The Lavuran Guards' Armour

The weather was pretty good last weekend (other than a rain storm at night) so I was able to get out and get a whole load of stuff base coated with spray cans. Here are the bits of my IG army that I painted:

Hellhound with magentised weapons

Medusa using the Maxmini howitzer

Chapterhouse Wheeled Chimera

Manticore

Deathstrike

Linear Obstacles

The weekend is over and I'm exhausted, I went hobby crazy and racked up a load of scenery, two 20mm kits, a load of spray painting and some 40K IG models. It all helps clear the backlog and my room so I can crack on with the Blood Pact, oh and I assembled some more of those guys too, plus fitted them into their new Battlefoam tray.

Here's the scenery I was working on - none of it is complete yet but I paint scenery very quickly so it should take much more to get it all done.

Ork BS2 sucks - hence the fact that the sandbagged position has been missed by 4 Ork Rokkits, one of which has failed to even explode! Mix of Pegasus craters, Armorcast rokkit and some 1/35 sandbags

Armorcast barrels and tyres

Maxmini barricades

GW Imperial Barriers

Water filled craters (Pegasus), they need the "water" muddying and another layer of water to level the surface.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

For a change it's not 40K, but one of my original wargame interests that I've been neglecting for a while - 20mm WW2. I'm planning a new army to be used with the Battlegroup Kursk (BGK) rules when they released next month. To be honest I suspect we'll have to modify the rules to play early war games, but some of my gaming club have already done this with BGK's ancestor, Kampfgruppe Normandy so I'll be in safe hands.

Here's what I've done so far for a winter 1941 Soviet force:

Pegasus BT-7s
Pegasus BA-6s
Trumpeter KV-2

Here's the rest of the stuff I've gathered so far:

I'm planning to pick up some infantry too soon - possibly a mix of Pegasus and Elhiem.

The Joy of Magnets!

Those little attractive metal disks are a lifesaver in this hobby, allowing us to get more from our hobby dollar, or making delicate kits so much easier to move and store - I don't know how we used to get by without them. The case in point being this Leman Russ Demolisher I've been working on, which has fully magentised sponsons, sponson weapons, hull weapons, turret weapons and even turret basket cover! The best this being that this kit is so easy to magentise, which I suspect is the GW designers sticking it to the management, who would have us buy a new kit for each variation! I've gone down as far as magentising the arms of my Wych Cult so I can swap out special weapons - those are tiny magnets.

Here's a pic of the Russ, just so there's something to look at, it'll be joining my Lavuran Guard troops when I get it painted, right now I just wanted the box and sprues gone so I could tidy up my pile of kits! (Yes the multi-meltas are missing, those are on my desk, I found them after I took the photo, and yes the plow is not straight, it's not yet attached)

Blood Pact - the painting begins!

I've managed to get quite a lot done in the last few days, which means I have some content to put up this week for which I'm glad as I felt last week was a bit barren. The first post is of my WIP Blood Pact AT-70 and some veteran infantry, using Maxmini heads and legs. I need to get 9 vehicles, 3 walkers and 67 infantry done by the start of August, so it looks like I won't be sleeping that much next month.

Here's the initial painting - Dragon Red spray from Army Painter.

Jake the Peg (Part 1)

This is a bit of an incomplete post as the model here has now been finished an partially painted, but I realised I hadn't posted this week, nor have I got anything else in the pipeline quite ready to post. I've done a little more on my Stormtalon, and have done some 20mm WW2 - haven't done any of that for ages; but it's not ready for an article yet. So here's something I did whilst working on my Chaos army the other week. I needed a 4th Havoc with missile launcher, but I had was bits, and not necessarily complete bits! Case in point, I had one marine kneeling leg, just just one! To over come this I got out the styrene shapes, the brass wire and the greenstuff, and voila, a bionic leg! 

No missile launcher, no problem, I had this old RT era relic in the bits box, but the hand grip had been cut off and a piece removed. No problem since I needed to re-position it anyway! Since I took this shot, I boxed in the side of the new handgrip's arm and added some piping to the outside. I'll show that in the second part of this article.

Given the size and shape of the old rocket launcher the backpack would no longer fit, but if you rotate it 90 degrees anti-clockwise it does, well after you cut it about a bit! You also need to add a mechanical arm and remote control, but that's small stuff!

Next time you'll see Jake, he'll be full painted!

We have the technology, we can rebuild it!

Just a pic of a Vindicator I rescued from a job lot purchase. The armoured sides had been stuck on over the doors so stood proud by several mm, and left an unsightly gap! I told this is because the Vindicator instructions are wrong! In addition some of the frontal armour was on crookedly, and it had been painted black, painted thickly yellow, then badly stripped. You can see it here stripped properly, with the pieces correctly fitted, a few repairs made and some liquid greenstuff used to smooth out some pitted surfaces. The dozerblade has been removed for painting, the rear shell hoist grab needs to be reattached and the cupola is gone as it will be replaced with one mounting a stormbolter.

Is it a bird? is it a plane?

No it's the flying guppy, aka the Stormtalon. Here's one that I've started for my Salamanders, so far just the pilot and cockpit fully painted an assembled. The sides need to have the black fine lining completed and edge highlighting added before I add the wings and engines. The gap between the sides at the top, will be pulled in when I glue the 'hump' into the recessed space between the 'shoulders'.

Captain Chaos

I meant to post up pics of the army I was working on last week, but in the end went to the wire trying to get stuff painted, and even then didn't get everything done! I did pretty badly at the tournament, 17th out of 18 but I had fun and learned that my pure Iron Warriors list would have been better suited to the style of game I wanted to play. Here are some of the pics of the units I took - you can still see that some are unfinished., and that my camera doesn't cope well with metallic colours.

Daemonology

Here's another unit for my army, 5 Bloodletters/Minor daemons..more tomorrow! (the one in the photo who is unfinished is now done).