All is Dust

It has once again been a while but that's because I've been planning this project for even longer than I was painting it and I was painting it for about four days. Today I present to you an Aspiring Sorcerer of the Thousand Sons!! Now you may have noticed that the main colours are not blue and gold (though they certainly feature) but black and white. Stick around and I'll take you through what I did, how I did it and why.

My inspiration for this piece came from the fact that I really wanted to paint my Thousand Sons models but I wanted them to fit in with my Black Legion units but I didn't want them to lose their trademark look so I was at a bit of a loose end. I decided to hit my old friend Google to look for alternate colour schemes and I was looking for about a week with little success. From what I saw I have to say we're an unimaginative lot for painting these guys (I could be wrong but I did see a lot of pictures). Eventually I started reading the forums for descriptions of what people did and stumbled across someone talking about doing a checker-board army which I thought sounded really interesting and there were a lot of comments about them looking too much like Black Templars. Something there clicked in my mind and I started looking at the Black Templar colour scheme. From there I decided to combine both the Black Templar colour scheme and the generic Thousand Sons colour scheme. Regular readers may recall that I was going to paint my cult units in their pre-heresy colours but I decided that I don't like how the bright red armour looked on my Sorcerer so I've decided against that now which is how I hit this quandary.

The reason behind my decision is that I wanted to mock the Black Templars. Plain and simple. As we all know I'm not a fan of the Loyalists and I make no secret about it so any chance to give them the finger makes me very happy. Combine that with the chance to paint a unit I've a) never painted before and b) always wanted and I was an extremely happy bunny. I looked into the Thousand Sons background and was particularly taken with the Cult system that was unique to the Legion. For those unfamiliar with the Cults they are basically how the Legion classified the various Psychic powers that manifested and there were 5 cults; Pyrae, Corvidae, Pavoni, Athanaean and Raptora which cover Pyromancy, Divination, Biomancy, a Telepathy and Telekinisis respectively. Why am I talking about cults and powers? Well it's the reason for the lack of a Mark of Tzeentch and the reason for what you see instead. Owing to the fact that the Aspiring Sorcerer can only choose one power, that power must be from the Tzeentch powers and those powers are all fire based so I decided that this Sorcerer was a member of the Pyrae cult whose powers were corrupted by Tzeentch so he has a Phoenix symbol. I didn't put a Tzeentch symbol on it because everyone knows who they are and who they belong to so it seemed like overkill to add the Mark.

The head dress type thing was simply painted with a flat shade of Hoeth Blue and Auric Armour Gold and the reason for this was to look like the enamel on the Ancient Egyptian death masks. The sword and blue shoulder pad were painted with thin layers of Kantor, Altdorf Guard and Hoeth Blue. The lightning was painted with Rakarth Flesh and highlighted with White Scar.

I can't actually tell you how happy I am with this model and how it looks and I'm very excited about seeing a full unit together. Let me know what you think in the usual way.