Playing Havoc

As promised, here are some of the WIP shots of my Iron Warrior Havoc squad. The other squad members are now mostly done, just two converted miniatures left to finishing painting. I'll post up a squad shot in the next few days

I'll be black!

Well, to be truthful not entirely, as I don't have enough Black Legion to complete the 1500 point army I require for the Vanhammer Tournament this weekend. This is not actually as big a problem as it might seem as I have tonnes of Chaos from the other Legions and I was working on an Iron Warriors force too, so combining these two takes me up to 1500, yay! I'm not posting my list on here as walls have ears (and other body parts due to unpredictable Chaos mutations), but here are some shots of items I'll be taking. I'll add more over the next few days as I get more done.

Chaos 'Dakka' Predator - complete and ready to go.

Terminator Squad, shots from Sunday, other figures are assembled and all 75% complete or better. 

How did I do?

The weekend is over and I'm back at work...boo! What's more annoying is that the weather today is sunny and dry - ideal for spray base coating, after 2 days of solid rain! Saturday was also an ideal day for spraying, but I spent that making the models I needed to spray - I'll need some good evening weather, or an excellent day next weekend, something on which you can never rely when living in the Pacific North West. So how did I do against my plans?

1 Chaos Lord - Nothing started
5 Chaos Terminators - bodies assembled and one painted
2 Predators - one rebuilt awaiting the spray can, other not started
3 Rhinos - all assembled and awaiting the better weather
1 Dreadnought - nothing done
6 Havocs - one 90% done, one partly assembled, one half assembled with scratchbuilt bionic leg! (others in bits still)

In addition, I forgot to say that I needed 5 lesser daemons, one of which was already done. Well now 2 more just need basing, and the other 2 have some paint on them.

From the list of other possible stuff I could do I did:

Salamanders Rhinos - 2 of 3 (re)assembled and awaiting paint
Salamanders infantry - all greenstuffing done, awaiting spray painting
Imperial Assassin - awaiting spray primer
Black Templar Bikers - as above

I also squeezed in assembling one extra Iron Warrior Rhino, 12 Hormagaunts, Lufgt Huron and painted one more backpack for my Dragon Warriors. I'm pleased with the quantity of jobs done, but disappointed that the weather stopped me getting that bit further.

Long Weekend...

It's Victoria Day on Monday, so up here in the frozen north, we get a day off, Yay! That means I get to spend a fair bit of time this weekend catching up on my modelling an painting, which is handy as I need to do lots. I'm attending a tournament in 2 weeks too, where my Chaos Marine army is getting its first competitive outing, and so I need to paint a chunk of that. What needs to be worked on it as follows:

1 Chaos Lord
5 Chaos Terminators
2 Predators
3 Rhinos
1 Dreadnought
6 Havocs

What I'd also like to get done, if the weather is nice, and I can spray outside, are basecoats for the following:

Imperial Fist Rhinos
Sisters of Battle Rhinos
Salamanders Rhinos and Landraider
Salamanders infantry (also greenstuff work)
Imperial Assassin
Black Templar Bikers

Let's see what I actually manage? I'll post an update next week!

This is also my 40th blog article, something of a milestone, I'll have a beer to celebrate!

Warmachine - oh no, he did!

As I mentioned the other day I ran the Teamhammer 40K event up here in sunny BC (makes a change from all the rain we get!) and while the games were on I got to wander around the store and spend a bit of time looking at some of the other non 40k games for sale. Many look interesting, Munchkin and Munchkin quest, and also WHFB. For the latter I actually have 2 and bit armies that I picked up in a job lot last year, and I'd love to get some use out of them (Wood Elves/Lizard Men/Bretonnians). I've been thinking I need a second game interest to stop me going stale on 40K, so I thought I'd dabble outside of the grim darkness of the 41st Millenium, and I've bought the starter set for Warmachine! I already had some Winter Guard figures I was going to convert into IG, so it makes sense to play Khador (I already have enough winter IG anyway thanks to the stuff I bought from Trollforged). I'll try to squeeze a game  in over the next month and blog up how it went.

Making Tracks

In addition to my wargaming, I do a bit of railway modelling (less lately) and have had in the past an O gauge garden train. Seeing some great urban modelling in the hobby magazine made me wonder if I could add some track to one of my wargames tables, more as something to break up the look of items on a cloth, than something to give cover saves. In order to see if I could help create the grungy look of some industrial trackage, I bought a couple lengths of O gauge track, the flex track variety, usually available in 30" or 36" lengths depending on brand and cut them in half. I then took the 4 pieces of track, and mounted them on a thick card base which I had cut to match the track's length. After that I applied PVA glue around the ties/sleepers, both on the ends and between the rails, and sprinkled sand/grit over that. Before the glue dried I wiped the sand off the tops of the rails and ties, and from the ends of the rails. Once the glue was dried (well not actually, hence why it fell to bit and had to be re-glued) I sprayed the section with several spray cans, mostly a dark grey with mistings of light grey and black. Last painting step was some drybrushing, brown on the ballast, and light grey on the ties. To dry out some of the weathering powders I bought I, then used then on the rails to give a rusty look, and were the rust has washed off and stained the ties.

Here's how it looks, ideal to appear in an Imperial city:

If you wanted to go further, try something different, you could use a strip of card under the track and more sand/grit to build a ballast shoulder, like you'd find on mainline tracks. You could also silver the tops of the rails for more frequently used rail - either by paint of by removing spray from the rail tops with an eraser/ Brite Boy. Last of all you could use an airbrush to put a line of black down the centre of the ties to simulate oil staining from locomotives.

Weekend (Dragon) Warriors

What an amazing weekend! On Saturday we had the inaugural Teamhammer 40K Tournament, which wasa resounding success as we raised over $400 for our chosen charity! See the Teamhammer blog for more details. http://teamhammer40k.blogspot.ca/ Following that we had some nice warm weather so I was able to get out on the balcony and spray some miniatures - actually it was a bit too hot and a couple of minis had to be stripped and redone.

I'm trying out the Army Painter sprays as I've said before, and generally I'm happy with them, but I think the claim they are primers that will cover black is not really true. Sure is you give enough layers you will cover it, but by then you model is swamped in paint, even if you use lots of light coats. Here's the verdict os far, the paints are good (some colours cover better than others - greenskin is the best of the 5 I have used but I have another couple to try. What I would recommend is a light primer coat of grey/white before hitting the models with the army painter primers, or just leaving the model in raw plastic to get an even colour. The spray grips well to the raw plastic, so why risk another coat of paint to obscure details?

What really rocks now though is that Army Painter is selling match pots, so you can afford to leave some of the hard to spay areas of your model and just touch in with these. This is excellent as it saves you swamping parts of the model with over spray as you try and hit a missed area, and the colour match on the 2 reds (Dragon and Pure) and the green (greenskin) is spot on, this has to be the way forward for me.

Now the bit you all want to see, what did I paint with them? Well I used the Pure red to base coat more parts of my Brass Scorpion and some Bezerkers, the Greenskin to do some Salamanders (there's an article coming on these guys eventually), the purple (I forget the name) to do my last squad of Dark Edlar Warriors' base coat and the Dragon Red to start my Chaos Marines Chosen unit. For those that have read Nick Kyme's Salamander series of books from the Black Library, you'll know the nemesis of the green marines is a faction of traitor Salamanders called the Dragon Warriors. I chose to use this scheme for a 10 man unit of Chosen, which will be fielded as two 5 man squads, one with melta guns, the other with flamers and a powerfist. Obvious I need to finish the arms, but here are two that I've started.

Lucky Finds

A few weeks back I visited a fairly local hobby store, one I've been to only once before, as I needed some plastic card. I'd avoided this place as while it had some cool stuff, it had a bit of everything, but not a lot of anything. Anyway, somehow I'd missed their 40K section before (it was quite small) but it did have some older, now OOP items, such as Grimaldus, Mephiston and this assassin in metal - all very cool! The assassin was in a 3rd edition style box so he'd been there a while!

The assassin suffered a strange mishap - as I was pushing him into his slotta-base, he snapped in half at the waist! I could tell by the break it was some kind of metal fatigue, maybe related to age, or to a faulty cast. Anyway as you can see I fixed him up with some greenstuff, and I'll be painting him soon.

Silver Machine

Yes, this time it is a musical reference that I can endorse! :) 

For quite some while I've been considering how to make a silver tower of Tzeentch. I've even gone as far as purchasing a Frisbee and two tubes of knock off Pringles chips from my local dollar store, but now I think I might have found a better solution. By the way the not-Pringles chips are awful, so you know how much I've suffered for this cause already! 

What I've discovered is the Battlefield in a Box Elven Tower, seen here assembled and sitting on my bed.

I'm thinking with the following changes I could have something viable:

- a respray (the current paint job is poor close up)

- convert the gems to weapon mounts by gluing on the animal weapon muzzles from the chaos tank sprues

- replacing the winged icon with a Tzeentch one

- mounting the tower on the disguised Frisbee base

What do you think?

Riveting Read!

One of the keys aesthetic features of 40K is over-sized rivets, that and of course skulls! When you are doing a conversion or scratch-build, you often need to add rivets to help you model fit into that 40K vibe. Now for Orks, you are fine using a punch and make lots of round, flat rivets, but those really don't cut it for Imperial tech. For those I've discovered Tichy Trains' rivets. These are available in several sizes, and can either be fitted by drilling a hole, and dropping the rivet's shaft in, or but cutting off the heads and simply gluing them on. The first I assume is the correct way, but the second has advantages when you can drill through the model. 

Here's how they come on the sprue, top to bottom, 0.050", 0.040", 0.030", the ones  I've used most on vehicles are the .040", but the smaller ones would look better on powered armour.

Here are the packs so you can spot them at the hobby store, and you can see what I paid for them in Canadian dollars, but you can always get them from Tichy's website for less:

Here's some of the .040" on my WIP Howitzer:

Here's Tichy's website:

http://www.tichytraingroup.com/

Jungle is Massive!

Don't panic, I've not serious adjusted my taste in music. Actually I've been getting creative with aquarium plants to make some jungle terrain. I've tried to keep it lightly populated so as to leave space for the miniatures, and all the bases needs paint and sand still, but it's a start. Good thing is that the plants were effective 4 for a dollar as it was 2 packs for for the price of one, and each plant needed to be split in two to stop it being too tall. The smaller scrub was from a $2 wreath, which is covered in 3 pieces of greenery on a single push in golf tee like arrangement, so when you cut these off you get hundreds. I have enough bits to make a few more pieces of terrain, but I really want to add more elevation to those.

The bigger piece below also has a water pool, so I can test out my new scenic water. The astute among you may note the foliage colours match those of my Dark Eldar - a coincidence but quite cool never the less!

Blood Pact Howitzer

Some time last year I saw a project by someone on Dakka Dakka which was using tanks from ToySoldierDepot.com to make 40K vehicles - an Ork tank and some IG APCs. This is what inspired me to start on my Lungbursta project C(or rather what became a Lungbursta). Whilst I was buying those tanks I also picked up a couple of howitzers, which I'm told are cheap copies of the old Marx cannons. My plan was to use them for my Planetary Defence Force army, but I figured I didn't need both for that, so one has been seconded to my Blood Pact. The one that will remain Imperial, will be fitted with the shield from the Basilisk (you can find others that have done this conversion online).

I had a couple of hours spare last night so this is what I did, but I still need to fill the wheel backs.

For those that want to see the conversions that started me off on this crazy path, look at Brushfire's work on the Ammobunker forums, as it's easier to find that wading through the Dakka gallery.

Lungbursta gets a Big Shoota and I start a Gutrippa

Just to prove that the Lungbursta project is not dead, I've been working on the pintle big shoota. The gun is taken from one I ordered from Shapeways, but which was too crude and big for an Ork to carry. I've modified it to fit in the pintle mounts, added hand grips to the rear, 50cal style, and added a barrel, with some ridges on the top to make it look more Orky. The tank commander needs paint still and a head choosing fro him - I have several suitable ones from Kromlech so I just need to choose.

I've also started a second Ork tank as I had some pieces of plastic strip lying on my desk and I wanted to use them up. This will be a Gutrippa I reckon, using a battlewagon turret with a new rear deck and scratch built claws at the front.