Cyber Cherub campaign token

The new plastic Space Marine Librarian comes with a plastic Cherub servitor that can be fixed t his shoulder. I thought that this would break off ridiculously quickly, so like many servo skulls before it the Cherub was consigned to my bits box. Hulls Angels wargaming club were putting together a campaign and it required everyone to have their own unique marker for their army.
Unfortunately I had too many commitments to join in the campaign, but before I realised this I had already stuck the Cherub to a 25mm base, ready to be my marker.

The poor Cherub has been sat around on my office desk for a few weeks now, frequently getting knocked over by other projects, so I decided it was time to show the mini some love and turn it into my first stage by stage paint. I am not going to win any Golden Demons, but I thought you might like to see how I work.

Base chaos black

So here is stage one, black undercoat and then because I want an odd flesh colour on this odd little servitor I have started lighter than I normally would and put a layer of elf flesh straight on.

Elf flesh

Everything is still rough and ready at this stage. I was planning on using some grey to try and make the skin tone more pallid, but I wasn't happy with the results of that so I mixed snot green and elf flesh to get a slight green tinge. Rather morbidly I like to think that this little servitor has started to go off a bit and is getting a little necrotic. I added the bulk grey colour to the wings and back of the shield and scorched brown to the paper and the areas I was planning on doing metallic gold. I also painted the red on the purity seal and the eyes. I wanted glowing malevolent coals, but they looked nothing like I hoped, so I put them down to clean up later.

Grey, red and brown

 I used bleached bone over scorched brown on the areas of paper and then built that up to a more solid white, with ceramite white. I also added some detail and definition to the wings using white. I cleaned up the black areas ready for the boltgun metal and I also added some writing to the parchments and the purity seal. I think it came out reasonably well. The white in the picture below is very bright, but I found that bleached bone was very close to the skin tone and I felt that I had to make the difference between the skin and parchment more distinct.

Progressing to white

As you can see at this point I  have reduce the Cherub's optics back to the single red eye in its forehead. I guess the Mechanicum did a rush job on this one and thought 50% of the optics was suitable for something with 50% of the size.

The back of the sheild here is Enchanted blue and I had a bit of a wobble and decided that the whole thing looked better as a single colour, so I wrapped it around in the next stage. Below you can see that I added the metallics and also added a snow flock and PVA glue mix to the base to get a thick layer of snow on there. Now that this is all matched up with my Ultramarine army I am very tempted to throw the little fellow in as a filler in a command squad at some point. For now he will be joining the odds and ends in my glass cabinet.

Finished front

If you spotted the cable to the left of the head is not cleaned up, I did spot this, but it was after I had all the photos together. Below is a rear view shot for all of  you who have been wondering what has been going on back there. The answer is cables and the white on the wings, which I find is surprisingly easy to do and looks really good. That is all for this post. Come back for more progress on the army as a whole.

Finished rear