A Study in Scale: Deathwatch Artemis

The 54mm scale Deathwatch Space Marine towers over all of the other Space Marines models I currently own.

Earlier this year, we converted and painted a Dark Angel in the style of Lunax7070, based on parts Lunax7070 cast in resin for us. If you are familiar with his work, you would correctly predict that the Dark Angel we created was massive. We got a few comments on social media suggesting that the model was so large that they were likely similar in size to the famed Deathwatch Space Marine Artemis, released in 2001 for Games Workshop’s short-lived 54mm RPG. This got us to wonder, how do they compare to each other? Fortunately, I had an unassembled copy of the model that was gifted to me years back. It stayed unassembled due to the time-consuming frustration of metal models. This seemed like the ideal time to get the model out and assemble it!

For its time, Artemis was an impressive model, entirely hand sculpted, but in 2022 it shows its age, with not completely symmetrical parts and the characteristic distorted Space Marine anatomy.

Most of the pieces of the model were pinned together to make the model less likely to fall apart.

As anticipated, the model took a long time to clean up and assemble. The moldlines on the model were not awful, but due to the size of the model and it being metal, the cleaning process was a lengthy one, involving an X-acto blade, files, and sandpaper. Like with many large metal models of that era, the model did not fit together very precisely. I pinned most of the pieces together, for added strength, and used Apoxie Sculpt to fill in any gaps. The sword arm in particular did not fit without gaps, so I ended up sculpting some of the characteristic ribbed joint material seen on power armor.

While the mode has a dynamic pose, it suffers from most of the anatomy problems inherent in classic Space Marine models, like an incredibly small torso and lack of substantive gluteus maximus muscles.

Although the Lunax7070-based Dark Angel is huge, they are still substantially smaller than Artemis.

As anticipated, the Primaris-scale Dark Angel on the right is tiny compared to Artemis.