From the moment the Nighthaunt range began I was struck by the urge to make weird Mechanicum chaos creatures out of them. I picked up a load of Nighthaunt models in one of the Hachette partworks series, which I have come to think of as GW sales, and then I left them for years! Eyes bigger than my stomach, as my dear old Mum would have said, etc etc. Anyhoo, throw in some spares from various Skitarii and other bits from my bitzbox and here we go… I tried to use a blanchistu set of tones too, just to pretend like I knew what I was doing….
A newhammer diversion! A few years ago, just at the point when GW started releasing cool new minis again but we didn’t know how much awesomeness was to come, I spent a GW gift voucher on the Start Collecting Adeptus Mechanicus box. Then it sat there for years whilst I did other things… so I thought I’d better either shit or get off the pot, and decided to, er, shit…
What I was aiming for with these miniatures was to try out some fun conversions and learn some blanchistu stylings. I certainly did the first, but I simply am not a good enough painter to use such outwardly minimalistic techniques effectively, and my attempts to add layers and bursts of colour have made it all a bit of a dogs dinner. Still, I enjoyed myself, especially the process of imagining what the Dark Mechanicus might look like.
This Explorator Team are from a minor Forge World recently fallen to chaos. The team itself aren’t high enough up the hierarchy to realise that their worship of the Omnissiah is now chaos worship, they just follow their leaders and see their mutations as gifts from that Omnissiah. Sooner or later they’ll just be another set of fanatic berserkers, doomed to end up chaos spawn with interesting metal bits embedded in their protoplastic limbs.