Sometime around the beginning of the month i realised it was Orktober and there were certain things expected of me. I cleared my table of non-Ork projects and had a rummage through my various boxes and a look in Freebooterz to see what mobz i was missing. Having made a selection I started work on the mobz, building and painting and convertin and all that. And here we are at the end of Orktober and this is what I have achieved this month… the biggest lesson here is one that I should have already known – don’t try and do too much at the same time! Ah well, Orkvember it is then too!
With these two squads I have now painted the whole Chaos Army! I will get a photo of the whole lot soon, but for now enjoy some gobbos and chaos warriors.
I have to say that I think both lots look better in the plastic, so to speak.
I got this rhino years ago in a joblot of battered vehicles and unfinished conversions that caught my eye. It was covered in mud-effects and patchily painted. I scrubbed off the mud effects, stripped the paint off it, added a space marine sticking his head out and a generic cannon that could be a counts-as for a storm bolter or even a predator cannon if I wanted. I then used a thinner mud effect to give it a bit of verisimilitude. I am quite pleased with this, it looks battle damaged but functioning, very Steel Guard-esque (Imperial Fists descendents with a touch of the Death Guard infantry slogger mentality).
I’m struggling getting the best use out of contrast yellow. Sometimes it looks great, but here I think it looks dark and unsaturated (is that the right word?)
I don’t have an epic ork army, I just painted this one because it was there. I am not that happy with the outcome. Maybe it’s time to sell up the epic stuff!
A quick Steel Guard squad, using a sprue of modern marines that I had lying around. They look alright but they’re not as characterful as the old ones, are they?
I haven’t painted sergeant helmets white before, but I think I’m going to stick at it, I think it adds a nice flash of colour. Of course, the first third of the chapter don’t have white helmeted sergeants, but it’s my goshdarned chapter and I declare it OK.
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.
