Army in a week and other projects.

I've had a weird and crazy couple of weeks. I've gone from being super productive, to being pretty ill, then came a ridiculous heatwave which meant that I struggled to find the motivation to hobby. Now that's eased off I'm finding that after really having to work hard in order to get back into swing of painting, I'm back in a super productive mood.

The big thing which I've gotten done was painting pretty much the entire Fellowship of the Ring in the space of a week:

My motivation for this was the monthly Middle Earth night at my local gaming shop. Five days before the latest one, I decided that I wanted to field something a bit different to my Rohan and Army of the Dead, so I had a look atwhat I had to hand which I could get done in time. The only member I had painted prior to this was Aragorn (who I want to repaint at some point), but I had the models for all the Fellowship knocking about, so I thought "why not" and went from there.

I surprised myself a little with how well they turned out, considering that they were more or less a speed paint. I obviously want to go back at some point and spruce them up a bit, but on the whole, I'm pretty chuffed with them.

I even managed to get a few pics of the game itself. I got smashed after a few bad tactical decisions, but it was good fun.

The best moment was easily when Merry and Sam managed to drive back the Balrog all by themselves, after reinforcements didn't arrive and the Balrog fluffed his rolls!

"You shall not pass!"

On top of that admitedly decent amount of progress, I also got a couple of Rangers of the North painted up for my Grey Company list:

These are more of a side project than anything. I figure that I already have Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli for my Fellowship and Return of the King forces, so I might as well paint a couple of Rangers so I could field the Grey Company if I wanted to.

These were nothing fancy, just a single night's work plus a few minutes doing their bases, but they've turned out pretty well. I've got another half a dozen or so to finish up, plus Halbarad and a Mounted Aragorn to make my fifth Middle Earth army. That's kind of ridiculous when you consider that I only picked up the game in February!

I've noticed that the nature of LOTR, with various heroes available in multiple army lists, makes it almost far too easy to just stray into another army project without even thinking about it. I'm already thinking that I should pick up some Hobbits, as I've already to a decent amount of heroes who could lead them. This rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper!

On top of all that, I even made little more progress on my friend's Nurgle stuff:

Not as much as I wanted, but luckily he's not too bothered on how long it takes to get them done. I wanted to have at least the Plaguebearers and Nurglings ready for the game we had a few weeks ago, but real life interfered on that one. I'm going to see if I can finish them in the next couple of weeks though. All I really need to do is pick out some details using 'standard' painting techniques, then finish the bases and I'll have a good chunk of them done. Then I can work on some of his characters, which should be a bit more fun.

I'm loving how the green turned out and it was wonderfully simple to do. It was just two/three layers of Waywatcher Green on a Corax White undercoat, followed by a 2:3 mix of Contrast Medium and Militarum Green. I certainly like the result a lot better than my previous experiments without Medium. There's a good amount of the Waywatcher showing through, really pushing the highlights which Contrast is meant to create anyway.

This is turning into quite a long post, but there is one final thing which I've gotten finished.  If you remember last post, I talked about using Trello to organise my hobby progress. Well it actually paid off:

All that needed doing to my second Sonic Dreadnought was attaching the missile arm, but I've been forgetting all about it for about 18 months now. There's always been something more interesting to distract me, especially as I took a long break from playing 40k last year.

I decided to give it a bit of a spruce up whilst I was there and pick out a few extra highlights and details. Nothing fancy, but just making it 'pop' a bit more. Completing it means I've only got a couple more models to paint and and I'll have 2000 points of painted Emperor's Children ready to go, which is one of my goals for this year. It also proves my new organisational system works, which is rather nice to know.

That's all for now, but you can see I've been pretty busy, despite my motivation taking a nosedive for a while. It was only when I was writing this post that I realised just how much I've managed to bounce back. I didn't realise just how much I'd gotten through until I was writing it all down!

Hopefully this productive streak continues. I've got some something in the works which should occupy me for a little while. I'm pretty excited about it, so that'll probably be going into my next post. Getting back into a hobby groove again has also fired up my enthusiasm for blogging again, so that should be pretty quick in coming.

Until then: happy hobbying!

A cornicopia of chaos

I've been pretty busy recently, both hobby-wise and in real life, so yet again the blog has fallen a little to the wayside. I'd promise to rectify this in future, but quite frankly we both know it's about 50/50 whether that will actually happen.

So what have I been up to? Well for a start I've been painting some Shadowspear stuff. I actually got the box set on the day of release and painted a lot of it really quickly, I just haven't really had the time to get the stuff posted up on here (more on that later).

 Of course I couldn't resist kitbashing the Master of Possession into something a little more Slaaneshi. I replaced the backpack icon and staff top with some Deamonette bits I had laying around. It's only a few simple changes, but I think it changes the character of him massively, really bringing out the shamanic nature of the model. Thus Ashur Karr, Fleshmaster of the Glorious Host was born.

Of course he then needed some deamonic minions to accompany him:

The Greater Possessed was just painted straight from box, with no modification. Something of a rarity from me. This particular sculpt really is the star of all the new releases in my opinion, up there in quality with the Forge World Gal Vorbak. It's a shame that the other one you get in the box really doesn't reach the same standard, but I suppose I can't have everything. I may try and do something with the alt sculpt to improve it at some point, but I'll have to see.

You'll notice that I painted him in Sons of Horus colours rather than Emperor's Children. That's because I love the idea of the Possessed in my force being prisoners rather than willing hosts. I got the idea from 'Black Legion' by ADB and it really stuck with me. I like to think of him as some hapless XVIth Legion warrior taken by Karr during the Legion Wars and kept as a favoured pet in some twisted form of sentimentality

Finally out of the model from the box which I've finished, we had the Venomcrawler. Again, it's a fantastic model. I want another two of them eventually. I'm really happy with how this one turned out though:

I love the way that the garish pink of the EC's makes the model look even more disturbing than it already was. Plus the look on my opponent's face when I deploy a giant pink and gold deamonic spider is priceless!

As you can see, I've been pretty busy. I did manage to build some Chosen from the Chaos Marines in the set too, but I'm holding off on painting them until the new Contrast paints come out so I can have a bit of an experiment. The Obliterators are remaining unbuilt until they get a points reduction, as I already have three of them and I see no point in blowing 575 points on fielding five of them!

I've also been busy building a Lord of the Rings Rohan force for an event which a friend hosted, but I'll cover that in my next post, along with the event itself. To be honest I've probably got enough stuff to catch up on blogging about and projects in the works to fill a dozen or so posts, it's just a matter of finding the time to write them. I might make catching up on blogging a mini hobby goal for this summer. I certainly find my hobby motivation shoots up when I'm blogging regularly, I just never seem to get around to it.

Anyway that's it for now. Happy Hobbying!

Slaaneshi Obliteration

As always seems to be the case, I started working on my own version of a unit, then GW go and reveal a much nicer updated version of it!

That hasn't stopped me from finally getting around to painting my converted Obliterators though

Granted they might need a rebasing when the new kit launches, but other than that, i'm pretty happy with them. I think the garish colours actually make them look pretty disturbing.

I'm not sure what I'll be doing next. I might paint another unit for my EC's or Deamons whilst I wait for Shadowspear to launch, or I might crack on with that other project I've been hinting at for a while.

I'll have to see where the inspiration takes me I think. I've got a few days off work now, so I'm likely to be getting quite a bit done!

Purple, gribbly and coming for you...

Alternating between painting my Kolstek IG and my Emperor's Children seems to be a great way to keep me motivated to painting atm. My guess is that the radically different styles between what are going to be my two main armies for 8th Edition is enough variety to stop my hobby-addled mind getting bored and losing interest. Whatever works I suppose.

Continuing that theme, I've been working on a unit of Warp Talons for my EC's over the last couple of days:

As you can see, they're mostly built using the standard kit, but I've sprinkled in some bits which wouldn't look out of place in a 30k army. This was partially to make them easier to  paint, but also because I see these as ancient mercenaries rather than simply the Daemon-infused Marines which the main fluff for Warp Talons describes them as, so I wanted to tone down the chaotic elements a little.

I consider these about 75% done. The main job I still have to do is highlight all the silver, then add some freehand. I also want to add in some contrasting colours on a couple of the armour panels to emphasise the fact that these are Emperor's Children rather than just purple-looking jump troops. That really depends on how much patience I have left after doing the silver though.

Either way, I'm hoping to have these done by the end of the weekend, ready for a game against a mate's Black Templars on Monday night. Hopefully I'll be able to grab some photos from that to show you too.

Lots to keep me busy. As usual, I'll post more soon. This productive streak doesn't seem to be abating any time soon!

The ever-steady march of progress...

So 8th Edition has hit the gaming community like a hurricane and by all accounts it's been a roaring success. I've already played three games of the new edition and immensely enjoyed each one. That's already a massive increase on the amount of enjoyment I got out of non-30k 7th edition! I even spent the evening last Monday teaching a group of people who hadn't played since 5th ed how to play. That's pretty good going considering that at that point I'd only played one game of the new edition myself- a testament to how slick and streamlined the rules have become!

Needless to say, 8th ed has been the massive shot in the arm that 40k badly needed.Most people have nothing but good things to say about it and loads of people who'd previously left the game have made their return, at least judging by my local community. Previously there'd normally be a few of us meeting on alternate Mondays to play Horus Heresy. There'd be a few people would be milling about occasionally playing AoS, but 40k was pretty much ignored. Last week though there were four games of 40k being played, with half a dozen more people watching with great interest. Excitement is running pretty high in my local area.

Enough gushing about 8th edition though. The real benefit of this release for me is that it's set my motivation to build and paint stuff into overdrive. It's a shame this hasn't involved too much progress on my obscene backlog of projects though. Instead I've been focussing on what's looking to be my army of choice for this edition: Slaanesh.

I've always loved Slaanesh and his/her/it's followers. They've run a close second behind Tzeentch in my love ever since I started 40k in 2003-ish and I've always wanted an army of Noise Marines, but ever since the 3.5 codex their rules have been a little lacklustre, so that's really killed my enthusiasm for them. I might be primarily a narrative gamer, but I also like to actually win games occasionally!

The moment I saw the new rules for Noise Marines though, I knew the time had come to make my dream army a reality. I started by taking the Primaris half of the Dark Imperium boxed set and having a rummage in my bitz box to make them suitably Slanneshii:

Yes it's left my painting points in tatters (I'm not going to even talk about the Ebay slurge I've done for Daemons to accompany them), but at least I'm actually painting stuff! I've been painting so much in fact that I'm running up a massive surplus on my 'hour a day' hobby challenge. Hopefully once I've got my Emperor's Children off the ground, this will translate into progress on my other stuff too, but I'll have to wait and see how that pans out.

My original plan for this force was to make something which works equally well in both 30k and 40k. The more I look at what I want and start painting though, the more I'm thinking that plan is going to fall by the wayside. I'm wanting to include some of the weirder and more obviously Chaotic stuff which Chaos Space Marines get like Warp Talons, Daemon Princes and Forgefiends, none of which have a direct 30k counterpart. Instead I'm probably going to be taking inspiration from Kraut and his World Eaters over at the Eternal Hunt blog and build myself some 'historical' versions of my 40k Chaos characters when I get around visiting my 30k EC force.

Back to matter in hand though, the Primaris Marines were awesomely good fun to work with. The kits are simple to build, although the limited poses we have currently made a few of the conversions a little awkward to do, especially the head swaps. You'll also notice I haven't done any swaps on the shoulder pads either. This is due to the way they detach -  the arm and pad are one big piece, or else the pads are sculpted onto the torso pieces. I'm hoping that the multi-piece kits we'll inevitably get don't have this issue, as I can imagine a lot of people getting frustrated when trying to swap the pads for Chapter-specific ones. I can work around that issue for now though.

Anyway, after a surprisingly short period of time, I had these guys ready to paint. The actual painting of them only took a couple of hours, as I tried to keep the colour scheme simple so I can produce an entire force fairly quickly. The trick was trying to balance the garish colour schemes which Slaaneshii followers are known for whilst still making it look good as a force. I think I've struck a good balance. I'll be going back later to add transfers and freehand detail, but I'm considering these guys done for now.

Hopefully I'll be able to finish up the rest of the box in the enst few weeks. After that I'll be building and painting the two boxes of Warp Talons I bought, then move onto the characters for the army. It looks like is going to be a summer dedicated to Slannesh for me!

I'll post more soon.

Bloodthirster progress

Ok, so the Zombie plan didn't quite pay off. As I've said before, I'm moving flat in the next couple of days, so the need to pack kind of overtook me.

However, I did manage to get a little progress done on the Bloodthirster. Not much, admittedly, but at least it's something



Hopefully by the weekend I'll have my new hobby area ready, complete with proper lighting set up, so there'll be both progress on all my projects and proper picture to show you.