Genesis

"And so He called forth in a loud voice 'ARISE ALL YOU WHO WOULD CALL THYSELF MAN, FOR YOUR LORD IS AT HAND'! 

And His words were as fire, and the unbearable brilliance did sear at their flesh unto bone, burning away the sin and wickedness, until they emerged from perdition anew as men of purity!

And His voice was as a glorious brazen trumpet that did sunder the heavens in its clarion blast, and the men lept to their feet anew with their souls fired by righteous purpose! 

And His truth was as a great flail of gold that lashed and scoured the sin from the hearts of men, for all who beheld Him knew at once the blinding majesty of Emperor, and none could deny His bidding without curse of blood and leprosy, and so all the men cried out in praise that Emperor is Lord! 

And so it was that where once walked urchins, thieves, liars, fornicators and the blind sick, there now strode a mighty host of men gold of faith and a great love and fear of Emperor immortal, and with great trumpeting of fanfare and singing Emperor is master did they march through the iron gates of Nod!" 

A simple passage, but one full of wisdom. For just like the pilgrims who came from the lowest of human life, so too is the tremendous might of The Emperor the birthright of all mankind, no matter the station, and it is the sprit of man that is the immortal God Emperor's gift unto every human being, no matter their birth. We too, are as wretched as the pilgrims on the road to Nod when the God Emperor met them, for even the greatest man is but fleeting and insignificant before the eternal grace of the Emperor. 

And just as The Emperor called to the lost souls on the road to Nod, so too does He call to us even now! He burns within the righteous hart of every good man, imploring us all to rise up, to take a stand against the darkness, to fight humanity's blighted fate with every fiber of our very being! And so long as we fight with unyielding faith in the God Emperor and His Will in our souls, we will triumph over all and march forward in the golden light of a glorious new dawn over the galaxy that is His Emperor's kingdom for mankind! 

So sayeth the holy gospel of the God Emperor of Man.

Wonderful news everyone! I am a new man, saved from the death and torment that is the wages of sin, and delivered unto the glorious path of the God Emperor, for I am His servant and His plan is my destiny! I have been lifted up from the filth and the maggots to walk by his side in the everlasting kingdom of man! I have cast off the suffocating bands of degeneracy and wickedness and embraced the purity of the light! 

Take heart, for I am at long last, just in time for their 20th anniversary, starting the Witch Hunters army I always wanted.

The first time I discovered the Witch Hunters was when I had just started into 40k for the first time, at age 8 going on 9. I was researching every scrap of information I could find on the Games Workshop website and so invariably turned to the Witch Hunters page and.... was horribly confused. Witches in space? Witch Hunters in space? What the hell was going on? What's with all the braziers and torches? Why is everything half-medieval in my sci-fi game? What the hell does this Inqzecution thing have to do with anything? Or this Ordos Hathfickfehichsurs? Wait their troops are mostly girls? Ew cooties!

Pretty much the only thing that didn't go completely over my head was a photo and short blurb describing a type of fighting machine called a Penitent Engine, which was a kind of battle robot powered by a prisoner hard-wired into it whose desperate frantic need for mercy and forgiveness directed the robot straight into the teeth of the opposition. And even at that young age the whole concept and the model were both very creepy awesome and the ultimate illustration of the evil of the Imperium, so that very quickly earned a special place in my heart even when I could not make any kind of sense out of the rest of the model line. 

But the real origin of this Witch Hunter army lies almost a decade later, in 2011. By this time I had become a morbid depressed teenager and had discovered the darker joys of horror films and gloomy symphonic metal ballads about suicide. I had also learnt how to read and pronounce 'Ordo Hereticus' properly (well sort of, by habit I was still putting the accent emphasis on the second-to-last syllable for 'Ordo HereTICus' but it's a minor squibble). 

And in what might have been their greatest stroke of brilliance in the 2010s, GW released the entire complete Witch Hunters codex online as a free PDF. One fateful night I decided to look through it out of curiosity. And everything changed. 

I understood everything. 

I understood the Imperium. I understood what playing an Imperial army was supposed to be like. I understood space gothic aesthetics and hunting witches in space with crossbows and everything. And I understood the appeal of it all. Reading through that book was what finally broke me out of my bubble of Tau-powered classic science fiction. Ever since then I've wanted an army of heavy metal Witch Hunters. 

And finally I'm starting to get around to it this year. Here are my first results. 

OK, not my best work by any stretch, but hey that's what test models like these are for. 

In fairness they're much less flat looking in real life - an unexpected side effect of the colour scheme I've chosen is that it is apparently much less photogenic than my usual reverse-engineered GW studio schemes are. This is only compounded by the fact that the 2019 models being used are weirdly barren of details in a lot of places. The hair on them in particular is so poorly sculpted that I gave up trying to highlight it, resulting in the flat blobs of colour pictured. 

But for all that, it is a solid proof of concept and the basic colour scheme is turning out nicely, needing only a little further refinement before being ready for application on my precious metal Witch Hunter models. 

Right now the biggest question that I'm wrestling with is which variant of white to go with on the armour - grey-white (as showcased on the blond and brunette on the left of the group shot) or blue-white (as seen on the redhead and dark haired models on the right of the group shot)? The blue-white does give a nice stony gothic artwork look, but the grey-white produces a very Imperial look. A possible compromise I'm also considering is blue-white for the rank and file and grey-white for the veterans. 

Let me know which one you like more in the comments! Then also take some of these pamphlets and come back every Tuesday night, Thursday night and Sunday morning where we will be studying the holy word of the Emperor's Creed.