TH/SS set. The hammer and shield are small enough to count as power weapon and combat shield if I want to use the guy as a Company Champion. Otherwise, he's just a dude with actual TH/SS. I gave the champ the helmet from the standard bearer model. All of the models have FW shoulder pads, and several have brass etch as well.

Picture courtesy of http://thegrumpystunty.blogspot.com/2010/04/salamander-apothecary.html

The command squad will mostly be painted like any of my other marines, so lots of green, black, and gold of course. However for the apothecary I plan on something like the above picture, except with the helmet fully white and the white arm left green instead. The red arm represents super old fluff from the Chapter Approved supplements in 3rd edition. In the Salamanders edition, Apothecaries were said to paint one arm in red to represent the blood of the fallen. I thought that was cool so I'll be doing the same.

And that does it for my inspiration for these models. Keep a lookout for more from me and the rest of the crew as the month continues!