Battlefield Gothic

Where has the last month gone? To be honest I haven't done much wargaming for a few weeks as I felt a little burned out with my plastic dudesmen. On top of this I've had health and work issues and so with not having much spare energy, nor inspirational subject matter I haven't felt inspired to write anything - until now.

Over the weekend just gone, I felt more motivated and had enough get up and go to crack on with the Ork scenery for my Orkington village - doing the lion's share of construction on my fuel tank piece, as well as heading down to the hobby shop and scoring some new Gothic terrain pieces. I'm planning to do a separate article on the updates to Orkington, as I notice the last update on this project was near its commencement, and there's been lots of development since then to show you.

Moving on to the Gothic scenery items, which may be old hat to many of you, but I only discovered them recently and I suspect many others may not ever have seen them, and so this is for their benefit mostly. The range is produced by Pegasus, who make a great many wargaming scenery items (their craters probably being best known to the 40k world).

This is the Gothic City Ruins #1 kit that I quickly assembled last night. It's a snap together kit in hard grey plastic, and while you could happily use it like this, I would recommend gluing it, after some filing to make the pieces fit just a little closer. The kit had no flash and reasonably few injection points to clean off - and these clipped off with no fuss at all. Other than the less than perfect fitting, and one of the pieces seeming to be a little too tall (one half of one of the wrecked columns) is that there are the rectangular holes in the corner columns. In the other kits in the series, these are filled with lamps or gargoyles so I'm hoping I have some spare from the other kits I have to fill these in, if not I'll need to raid my bits box.

The other kits I bought, each retailing for approx C$42 + taxes although I got a 20% discount, are:

I plan to hit them with a dark grey paint, and then use drybrushing to bring out the details. Not the greatest technique, but it should be fast enough to get some more scenery on our tables on club night!

Solitudors - Introduction

Previously I mentioned my Blood Angels army, which in fact is a successor chapter called the Solitudors. The name is taken from the Latin for isolation - solitudo, but since this also means to desert (i.e. to abandon), I opted for a desert (as in sand) theme. I'm rolling around some ideas for a backstory at the moment and at some point I'll write down, (maybe for Astronomicon next year?) so it should make more sense how the colours and theme fit together. Right now it's something like red sun over yellow sand give rises to the red torso and arms with yellow legs.

This was the first figure I painted in this scheme, with completely solid yellow legs:

But I've now moved on to only having the yellow on the thighs, shins and feet. I've repainted this figure to match, and since thise photo was taken, I've completed the base.

The current scheme is shown on this work in progress shot of a devastator:




I've made custom decals for some fo the marines, plus had custom pads made for others, these will be the subject of a future article.

Blood Pact - slow burning project

Ever since I read the first Gaunt's Ghost books I've wanted to model the Blood Pact. At the time I had just started my first army, IG, after a 15 year break from the hobby and I wasn't in a position to start anything else. Things have moved on now, I've built (and mostly painted) my DE army and I've stock-piled a great number of figures and kits for future projects, one of which is the aforementioned traitors.

Right now I just have a load of guard sprues and toy tanks, with suitable heads in the post (Secret Weapon and Maxmini), so this is just an introduction to what I'm using for each of the signature Pact items.

Infantry:

-Veterans are Cadians with Secret Weapon heads.

-Regular troops are a mix of Cadians, Catachans, Chaos Marauders with Maxmini heads - This is more of a unit of cultists than true BP troops.

- N20 Halftrack, these 1/32 M3 half-tracks with a Chimera/Hellhound/Hydra turret as appropriate.


- AT-70 Reaver will be one of these Pz.III toys with lots of detailing and a Kromlech turret (just as soon as they release one with something other than a plasma style cannon).


- AT-83 Brigand will be built from this very large Sherman (1/32?) and fitted with a dozer blade and a large bore cannon.


- U90 Usurper, Chimera tracks with a scratch built hull I expect.

- Stalk tanks - still under investigation, but there's a guy in Italy who custom builds some very nice ones.

More information as I move this project forward, but right now it's behind my scenery and Blood Angel successor army, which will be the subject of future blog articles.

Objectives

Objectives are often something that gets left to the end of an army build, and are consequently rushed just to get them ready for a tournament. This leads to bases with numbers painted on, or just an icon glued on or similar, but this is missing a chance to be quite creative. I've seen some really good modelling done as objectives over the years - crashed jetbikes, lost Ratling snipers, statues of Ghazghul etc, but it's also a chance to incorporate a different aspect of your army into each objective.

For my Dark Eldar army I have the following:

a spider model which is presumably being harvested for its poisonous venom



a monster which has either escaped from, or is destined for the arenas



a evil looking portal - a route to a disconnected part of the webway, or a backdoor to a rival's realm?



a slave?



I've tried in each of them to take one aspect of the Dark Eldar's depravity and make a marker for it. The final objective, which is a 60mm one will be a crashed jetbike with a wych carrying a stolen item - the raiders must retake this stolen item to take it back to their shadowy city.

I'm working on some other items for my other armies:

For my Orks I have a scrap pile (for lootin') I actually made a couple of these to double as scrap markers in GorkaMorka. Most of the items are miscasts from Zinge Industries, he likes to give them out for us to convert!



For any Imperial forces I have this statue of a terminator. I bought the green-stuffed figure in a bulk buy on Craigslist, and while it's very well done, some botched repairs by a previous owner make it look a bit too rough to use as a figure in my army. Mounted on an Orangina top on a 60mm base he makes an excellent statue though.



I also have a missing sniper objective under construction - photos when it's a bit further along.

I should also say an excellent source of 40mm based for objectives, or indeed any figure, is the humble poker chip. It's dead on, or close to if you get the knock-off ones, for a GW base.

In closing, please no more numbered 25mm bases - go out and make something visually interesting, and themed to the army you're playing!

Something fun..

Came across this 40k comic the other week, some chuckles in there:

http://wobblymodel.weebly.com/index.html

Thought I'd share it as anyone who puts in this much effort deserves some exposure!

Projects on the bench 1 - Orkington

It's been a little while since I posted my Astro preparation work, and that's because I got a bit burned out after painting that many miniatures for the tournament. I haven't been completely inactive though as I've been working my way through some scenery projects. The real driver for doing this is actually two things, first off we need more scenery at the club I attend (Trumpeters Tabletop Society in Burnaby, BC) so the one or two people who people who do provide secneray don't have to spread it over so many tables. The second reason is that I recently acquired a copy of GorkaMorka, and I'd like to play that with something better than card buildings (most of which are missing from my copy anyway)! I'm working through some ideas for an Ork settlement (Orkington - named after a place close to where I used to live Oakington), but in no particular order, just as the muse takes me!

Here's some of the scenery I've completed so far:

The back from one of the toy trucks I used to make the wrecks below, turned into an Orky sack of something store...or perhaps a ramp for Orkevil Kernivel?


The Squig Pen...need to add a sign with the glyph for Squigs.


An old burned out and looted truck..must be old the grass has grown back!


A Mek's store of things that maybe useful one day..and some cover! Also needs some glyphs.


I have a few others in various states of completion, I'll post them up here as time allows.

Astronomi-con Preparations

In a little over a week I'll be off to the Astronomi-con event here in Vancouver, and I'm pretty excited! I've been painting like the Energizer bunny for the last few weeks trying to both get my army ready, and to complete all my Dark Eldar (about 4000 points at the last count) before 2012. I know I'll slow down after this spell of brushwork madness, so I need to keep the momentum by organising a number of big games over the rest of the year. This will force me to keep painting new squads and not just recycle my painted points in various configurations to meet the points limits.


I'll post more on my painting progress, and on the games/tournaments in which I plan on playing over the next few weeks and days, but in the meantime I'll leave you with some of my recently painted items:

Time to kick off this blog, I've had it for ages but not used it, which I think is bad, so I'm rectifying things with a first posting.

While my website, of the same name is down, and since I don't have the time to fix it using the new server that I bought, I'll post my updates here. Currently it'll be mostly 40K stuff, but no doubt at some point I'll swing back to historicals, and then it'll be all about those - I'm fickle like that!