The final miniatures from the Leviathan Starter set have been finished. The new monopose Terminators are very pretty, scaled well to earlier Terminators, and are nice and dynamic. Pleasure to paint, as Space Marines often are. It’s always nice to finish a box set, I feel a sense of achievement, and pride knowing that if someone came over for a game (if I had any friends in this city :rolleyes:) we could play using a fully painted army. Next up: the new HeroQuest…
The two Space Marine characters from the Leviathan Starter Set. Both lovely miniatures, but I hated the scenic base on the Captain. I tried to paint it to look like one of my Tyranids and it looks crap.
Up today we have the Tyranid half of the Leviathan Starter Set. Now Tyranids are not really my thing. They’re kind of boring. They’re not my least favourite 40k faction (waves to Necrons) but I don’t really care about big faceless monsters and hordes of identical smaller monsters. Although I do dig on Genestealer cults. GCs are amazing and are full of character. I don’t have a GC army, but I have the cults part of Deathwatch Overkill and a GC chemist guy and a GC rockcrusher so maybe I do. I also have the majority of the genestealers from Space Hulk painted up, so I could run all these together as a big army or something. That might be fun. Normally I paint genestealery things in the traditional oldhammer colourscheme of blue and (titillating) pink, but I wanted these painted quickly using contrast paints and basic techniques. I flicked through the starter guide and looked at the different Hive Fleets and it was Kronos that stood out for me. I liked the idea of them being Chaos-eaters, developed to function in areas of high psychic activity and specialising in fighting daemons and eating daemonworlds. The dark red-bright blue-brown colour I thought would make an interesting scheme to paint and was different to anything I had done before. Plus all the colours were available in contrast so I didn’t need to mix or shop around.
These were both fun and frustrating to paint. My lack of experience in the miniatures or scheme definitely showed, but I was aiming to get them done so that I could play the game out of the box, not win golden demon. I didn’t enjoy it so much that I will be staying in the Tyranid game, and I’m not especially pleased with the result, but just painting a big batch of miniatures and completing the box set is a victory in itself.
I’m still alive, as busy or busier than ever but still getting to slowly grind out some finished miniatures. Here we have a Sternguard Veteran Squad, intended as a part of Chapter Master Melmoth’s honour guard. I used Contrast paints mostly, and the grey is much lighter. I think next time I am going to use the normal Mechanicus Standard Grey and use the Contrast paints to shade it. This is the Armour Through The Ages resin reprint of old lead miniatures and has recently been on Made To Order. This surprised me because I hadn’t realised it had been taken off sale in the first place. Its a bit sad when things you’ve bought have been removed from sale and them brough back again as classic one offs! Nice to get it painted finally. I really wanted to paint the Thunder Warrior, a mini I had when I was a lad. Its a proper 80s mini that should really have been painted in neon colours! I hope you are all staying Covid safe still. Its not over, and it might cause your immune system to go crazy and disable you, even if you’ve been vaccinated.
A vehicle for the cult. I have also bought a land train so as to add something oldhammery to the cult. Of that, later! I’m pleased with the mud spatter on this one, though maybe some weathering would have looked good too.
A digression into newhammer, I painted these guys because I like the miniatures so much. Full of detail and bursting with ideas. I like the idea that this is how some people slip into chaos worship, without even realising that they’re doing it.
Returning to the leadpile in search of a chaos character I find this chap, ideal! This is a great little miniature, mid-period GW, neither silly nor especially grimdark (given that he’s a Night Lord, for whom grimdark really means something). It was a pleasure to paint, although I chickened out of trying to paint lightning bolts all over him because my life is still hectic and my nervous system can’t handle the intense concentration that learning new painting techniques can take. It’s still an hour here or there really. Painting is like meditation in that the busier you are the more important it is to try and find some time to do it! I hope you’re all doing well and are enjoying the gradual return to normal. Remember that covid is still out there and some people are medically vulnerable so take care of yourselves and each other!
My final orktober offering is an oldhammer-newhammer combi. When the Speed Freeks game came out a few years ago I fell in love with the ork vehicles inside but I couldn’t afford the whole box. Later I picked up this Boomdakka Snazzwagon, which is a lovely kit, feels very old school, full of orky goodness. It could easily pass for a battlewagon in my opinion, especially against the tiny metal vehicles of old. Orks can buy heavy weapons to mount on battlewagons, so the weapon roll out here is whatever i roll on those lovely charts (heavy bolter, heavy plasma gun, missile launcher). Speed Freekz also get access to cheap vehicles, so I added a warbuggy and wartrak (skorcha). Poor tiny vehicles! The skorcha really needs a (full size) modern kit, by the way GW, hint hint.
So yeah, its’s been a busy few months. Since going all out for Orks I have been sidetracked by my partner’s long covid flaring up again, an increase in my workload, and a decrease in my own mental health. Not as much time for painting as I’d like, but an hour here and there is better than nothing. So that messy pile of bitz from five months ago has turned into three more Freebooterz mobz. Up first is the simplest: Ugnob da Dribbla, Possessed Warphead!
As readers may have noticed along the way, I love random tables. I really enjoy rolling up combos of items and materiel and bionik bitz and mutations and then modelling it. I’m not a great modeller, but every conversion teaches me something, even if that something is how not to do it next time. Sometimes they turn out great and sometimes not so great. Occasionally the tables throw out some disappointments, and that’s what happened here.
So a Possessed Warphead is, as the name suggests, and Ork possessed by a daemon (or daemons). Orks don’t possess well, so this is a bit of a bad move by the daemon. You get a weirdboy that is way powerful and has some cool chaos attributions. At least you do if you manage not to roll badly. Ugnob here has been possessed by nurglings! He also rolled up nothing on his chaos attributes chart. I also rolled on the bionik bitz chart, got a dok’s surprise and then rolled fungus breff! So let’s say that he’s only just been possessed by nurglings, which has given him a tendancy to have ten-way conversations with himself, a weird sense of humour, terrible breath and incredible amounts of snot.
Possessed Warpheadz even give Madboyz the creepz, so he’s a lone figure on the battlefield, but I decided to make him some snot and grot sidekicks. This became a big base of sidekicks, but actually I regret this because it’s too big and unwieldy, it makes no sense. I should have made a scenic base that you can put Ugnob in, or put the sidekicks onto individual bases and scattered them around him.
This isn’t a very oldhammer beginning to Orktober, but fear not, there’s plenty to come!
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).