Rogal Dorn Primarch of the Imperial Fists
Forgeworld 54mm Resin kit
Painted in 2021
There’s a whole background to Warhammer 40K now; histories, novels, references, you name it, and it’s probably available somewhere on the Internet.
And I think it’s fantastic that the imagination of so many talented individuals has been captured to produce such vivid imagery and storytelling to give life to the characters within the Imperium.
It means that the “fantasy / Science Fiction” has been somewhat removed.
If you buy a character figure, or a distinct creature type, then some might say you have to paint it with accepted colours – a Green Ultramarine would be considered wrong.
So in a similar manner to painting say, a Napoleonic Officer of A certain regiment in 1815, you now have to do research for the model to be considered “correct” and I have to be honest, sometimes that ( for me ) undermines the idea and freedom that Fantasy and Sci-fi allowed the modeller in years gone by.
However, there’s no law yet saying you can’t paint a model your own way, and sometimes it’s good to follow the “accepted” colours anyway.
So what do we have here ?
This is the larger than normal Forgeworld offering in resin of the character Primarch “Rogal Dorn” - one of the good guys that defend the Emperor of the Imperium of man in his fight against the encroaching Chaos.
I do like a bargain – maybe I’ve mentioned that, and these kits new ( at the time of purchase ) were going for around £75 to £80.
However, on good old eBay, sometimes there were genuine models that people either didn’t want any more, had painted and just didn’t need the model, or perhaps wanted to regain a bit of the money they’d spent to repurpose on buying other models.
I’m not sure which class this model fell into, but someone was getting rid of it, and I paid £50 plus postage, or thereabouts for an assembled and mostly painted model.
It was a genuine Forgeworld kit, not a copy, and when it arrived, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it had been assembled and painted – see photos #1 and #2
The figure wasn’t finished, but most of the blocking in of colour had been done on the figure, along with an amount of shading and highlighting.
In fact it was painted to a well above average level, and it could simply have been added to a wood plinth and put in the display cabinet if I’d wanted to.
So there Rogal sat for about twelve months or so, not doing much above glare at me, questioning what I was going to do with him.
I felt it was actually, like the other Primarch I had added details to ( see the short article on Robute Gulliman ) worth finishing the already neat paintjob that had begun, and I’ve begun that in photo #3 by repainting the face.
There’s not a lot of difference from the original, but it’s perhaps a little more refined with deeper shadows and brighter highlights.
In photo #4 I’ve begin adding deeper shadows to the armour and have repainted the loincloth. The deeper shadows were a case of adding thin washes of Vandyke Brown to selected areas to deepen the shadow effects.
Looking at the leg in photo #5 I’ve now painted on some scratching and highlighting to the raised edges of the armour. I used Molotow silver liquid for this, carefully painting this on to the areas that would catch most light. It needs smoothing out at this point to blend it in to the gold colours of the armour, but the roughness of the initial application shows up better in photos.
The great idea of this model is that you can assemble it on a small base that can be removed from the much larger groundwork section if you want.
I guess it can remain that way once the model has been finished too, or fastened in place with magnets or glued permanently into position. Photo #6 shows Rogal back on the larger base, and the fit is pretty much seamless as the smaller base slots into the steps very cleanly.
Photo #8 and I’ve begun that process, starting off with the detached helmet and adding red oils to this. It looks a bit shiny in this picture because the oils are still wet, but it’ll calm down once they dry fully.
A base of Carmine oils was used, with Scarlet and then a few dots of Cadmium Orange being blended in to form the mid-tones and highlights respectively.
Photo #7. As with the figure, the painting was a little flat, and some pin washes and a little light drybrushing really made the detail pop out. It doesn’t look very colourful at the moment, but that will change when the dead space marine and a few other details are painted.
Photo #9, and possibly the best bit of the model is the back of the cloak. The raised detail helps the modeller paint the design, but a bit of artistic license can be taken and instead of painting the raised design with flat colours I chose to use lighter paints to add a bit of texture to the fist and laurel wreath logo.
All done in oils, beginning with Vandyke Brown, adding Mars Yellow and then Buff Titanium and finally Titanium White to gradually work through lighter and lighter colours.
The dead marine was painted with green and white armour, although I left him without any chapter identification, and photo #10 shows the almost completed model on a wood plinth with a small nameplate printed out and stuck on.
Final thoughts.
There’s a lot of little detail refinement been done on this model, too much to detail, and to be honest a lot of it is very small adjustments of colouration that is difficult to pick out in a photo.
The base figure was neatly painted to a decent standard, and a lot of gamers probably would have found it easily good enough to use as a main character figure.
I felt that whoever had begun the painting had done a good job, and as the figure is of such high quality regarding sculpture and casting, it would be worth my time and effort to just complete the base and add some of the small details that could use a little “push” to bring them to the fore.
Overall a pleasing project to work on, and a lot quicker because someone had already done the lion’s share of the work cleaning the components up and assembling the model.
Worth looking for painted, part painted, started or assembled models on eBay, because you might get a bargain that saves you a little bit of work too.
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