Horror In the Scrapyard: month 1 complete!

So this month has worked out well for me-my Cybermancer (overlord on catacomb command barge) and 15 scrapcrons have risen from the junk of a hive world and are fully painted and based!

I've been painting in short bursts of an hour here and there, after the boy has gone to sleep, and whilst watching DVDs with the missus... After five or more years its great to get back into the hobby!

The broken down feel has been very interesting to work on-from salt masking on the armour of the Cybermancer, and command barge, to the rust and oil stains on the scrapcron warriors... Over the top of shading, highlights etc. the Living zombie head of the Cybermancer really makes him pop amongst the other colours, and I couldn't resist the dripping blood from his in and out tubes. Honestly, the hardest part has been the hazard stripes on the tube on his head, all done by hand!

Next month I think is immortals, 5 more warriors and a ghost ark... But might scale down to just immortals depending on busyness... But for now, don't go done to the scrap yard at night... And recycle. That's important too...

1st month's goal complete!

Ok, so the goal for the first month was to paint one HQ choice and one Troops choice. For my first month I decided to paint my own version of the Captain Tycho special character, and a tactical squad, but as I'm doing my own successor chapter the Grailbearers my tactical squad is a little different to the one you'd see in a regular army.

Since the Grailbearers are styled more as a group of crusading knights, it seemed more appropriate for them to carry pistols and chainswords than bolt guns. This isn't to say I won't have some boltgun squads in the army, just that I want to have more combat armed units than shooty units. Luckily the Blood Angels codex gives you the option to take an assault squad without jump packs as a troops choice - the perfect way to represent a combat weapon armed tactical squad!

I've painted mine up as 3rd squad of 3rd company, as you can see by the the red droplet on yellow knee pad, and the white blood droplet on their rights shoulder pads. I've also modeled the sergeant on Sergeant Rafen from the James Swallow novels as I really like the cover of Red Fury (like I said in my last post). I've tried to make him stand out by giving him his own heraldry on his knee pad, so it's not just yellow and red but yellow, black and red.

The squad is armed with a melta gun, two inferno pistols and a power sword and I intend to drop it in from orbit in a land raider for some series tank busting fury!

The captain is my version of Tycho, like I said in my last post I'm quite chuffed to have been able to convert it entirely in plastic! Still considering a name for him - currently thinking Galad since most of my other models in the army have names on their shoulder pads from medieval knights.

Here's some photos anyway.

As to what I'll be doing next month, I'm currently thinking Death Company! Maybe even a dreadnought (even though it's only supposed to be one force organisation chart per month).

Been going more than a month....

I have been working on this army for about 2 months now but then i have a very short amount of time to get it all done before i go back to work at the end of February so i decided to give myself a bit of a head start due to the much closer deadline i am working too.

I had been wanting to do an imperial guard army for ages with a box of cadians sat under my bed for years, when i say a box it was actually 70 guardsmen on sprue from the eye of terror campaign many moons ago. I kept getting drawn back to the renegades on forge world's website so i have to find a way to fund this project while unemployed so i sold my Fantasy chaos army to get all the bits i needed to do what i thought was a characterful Guard/ demon army.

With the launch of the new 40k box set i had the models i wanted for my penal legion these were the first models i painted for the army doing some head and gun swaps where needed to make them look a bit different from the cultists, I love how characterful this unit is every one is an individual.

The priest was up next he wasn't planned to go with the penal legion from the start but this is now where he takes his place on the battle field offering a bit of punch to the unit as well as allowing the degenerates of the penal legion to reroll hits in combat lets hope for extra attacks and rending for them lads!

With the arrival of the first of the orders from forge world the first unit of guardsmen was painted up, swapping the back pack on one model for the voxcaster and using allot of green stuff to make the lasguns fit the models properly, this wasn't really a problem it allowed me to position them  in allot more ways than normal.

To keep it a bit varied i painted the first of my tanks next a demolisher adding the banner top from the chaos maruader horsemen sprue to the turret to bring a bit of the chaos feel to the tank after i had removed all of the imperial eagles from the model.

while i continued to paint the mass of guardsmen i added other units so that i didn't get bored after finishing the second 10 man squad, i added the first off the 2 hell hounds to the painting desk and played around with ways to make the end of the gun look over heated and charred. This was done by doing a blend from mithril silver through to shining gold then adding glazes of abaddon black to the end of the gun to show smoke damage.

After playing a few games with the army heavy weapon teams were added to the 30 man blob squad and an additional unit of 3 auto canons was added to the platoon so these had to be painted up.

After painting all this red and black a change would be nice so the bloodletters were brought out, oh no more red and black! i had seen the alternate colour scheme for the forge world bloodthirster so got to highlight to white from black my god that takes a while but i found with some practise it wasn't to bad.

With the new year i wanted to finish off the first platoon so got the green stuff out to convert up my commissar then set to work painting him up in the same colour pallet as the rest of the army but swapped the colours about a bit to make him stand out not that he needed much help wielding that small sword of his.

The platoon command would be next to be attacked by the paint on my brush. with the addition of some copper wire to make the arms on the heavy flamer fit on the model they were finished in just under 2 days.

This command squad along with the last few men meant i had finished the platoon so that's 3 troops (1 of them allies) a non HQ, HQ choice, 1 fast attack and one heavy support done.

The company command took a bit longer to paint a whole week was spent on these with a couple of different ways of painting the banner tried out and changed.

I spent most of that time painting the Commander himself now known as Commander Parov, its ok that only the commanding officers don't have gas masks on right?....

The aegis defence line took a bit of work to get how i wanted it to look and i found a pot of terracotta paint that needed to be used( why did they stop this colour). I had been waiting for the spikey bits sprue to turn up to do this but once it had skulls and spikes were added and it was painted up.

The lateest addition tot he army is my second Leman Russ this time an exterminator a few spikes were added along with a helmet from Dave Plamer's Brazenclaw army....

That's me all up to date with what i have painted not got a huge amount more to go but the rest of it does need quite a bit of work to finish.

Rise of the Refuse

My entering into the army challenge is largely thanks to the HATE (Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts) crew's massive support-especially my good friends Toby Wrong and Dakari Mane- as if it wasn't for them then life, a new flat and toddler would have continued to take all my free time... However, a very generous birthday present of a nearly complete NIB Necron army has given me no excuse to not get involved..! It's been a good few years since I've painted anything more than a Blood Bowl team, and I'm very excited!

So conceptually, I'm looking forward to playing the army, but I'm not so keen on the clean, carbon copy look to necrons-it doesn't suit my painting style or excite my imagination, instead I've been imagining a more piecemeal horror... A junk planet. Think Mark XIII meets Wall-E. a cybernetic Scrapmancer building killing machines from the refuse deep below an unsuspecting hive planet.

I like the idea of my Necron lords being still part human-the planetary overlord and his administarium advisors, corrupted by some ancient arechotec they discovered... Now rotting bodies sustained in cybernetic husks. So my first HQ will be a lord on a command barge-more like a scrap trawler...

My troops will be a decent mob of 15 necron warriors. The necrons them selves will be made from junk and crap-still using the skull heads here and there... But also tank tracks, smoke launchers and comms relays, that can replace heads, bodies and legs. Big thanks to Toby for use of his Orc bits bag!

As for colours I want rust, paint chips and dirty metal, with some industrial hazard stripes / hi vis... The pics show how I'm going so far... Really looking forward to my wraiths and ghost ark (a kind of rustbucket skip/rubbish trawling skimmer!) - I'm loving the individual feel so far!

"As long as there is civilisations, as long as there is war, there will be waste. As long as there is waste, We thrive..."

First progress on the FIST!

So we're into month one and I've started my first units. Starting before January would've been bad form of course ;)

So I've started a HQ and troops. Specifically Codicier Lothar Ossiax and Tactical Squad Expurgio. Below are some work in progress pics. All need some tweaking + green stuff. I'd love to label each in turn, but that doesn't seem to be an option on the phone app. So, in order:

*Work station alpha!
*Codicier Lothar Ossiax (two pics)
*Veteran Sergeant Axiom
*Plasma gunner
*(as yet unnamed) brother kneeling with Melta bomb
*brother with boltgun

So we're going for a very technical look. Funky backpacks, if not servo-arms. The Libby is a simple conversion from the Dark Vengeance one. But with the addition of a bit of Fists brass I think the hammer looks spiffing!

Some of the rest o the squad are going to be from DV, so kinda dull. But need some painting practice before I bring out the coolest guys.

Thoughts?