Hello everyone, it’s been a while. It’s not that I’ve not been painting whenever possible, but I’ve not been taking photos of what I do paint. This has now been remedied and so you’ll get a burst of posts over the next week or so. I hope that you enjoy them!
First up are the ‘goodies’ from Blackstone Fortress. Beautiful minis, a pleasure to paint, albeit difficult, and with mixed results. Some of these I am very happy and others not so much.
This is one of those painting projects that I struggled with. Truth be told, it was kind of half-arsed from the beginning. I pulled one of the space bunnies out of the leadpile, had a think for a few seconds, and then made a squad of beastman-mutant pirates using minis from a wide range of manufacturers. But my lack of preparation and imagination meant that i struggled with painting them. Because they didn’t exist in my imagination I had to work hard to bring them there. I’ve previously painted a squad of beastman pirates and they were more unified than this selection and less of a challenge. What I maybe should have done is mechanised them, turned them into dark mechanicus skitarii or something. Never mind, there’s plenty more in the leadpile!
The Freebooter Army project continues, with Freebooter Minderz. These are big tough Orks that would make an ideal close-combat unit. I picked a more modern Nob as the boss due to its size, and used some generic Space Crusade boyz for the same reason. A couple of Stormboyz minis to try and keep a vaguely uniform theme, to tie into the more modern idea of bodyguards being in tuxes, and used lots of greys to give that impression too, sort of. For most of us the closest we ever get to bodyguards are doormen, your names not down etc, so they’re Doorboyz. Randomisation of bioniks tables adds that orky feel, whilst assault weapons play to their strengths. I love painting Orks.
A while back I bought a corpse cart from GW for reasons that remain unclear. I don’t collect undead, I have no intention of collecting an undead army. You know how it goes, all that lovely plastic crack available on the website, your brain goes a bit soft and pow! Perhaps someone did a conversion that I thought was awesome and decided I needed to do it too, perhaps I had a clever idea that faded with the morning sun. I dunno, anyway it was sitting there staring at me and so I thought I’d try and do something grimdark with it, make it suitable for InquisiMunda or 40K or something like that. A project. Well, we all know that hive cities live on corpse starch, but where does it come from? Maybe someone has the job of going out and collecting the dead (and the getting better) and keeping the underhive clean of all those dead gangers. And so out went the cart axles and wheels and in came half a vincent black shadow from the bits box (the things people do to minis), some resin tracked wheels, and a few other bits and pieces. The necromancer driver didn’t need any work really, though I painted a hand silver to indicate a bionic. I have tried to do make it look like its in shadow, with the dark bits really dark and the light bits glowing but it didn’t work especially well. Its all practice though, and I’m pretty pleased with this.
I had a heathlord trike and nothing to go on the back! I had this alien knocking about, which I think is from Colony 87. It works! Also, the alien looks like a bloke I used to live with.
The Steel Guard project continues, bit by bit, and here we have one of the senior officers of the chapter. Chief Librarian Blasst has faced daemons and heretics and possessed psykers and really angry dogs, and has overcome them all. He is a fearless battler against the dark and was bloody hard to paint because of all the tricky detail!
I had a load of GW vouchers and I wanted to get something that I would really enjoy building and painting and would look amazing and I vacillated between a Stompa and the Glottkin or maybe a Keeper of Secrets but I settled on a Knight for a number of reasons. One: its awesome. Two: Chaos lends itself to soup armies which are rubbish for playing beardy people (because of command points and all those other things that I don’t really understand but seem important these days) but seem very chaosy… you know, hordes of cultists backed up by some Marines and giant spiky death robot. Three: it looks fun to build and not too finicky to paint.Four: its awesome.
I started by airbrushing the superstruture using vallejo silver paint. I’ve never used an airbrush before but it was great. However I did find that the paint rubbed off from handling later on, requiring lots of touching up. I don;t know if I didnt wash the sprue enough, or should have done more layers of airbrushing or what. I wanted to keep it simple as the best hope of doing this model justice, and I wanted something faintly organic, so I used colour-shift paint for the armour plates to give an impression of a shiny beetle carapace, which I am generally pleased with although I struggled with the highlighting. I used a beige-bone trim for the armour, because I wanted a light-dark contrast. I am reasonably pleased with the outcome. The first time painting anything is hard because you make mistakes and do things you wouldn’t do the next time, which is challenging for a centrepiece model like this. I’m not likely to paint another Knight, the price point is too high and there are too many other big ticket toys I’d like a go at before I retread old ground, but it was a fun challenge and definitely one I’d recommend.
I know I said I was done with Bad Moonz when I finished the Oddboyz, but I felt that just a Bigmob wasn’t really Orky. You need at least one more of the same colour in there. So here it is! Actually, the mob was kind of built to go in the battlewagon. This battlewagon came in a job lot and was pretty mullered. I rebuilt it and extended it and added a few bits. It looks alright but I was too basic with the side panels, I should have put more spikes around the edges and made the sides look like they were made up of different panels welded together. This wouldn’t have been difficult to do, but I didn’t do it because it didn’t occure to me until I was already painting and think, this could look better, and then I didn’t stop and redo it because Orkes don’t look back. I love the old battlewagon model, and I hope that this isnt the last time I get to build and paint one. Maybe when I win the lottery I will buy one for every ork mob I make!
Doris Plunger's Lead Mess 