Another box that has been sitting around for a while was a Chaos Space Marine Combat Patrol that I got for a birthday gift. The miniatures are lovely, though I have to say that the lack of options means they’re not as much fun or as satisfying as earlier heretics. I like to build! I have never painted Word Bearers before, and these guys seem far more like Word Bearers than any other type of nasty heretic, so Word Bearers it was. I am quite pleased with them, and it was nice to do a few squads together to give far more of a unified army look than I normally achieve.
A few years ago, just before the 2nd ed. Oldhammer boom, I bought the o.g. Gorkamorka boxset for a very reasonable price. Included were lots of ork boyz and some random metal orks and I was very pleased. Then I put it aside! Now the wheel of time has turned, and the compass needle points due-ork and I am pleased to present a collection with enough Orks to form a decent sized mob of Gorkas and Morkas with spannezs, slaverz, and Nobz and a trukk each.
These have been done quick and dirty for the most part, these are gamepieces rather than ornaments, but I still wanted to do a decent job. I hope I have succeeded.
When the whole Primaris thing was new and fresh and Reaver Squads were introduced in a box set called something like Shadowspear, Big Jim Workshop in his infinite wisdom introduced a small box set of Reavers, 3 for a tenner. And I bought some. Then, as things go, I put them away for a decade because time is a lie and I am middle-aged and there are lots of miniatures that needed painting before I got to them. Anyway, I was having a rearrange and found these at exactly the same time that I was looking for something simple to paint. But did you know that there is no way of legally fielding 3 Reavers? I only learned that once I had painted them and was looking to see how many points they were worth (I have a spreadsheet, the Steel Guard are currently worth 11,235 points and I am less than a quarter through). How fortunate for me that I have foiled GW’s cunning scheme by never playing any games (though if you’re in Caerdydd and fancy a game of 40k 2nd edition do drop me a line, I’ve been grooving on 2nd ed a lot recently and really fancy it). So yeah, this is Sergeant Giono, and Reavers Poreby and Mann, who got a couple of layers of contrast paint and blackened metal weapons to give them a ghostly kind of greyness rather than the military grey of the SG. But being Space Marines they were unable to get rid of the red trim and golden skulls of their chapter. Some things are more important than camouflage.
Given that the new edition of Age of Darkness has been released and I do fancy painting some Saturnine Terminators, I felt that I ought to complete the previous box first. Of course, it looks like a new edition of 40k with Orks as the protagonists is coming out, so that might have to be bought. I never did complete the Blackstone Fortress set either… oh my. So yes, these little bunch represents the other half of the set that I painted recently, the Sons of Horus. I decided to paint them as Ultramarines because in the initial Horus Heresy Calth boardgame I painted the minis as Death Guard and Imperial Fists instead of Word Bearers and Ultramarines. I just did what I wanted, what an anarchist! But since then I have come to appreciate the painting cue aspect of boxes. Having never painted smurfs before, apart from some Space Crusade marines when I first started painting again, I fancied a go as these guys. I am reasonably pleased with what has come out. I don’t think the edge highlighting is very good, but as a quick and dirty paintjob for the enjoyment of doing blue power armour for a change, yeah, its ok. Now where am I going to get the money for Saturnine….
Oh, and the other week I took the opportunity to visit Warhammer World and look at the exhibitions. Were some very cool dioramas there, including some lovely early ones. Needed more early minis tbh, and it would have been amazing to have one of every miniature ever made, but its definitely worth £8.50! I didn’t find the hidden assassin though.
Oh man, the Unmade. These are some of Citadel’s gnarliest miniatures. My missus loved them and kept talking about getting me some to paint, but we both missed ’em being quietly retired. GW should have Last Chance To Catch mail outs so we know when we’re about to lose stuff! Because of how awesome they are, second-hand prices are also a bit gnarly, so when we got the chance to grab a scrap lot at a decent price we leapt in. These Disability Icons don’t let lack of arms, legs, or faces get in the way of laying the smack down on their enemies. Of course, what we know and what they don’t, is that their local goddo, the Flayed Prince, is just a facet of Slaanesh. Whoopsy!
This was a fun bunch to paint and give some minor repairs and conversions too. What Necromunda is to 40k, Warcry is to AoS – a deep dive into the weirdnesses and grotesqueries of the universe. There are so many bits here to enjoy, from the flayed faces worn about their bodies, to the eye teeth in the helmets. The Blissful One (her on the stilts) is really one of the strangest miniatures I’ve ever owned. Fantastic! My favourite though is the lad pushing his helmet back to give his enemy a view of his flayed face!
Up next is a conversion that I’m pretty pleased with. It’s a chaos giant that has taken a form surprisingly unseen in the Warhammer Worlds since the very first days… an ettin! Chuckles here was bought originally as an unfinished conversion very cheap on ebay, which rolled around my To Paint pile for a while, fell apart, became part of my bits box, and finally, years later, re-emerged in a whole new form. Originally the heads were rubbish as they didn’t have a neck at all. Remodelling the neck so that one of them had a long stretchy neck and the other had no neck created a greater sense of movement and difference. He was missing a foot so I found something weird and fleshy, and have tried to give the impression of amorphousness – this guy is in the process of changing. A tail was essential, because chaos. Finally I rebuilt the arms, using some spares from the Cygor kit. He seems like he’s moving fast and pulling up stones as he comes. I tried to paint his skin tones as close to my own as I could! I wanted to give him a farmers’ tan, but couldnt work out how to do it. His face is scarred, as is his unmutated foot – it seemed obvious that his foot would attract a lot of sword hits. Places where the previous conversion left encrustations of green stuff I have tried to turn into scar tissue. He’s been hit with a flame weapon at some point. I am very pleased with how this turned out. I hope you like it!
With this wee fella another landmark is complete – I have worked my way through a pile of broken old vehicles, repairing, restoring, and returning them to life. I have no idea if Razorbacks are legal in 10th edition – the last time I played a game was 8th ffs (if you’re in South Wales and want to play a game of 40k, any edition, and don’t mind that I am a complete novice and that we have to take some infection control precautions, I would be up for a game, drop me a message). But in 8th Razorbacks were a thing, even if no-one ever played them. One opponent was so amazed by my antique models he called all his friends over to examine these weird things! He tabled me in 3 moves with his Dark Angels and was terribly embarrassed about it, but really it was an experience and style of playing mismatch. I had very little, and he was a tournament player. No shade to the guy, as long as he’s enjoying himself, there are no wrong ways to play as long as you’re not cheating or being a shitty opponent. I think I enjoyed the game more than he did though, it was no challenge for him to table me and he wouldn’t have learned anything along the way. I learned a lot and had fun and saw some cool models and got to show off my minis from a time when the grim far future seemed so very far away.
Oh yeah, so this Razorback has been converted a bit. It started life as a Looted Rhino, rebuilt and orkified. I prised off the most orky bits, but kept the basic frame as the previous owner had left it. I thought it looked quite good and different, whilst still being acceptably Imperiumy. The Razorback turret was all in one piece in my bitz box, fit into the hole in the roof, and looked alright. A bit of filling and plasticard, a couple of bits of copper wire, and pow! All that was left was to paint it. This one is painted as a first company support vehicle. I named it ‘Peace Is Tyranny’ because I have been thinking about Megatron a lot today! Enjoy!
This is it! We’re getting close now. Yes, I’ve nearly cleared a backlog of restoration projects. With this rhino there is only one more oldhammer vehicle sitting in parts in the small wooden trunk that hides my shame. Once a variety of badly converted Ork vehicles, these have gradually become, well, other badly converted Ork vehicles, a chaos warshrine, and another Death Guard rhino! No more will I buy damaged rhinos and pile them up waiting for inspiration to strike! Actually I probably will, although the price of damaged rhinos these days is incredible. I maybe should have just sold all these and called it a day. But that isn’t the oldhammer way! So you may remember I did some Death Guard last year and included a rhino. That was fun, so I did another! I used lots of glazes and layers of browns and greens and filth and rust. This was kind of necessary – the previous paint job didn’t want to come off in places, and the plastic was affected by the paint remover in others. All very Nurgly. Happy with my work here.
I have often thought about a Sisters of Battle army. They’re delightfully gothique, and have some wonderful miniatures. I would have thought that the whole sexy goth nun thing was kind of a generational trope, maybe beardlings don’t really have that whole late night telly – Bizarre mag – plastic trousers cultural foolishness axis. Perhaps these days Sisters of Battle stand for nothing more or less than Ladies Who Purge The Heretic. So anyway, when Imperium magazine had some Sisters that seemed like a good time to jump in. I bought possibly too many, but they were bargainishous. So this is the first round of Sisters, to see how they feel. I think the future ones will be converted, possibly heavily to make them chaotic. Meanwhile these have been both fun and frustrating to paint. Fun, because I tried some new techniques, frustrating because there is SOOOO much kibble and detail on these guys that just don’t really fit with my painting style [skills].
My big thing with these guys was an attempt at pearlescent armour. I got it wrong, but next time will be better. I chose Wraithbone as my undercoat and Flayed One Flesh mixed with Irridescent Medium for the armour base coat. Next time I will use Pallid Wych Flesh and more Irridescent Medium and then glaze with pure medium over the top and see if that looks more like pearl. Or try another of the colour shift paints I bought a couple of years back – I used one on the Chaos Knight and liked it a lot. Either way this was an acceptable first attempt but you can’t tell really. No complaints though.
The Inquisitor was really an excuse to paint a mini I liked. This is Athera, The Blade Of The Matriarch, who is an Escher Gang character from Necromunda. A little digression about Necromunda. Necromunda is where so much of the cool shit is happening right now. Almost every mini released for Necromunda adds new colour and character to 40k. It’s all full of amazing levels of characterisation and drama – GW have taken the opportunity to zoom in on a single planet out of a million (or more) and fill it full of grotesqueries, monsters, and humans trying to survive in a psychotic fascist death machine. I could buy everything because its all amazing! And I don’t even have the boxed game! For no good reason. One day…
Finally, there are some female space soldiers from god knows where. Drew Williams, I think. I thought that these would fit in fill up some gaps as well as creating a new heavy weapons squad for a bit of long range oomph.
The other year I realised that I had a build up of GW vouchers and so I jumped on Age of Darkness when it was released. This is a good example of Getting Over Excited Because Other People Are and Not Reading The Instructions Properly. Not that its a bad set or owt, this is a great set. The minis are fantastic and for GW it’s a decent price (interjection: have you seen Rogue Hobbies’ video on Gundam? I am not a GW hater but goddam when the relative prices of plastic sprues are compared it makes me piss blood. I cheered myself up by reminding me that I recommended that my father-in-law buy GW shares, and he is well pleased with the return and regularly praises my stock tipping skills so what comes around goes around and all that). No, not that at all, but because I don’t especially collect Horus Heresy minis and already have a massive pile of shame dreams. In point of fact, I actually thought that a) this was a game in itself, like Betrayal At Calth; and b) that this would be a limited edition boxset like Betrayal etc. Whoops!
When I did Betrayal At Calth I decided, foolishly in hindsight, to paint the marines as Imperial Fists vs Death Guard. This was because Imperial Fists are great and Ultramarines are dull, and Death Guard are super interesting and never get any love. Since then of course Death Guard have become their own Thing and I have loads of them and they’re a bit boring (in an entertainingly squishy sort of way). It was clear that Sons of Horus vs Imperial Fists was fun, but I’ve already painted a load of 30K Fists, did I want to do more? Well, I will worry about that later, I’ve never painted any Sons of Horus and considering I’ve got some Lupercal Green and Sons Of Horus Green sitting here crying out for use, let’s start there.
What can I say about these? I really enjoyed painting them and I think they came out well. I am very pleased with the Spartan because tanks are so hard to paint well if you’re a hamfisted spanner like me. The marines look good. I think I should have added some battle damage and dust to the marines, but its not a problem really. I am also pleased with the freehand Sons logos. All in all, a success.
Doris Plunger's Lead Mess 