So on my Knight Titan I had decided to create my own house, which meant custom house insignia. Now, I’m not a great free hand painter (yet), and since the pattern would need to be repeated multiple times over the model, I needed to turn to water transfers. While I haven’t tried it yet, I have heard that Testors Decal Paper can work really well if you have a design in mind. After searching through my pile of transfers from Space Marines, Chaos, IG, tanks, the knight titan, and even the Ork and Eldar sheets that I had, I finally settled on the winged sword from the Baneblade to create my custom decal.

The only problem was that the two transfers on the Baneblade sheet were only big enough for the shins and as i wasn’t confidant that I could hand paint a larger version for the shoulder, I turned back to the decals at hand. Looking at the Hawkshroud icon, it would give me a great wing once the head was removed and the wing turned 180, the Cadmus house would provide a great sword once the goat was removed.

Here you can see I also nabbed a fist from the Chaos Space Marine transfer sheet and trimmed the sword.

These were carefully transferred over to the shoulder guard into their relative positions. Notice that the Hawkshroud icon was also flipped to the reversed side to achieve the desired direction. While the transfer’s adhesive is now on the wrong side, it will still dry into position, and once set I covered the whole area in ‘Ard coat to provide a nice covering to make sure.

Also make sure you check out my post on Custom Space Marine Banners, where I follow the same method and talk about using Micro Sol. 

The final step was to connect the fist and wing with black lines and fill in the areas with white paint. The white took a few coats to get a good coverage and a few back and fourths with the black were required to get the some-what neat look below. It may not be a Golden Daemon winner, but it creates a simple, and repeatable house icon for me and I hope it inspires you to hack and slash your own icons!

Also note it doesn’t require hacking transfers together to get a new look, sometimes just a touch of paint will change the original to your need. The full house shields provided are great if you use one of the three houses on the sheet, but what about all the rest? Well I just took the House Cadmus transfer since I liked the helmet the best, and painted over the goat side with yellow and the red side with the blue. The half-aquila was also originally black, but a quick touch of white changed it to match my theme. After trying to fit the winged sword on the yellow half, I decided to go with just the sword.

Once I pick a house name I plan to return to these transfers and fill in the bottom scroll.

On a final note about the transfers, I found it is also helpful to use the base color to cover the clear, outer area of the transfers to help them blend in, even after a covering of ‘Ard Coat, the edges can stick out, but a quick layer of the under color will make the seam disappear.

Hope this helps you in creating your own look with the help of the might transfer sheets!