Finally Decided on a Chapter Badge

After years of putting it off, I finally decided on the chapter badge for my original space marine army. I've been wanting to get this army "done" for the last few months and move on to bigger and better things so I just went with one of the ideas that seemed to fit the most with my play style and the overall style  of marine shoulder pads.

Apparently I've been playing like the Raven Guard ever since the 5th edition codex came out. Dropping dreadnoughts in pods and outflanking with scouts while advancing with assault squads are what I like to do best. Even if they are not the most powerful units in the codex these days the game is about having fun first and foremost so from now on ,the Immortal Knights are officially going to be a Raven Guard successor chapter and sport some spiffy orange birds all around!

The logos I used were found on The Bolter and Chainsword and after a quick recolor in Illustrator were good to go. I had been planning on trying decals for some time and already had all the essentials on hand such as Micro sol and Micro set. It took me a while but i finally found some the of decal paper I bought form the model train shop well over two years ago. After a few test prints I was good to go and thanks to BigRed's excellent tutorial over on BoLS I managed to get that "painted on" look the first time through! I didn't really think the Micro sol would make as much of a difference as it did. From now on I plan to swear by it. My only gripe with it is while applying it I sometimes ruined my decals by bending them and occasionally it seemed to eat away at the decal sealer and splotched the ink as you can see in the picture. It's not a super big deal though as I plan to do a little battle damage here and there any how.

For one of my terrible first models full of mold lines, fuzzy primer and over watered metallic paint it doesn't look half bad in my opinion.

After I made my first decal and tried it on the bottom of a rhino I realized that I would have to put some white underneath for the orange to show up. Last night after the kids bed time I furiously painted white blobs on all my infantry models. I couldn't wait to throw a few on my favorite first turn wonder. And so my nefarious drop pod dreadnought was the first vehicle to get a few decals stuck on. After that I did my bikers, a few tacticals and a few terminators. When my wife came down to bug me about going to bed she actually said my dreadnought looked good! She hates my armies color scheme and has never said anything good about it before so I quite surprised to get some praise out of here for once!
With paint night coming up I'm hoping to get all the decals on and repaint all the area around them in one fell swoop. Then I plan to move on to putting more work into the bases. I'm considering making up a wash mix to throw on the whole army to make it look a little better since washes seem to fix everything. As I come across my first 20 models I'm trying to clean up the fuzzy primer/ too watered down paint jobs too. It shouldn't take too long there are only a hundred and five or so models in total!

Since I painted everything before basing I am looking for a way to get some shading in the recesses of the dirt without too much work involved. I was wondering if maybe a watered down black wash could be sprayed in without too much trouble. If any one has any advice I would appreciate it! The faster I get these guys done the better! I can't wait to paint something besides black and silver!