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.