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!