Month 2 complete - and then some!

Ok, so for this month I set myself the task of painting up the Death Company so I'd have a second troops squad painted up.

Only problem is I got a little carried away and ended up painting more than I had originally intended - oh well, I'll just have to paint even more stuff in the rest of this month/March!

First of all, here's the finished Death Company - I've armed them with bolters as their relentless rule means they can rapid fire with these and then still assault the enemy. To help with that I've given them a couple of power weapons and a power fist for those more heavily armoured targets!

All they really need now is a chaplain to lead them (perhaps next month!)

I've also painted up a land raider redeemer to carry Captain Galad and his squad (painted last month) around the board. I press-moulded the grail symbol from a Bretonian banner then made a green stuff cast of it. Then I stuck a couple of Bretonian shields on the side and painted them up to match the heraldry on the captain's knee pad. As a final touch, I named this noble steed - Concorde. Sweet Concorde - bonus points for anyone who spots the reference!

And I started painting a squad of scouts. Three of them are done, and the other two will probably be finished tonight. I've decided to call the middle one Depardiu as he does look quite a bit like Gerard Depardiu to me! These guys should be able to guide any deep striking troops down bang on target, as well as roughing any enemies up they come across!

Then as a final touch - here's a couple of veteran models I did a test paint on -

The Vanguard veteran has Sanguinary Guard legs and jump pack, and a grey knight head.

The Terminator has a Sanguinary Guard torso on a Grey Knight back piece and has a Grey Knight terminator helm. The shield is the symbol from the Sanguinary Guard banner top mounted on a simple plastic shield.

And lastly, an Iron Hand space marine. I decided I wanted some heavy fire support for the army, and thought the best way to do that would be to add some heavy duty allies from the regular Space Marines codex. Eventually there will be a squad of 10 of these painted up, along with a Master of the Forge with Conversion Beamer and another techmarine with a Thunderfire cannon.

Right, that's it - I'm off to paint some dreadnoughts!

Back in the Game

Well it all seems quiet on the Panic Rising Blog, so I thought I'd post a quick update-

There's two parts to this (well three, as the blogger iPhone app won't let me post photos anywhere but the end)... The second being my own hobby progress. The first is this-Community (not the TV show).

Having the blog and Facebook group for the Army Challenge has been awesome, BUT, more importantly, has reminded me of one of the big reasons why I like playing with small plastic soldiers (also known as Man-Barbies): the community of like minded geek culture and beer drinking that accompanies it! I don't get much beer drinking in at the moment, as my boy is still too young to join in, but I have loved seeing the posts on everyone else's work, as well as getting advice and feed back on my own! I have even had a fellow gamer post me some zombie bits out of the goodness of his heart (the wonderful BEN), which was AWESOME of him, and very generous! This kind of exchange is brilliant.

This may get a little sentimental, but getting to build this sense of community through mutual banter and hobbying advice has both made me very happy, and also really inspired me to keep sneaking in an extra coat of paint here, and some more plastic scythes on a model there..! I am certainly checking FB a lot more often than necessary, after posting a painting or modelling picture, to see what people think of it!

The other thing that is very helpful is a deadline-I've got it into my head that I can get 1750 points painted by march to use at The Spikey Clubs SVA event (with the knowledge that I can borrow some chaos allies if needs be - thanks 6th!) - so paint brushes ahoy, and I'll crush (I mean 'see') you at SVA!

HOBBY PROGRESS:

Painted up 5 immortals- fun, and not too taxing...
Built a couple of wraiths-great, but the decision to put decomposing cyber zombies controlling them has made them a big project. 3 more to build!
3 Crypteks built-enjoyed making these guys a lot-they feel very unique!

Also sourced loads of bits for other junky robots, and cyber zombies-as well as vehicles - which will be pretty big conversions! Including the Manifactorum terrain set, for building junkloader ghost arks!

Photos:

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.