Mark: Belial

I started a Belial conversion shortly before the rumours about an upcoming DA release started gaining credibility, and with a rumoured release of a miniature I decided to put him aside and wait to see what was came out. Looking at GW's terminator armoured characters like Calgar, Lysander, and the Terminator Chaplain, I had high hopes and while I won't go as far as saying that the miniature is bad, it needs a little movement, he looks a little like he's squeezing his cheeks trying to hold in a wet one.

Since starting this guy my confidence with green stuff has increased, so he will be loosing the cape from the Chaos Terminator Lord which will be replaced with a shiny new monastic robe. 

Until next time .......

Mark

DA Company Master Finished (Finally)

In between building and converting miniatures for my new Chaos army, I've been working on some of my projects that have been on the bench for a while now. So I finally have this guy done, I'm reasonably happy with the way he has come out, I may in time go back and paint the cloak a different colour to the robes to add a little contrast.

I admit I'm a little short on content today so I'll throw in a sneak peak at my Traitor Guard allies for the CSM.

Until next time .......

Mark

My hobby mojo ........ IT'S BACK!!!

Mojo

As the title suggests my desire to build, paint, and play is back after a bit of an extended hiatus. Over the last fortnight we have started playing a 6e City Fight campaign at the local club, and it's really kickstarted my love for the hobby, the new Chaos Codex may have had something to do with it as well.

With the campaign starting off at only 750pts, I decided to start a new army. The new Release of the new Chaos Codex made the choice easy, I've been toying with the idea of starting a Chaos army for a couple of years, and this seemed like the perfect time to start one. While I like to win as much as the next gamer, at the moment I'm not overly concerned with the overall combat effectiveness of the army and it will be growing naturally over the course of the campaign as I build a narrative around the events that play out on the battlefield and across the city of Vogen as a whole.

Vogen

The way things stand at the moment my Khorneate warband is lead by a hulking brute in Terminator Armour that just happens to be an expert on all things stealthy, having rolled up the Master of Deception Warlord Trait, we had the option of keeping our initial trait across the campaign if we stuck with the same force. The way the campaign is being run it is allowing me to run this initial force as a harrying force, impeding the movement of the forces of Order and causing mayhem behind enemy lines, and then allowing me to try out a couple of different lists, as the forces of Destruction try and batter the city into submission.

Some of the players in the campaign have been writing some short stories around the exploits of their forces and posting them up on the clubs forum, the work by Tyranidlord are well worth a read.

So, now onto the painting;

I got keen the other evening and built and mostly painted this little guy in a single sitting, probably not my brightest moment as I hadn't done a test mini for the colour scheme yet, but he seems to have come out okay. He will be my Kharn counts as, he needs to be something special with an axe that big.

Counts as Kharn

I've started converting a squad of Obliterators as well, while I quite like the current miniatures I just can't justify the AU$83 for the fine cast box at the moment, and hey mine will have a nice cartoony charm.

Obliterators WIP 1

Until next time (which will hopefully be soon) .......


Mark

Mark: Project Ultramarines #2

I'll be honest I've been doing more than my fair share of procrastinating this week, and combined with the weather making undercoating difficult I didn't get a great deal of painting done this week. So my progress is merely a group of 5 black and blue Marines. I'm planing on getting in a couple solid painting sessions early next week in the hope of getting this batch finished and the next at least started.



I did manage to break intense procrastination for a couple of minutes and get a little more sculpting done early in the week.

Antman donated an AOBR Terminator Squad that he had laying around, so I'll be adding them to the squad I painted in April. I have a spare terminator that came with the AOBR release White Dwarf and a couple of Assault Cannons that I'll be adding to the squad. This will mean that whoever ends up with the the army will be able to have two squads of five or a single squad of ten.

Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: Project Ultramarines #1

Okay I know this isn't Saturday but I had some unforeseen technical issues and wasn't able to get the post done last night. In the past week I've managed to scrape together a Tactical Squad and sculpt the Ultramarines icon onto their shoulders. Midway throught he process I switched from GW to Kneadatite green stuff which has different properties, and in the photo's I could see a gouple of mistakes I made with the first couple I did with the Kneadatite. So I'm aiming to get them fixed up and ready to start painting on Monday.

After getting my head around using the Kneadatite I found that it was a great deal easier to work with on a smaller scale than GW's, so I decided to start experimenting.

Other than a couple of comments regarding my sanity or perhaps lack there of, the response from the clubs members has been positive and they've gotten behind the project. A couple members have offered to donate miniatures to the cause and I'm looking forward to seeing what they will add to the project. 

Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: A Little Progress

I haven't done a great deal of work on the hobby front as both time and motivation have been in short supply. I have put some high lights onto the Dark Angles Company Master that I started a while ago, and I've started building/converting another Librarian for the Dark Angles.

Truth be told I was going to use this guy as a Mephison counts as, but it just felt wrong using my Dark Angles as Blood Angles. I'd like a Blood Angles Army but I think I'll wait until I get my head around the 6th edition rules, and build them from the ground up for the new edition.

Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: AOBR #3

To be honest I was hoping to have these guys done by now but it seems that life has a way of getting in the way of little things like this. I only have a couple of details to pick out here and there and I need to highlight the armour, I know I have Saturday free at this stage so the will hopefully be done for by the end of the weekend.

One of the things that has been taking us a chunk of my valuable hobby time has been the fact that my local gaming club Kingaroy Wargamers has decided that it's time to go and make its self all legitimate and become Incorporated as a non-profit group. I've been leading the charge for this, so I've been spending a great deal of time pouring over the department of fair trading's website finding out what has to be done and working on the clubs constitution. I'm also running the Kill Team Tournament I've been mentioning and I'm laying the groundwork for our annual Warhammer Fantasy tournament "The Tricksters Blade" that I will be running a little later this year. And of course there is the issue of my addiction to Jetpack on the iOS

At our regular club meat (edit: I like it medium rare) on Sunday I managed to get in a couple of games; the first was a play test of the 5th mission I'll be using for the Kill Team tournament next month which resulted in another win with the boys in blue. The second was a multiplayer game of Mordheim  against another two Human mercenary forces with my Marienburgians coming out on top, my long time rival Trev was using his Middenheimers and a newcomer to the Mordheim scene was starting out with Reikland.

Until Next Time .......
Mark

☺ Unless my addiction to Jetpack doesn't take over all of my time from here on out. ☺

Mark: AOBR Terminators #2

Over the course of the glorious long weekend I've managed to put a bit of paint onto the AOBR terminators, and before I go any further I just have to say "I HATE painting white". I've always avoided white in the past because of its bad reputation, that I have to say is well deserved.

OK tantrum over on with the rest of the blog.

The biggest issue with the white has been trying to get some depth into the helmets, in the end I've put a wash of 7 parts water to 1 part Badab Black over solid white, then line highlighted and layered Skull White onto different parts of the helmet, and it's come out looking half decent. As far as the rest of the colours are concerned I have pretty much everything else base coated and shaded, I've added the first layer of highlights to the Storm Bolters but I'm not completely sold on the black and I may end up going with the classic red, and I'm yet to decide if I'll paint the chest emblem and decorations gold or bone at this stage.

As far as gaming goes; I managed to get the missions I'm putting together for the club's Kill Team challenge play tested, they all came through quite well. They're all based on missions out of the Privateer Press Steamroller Tournament Pack, which to Privateer Presses credit are done very well. I can see some of the players who haven't had much exposure to Warmachine having a little difficulty getting their head around the whole I score points every turn holding the objective, rather than the more traditional (for 40k at least) sweep in at the end and take the objective structure of the missions. They have 6 weeks before the event so they have plenty of time to get their heads around the idea.

Of the four games I managed to get on Sunday I walked away with three wins and an ass whooping. All of the wins came from Trev over at Triple Helix, who to be fair had some shocking luck where by whenever he utilized a weapon with the "Get's Hot" special rule he removed one of his own miniatures rather than one of mine much to his disgust. The ass whooping came from Jamie over at Toy Soldiers, I take full responsibility for loosing this one, after taking a couple of his Harlequins out early with shooting I got a little over confident, closed in for the kill and was then promptly shown just how easy it is for Harlequins to tear apart Terminators in combat.

For those of you who are interested in such things, the mission pack I cobbled together can be found here.

Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: AOBR Terminators #1

I'm going to be running a small Kill Team event in the near future for my local club and I need to play test some missions that I've put together for it but couldn't come up with anything out of the Dark Angles codex that fit to the 200pt limit, so I've decided to use the AOBR Terminator squad that's been kicking around my bits box for a while now. I've taken the opportunity to try my hand at sculpting a couple of extra details onto them because I found them a bit boring straight out of the box, and I've been looking for a canvas to learn how to sculpt onto that I don't have an emotional attachment to, so I'm not overly worried if the results come out a little sub-par. So the lords of all things vanilla sorry I mean Macragge will grace the table for a couple of practice rounds.

I haven't tried any sculpting up until now on any of my conversions, I've just found the idea a little bit daunting, but once I got started I found it a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Each of the U's on the shoulder pads is a little different, that's due to the fact I was experimenting with a couple of different tools and methods. I'd like to give a shout out to Garfy at Tale of Painters for his tutorial on sculpting U's and Ron at From the Warp for his tutorial on how to sculpt scrollwork, they were a great help.

Beyond sculpting U's I've been busy putting together a mission pack for the club's Kill Team event and the players pack for this years Fantasy Tournament has been started. I've also had the opportunity to have a chat to our neighboring (only in Australia could we call 150km an neighborly distance) gaming clubs secretary about our clubs supporting each other, so we should have Kingaroy Wargamers and The Darling Downs Gamers Club Inc getting together for all things gamery (is that a real word) in the not too distant future. I also managed a couple of games of Mordheim last weekend and walked away with a pair of wins. The boys from Marienburg acquitted them selves nicely, they probably deserve a paint job now.

A nice little package came in today's mail, the power cable sample set and ammo belts I ordered from DragonForge a couple of weeks ago turned up. I'll just add that it's not DragonForge's fault for the long delivery time I just happen to live in Australia so it takes 21 to 28 days for packages to arrive from anywhere else in the world.



Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: One of those weeks

I know, my fail; it's a cat pic

It's that place, we've all been there, it's painfully frustrating, but we find no reason to leave. It's De-motivation Central, you know that place where you look at the half painted miniatures on your desk and all you can think is "I don't want to". Well I'm there, I have a Dark Emissary that I need to get done before for an online painting challenge I have entered, and the category I put forward for the ANZ wargamers March challenge was selected so I'm guessing I should paint something for it. The suggestion was for something big, like a monster or tank. So I'll paint a tank for my Imperial Guard, I should be able to most of it with the airbrush so it should be a little fun.

Now on to something I have done, I'm still smitten with Mordheim and have managed 8 games this week across 2 different campaigns, with more planned in the next week. I'm finding that a lot of the warbands created after the initial release of Mordheim are a little stronger than the Human Mercenaries I'm running. Lizardmen, Norse Explorers and Beastmen Raiders are all quite a bit tougher, and although it was released with the game Clan Eshin are quite nasty as well. On the plus side after getting your teeth kicked in you quite often come out with an underdog bonus which can give you some stellar hero's and units.

Through the week I've also managed to put together some terrain, but I need some textured paint before I can finish them off. I've also started modeling a Possessed warband and started planing Clan Eshin, Dwarf Treasure Hunters and Shadow Warriors Warbands.

Possessed

Buildings Front

Building Back

Until next time .......

Mark

2012 Totals

Miniatures Purchased: 20

Miniatures Gift/Trade: 201

Miniatures Painted: 47

Wood Elf Points: 420

Dark Angels Points: 1245

Circle Points:18

Mark: A Ghoulish Good Time

I've started playing a Mordheim campaign through the week, and I have to say I'm really enjoying it. So much so in fact I've gone into 100% Mordheim mode, pouring over the rule books, going over my armies too see what I can re-purpose, and building and painting new miniatures (the Ironblaster has once again found the back burner). I very quickly managed to put together an Undead warband. But after 5 games of sliding backwards I took my campaign mulligan, and restarted with a Marienburg warband, and things immediately started looking up. The fact they were multiplayer games so I my fledgling warband wasn't being focused on by a single stronger opponent and, that I had the under dog bonus for two games helped a great deal.Still didn't win a game though.

Ghouls

On the hobby side of things I assembled and painted 5 Ghouls, assembled my starting Marienburg warband plus additions, dug out and cleaned up the paint job on a Pit Fighter I assembled years ago for a Warhammer Quest campaign and started painting my Dark Emersary to use as a Warlock.

Warlock WIP

Pit Fighter

Marienburg WIP

I have a couple of extra miniatures to assemble to add to the Marienburg warband and I'm working on a Vampire that will better represent what I want to use on the table. And I'm thinking about getting one of the new plastic Necromancers as I'm finding that metal miniatures aren't the best choice for a game where you are constantly laying miniatures down and flipping them over on the table.

The Re-purposed Dead

Until Next Time .......

Mark

2012 Totals

Miniatures Purchased: 20

Miniatures Gift/Trade: 201

Miniatures Painted: 47

Wood Elf Points: 420

Dark Angels Points: 1245

Circle Points:18

Off the Bench

I haven't had a great deal of time to spend at the paint table this week and the heat of a Queensland summer (still 30ºC at 10pm on a couple nights) has really sapped my enthusiasm in those times I had the chance. Even with the inconvenience of the heat I have managed to get a solid start on the Ogre and chariot body for my Ironblaster.

I have managed a little extra gaming this week as well, catching up with a friend who works shocking hours and is unable to join us at the local club. I managed to get the Ogres out for their first run at Blood Bowl since I've had them painted, and promptly lost. It seems that Ogres have some ball handling issues and I didn't see the worth of Snotlings until  it was too late, I think a rematch is in order here.

I also had my first real game of Lord of the Rings through the week and found it to be a much better game than I anticipated, with heroic actions, banner placement and the order fights are chosen being a far more tactical fair than I thought they would be. While I lost this game too (I'm seeing a trend here) I did learn a lot, and to be fair my opponent did have Legolas, Haldir and more than half his elves had bows. The fact that I deployed my Uruk-hi with Crossbows where they had no one to shoot at, and walked straight down the throat of elven shooting had nothing to do with it at all. The fact that I managed to roll snake eyes four times in a series of five fights in a single turn may have contributed to this as well.

Now I'm off to spend some money on yet another miniature game.

And just to help my ego a bit I managed to get a game of 40k against my long tome rival Trev from Triple Helix last weekend, and shock horror I managed a win in this one. And I don't care what he says, lining up my transports as a shield between his heavy weapons and the only scoring unit left on the table is a completely viable tactic. Especially when they're sitting on an objective.

Until next time .......

Mark

2012 Totals

Miniatures Purchased: 20

Miniatures Gift/Trade: 198

Miniatures Painted: 41

Wood Elf Points: 420

Dark Angels Points: 1245

Circle Points:18

The Quiet After the Storm

After the frenzied lead up to the tournament last week I decided to have a bit of a quiet week hobby wise. I did manage to do some work on a couple of smaller projects. The first of which is a deathwatch marine for an upcoming game of the Deathwatch RPG, I don't know if we need a mini to represent our characters or not but I thought it would be fun to paint one up anyway. The second is a start on a Grey Knights test model.

I did a trade for a large batch of the old metal GK miniatures, the trade included 126 in Power Armour (12 Psycannon, 14 Incinerator, 12 Justicar, 88 Normal) and 45 in Terminator Armour (26Halberd, 15 Sword, 4 Brother Captain with 4 Incinerator and 2 Psycannon mixed in). There were a couple of metal Servo Skulls, a Penitent Psyker, and some Confrontation Miniatures that brings the model count to 198. I think I have some serious painting to do if I am going to keep my painting pledge.

I have started a Vindicare Assassin for a painting challenge on the ANZ Wargamers facebook page. They have a painting challenge every month, this months is for the oldest unpainted miniature in your collection or a conversion. Because of holidays things kicked off a little late so they put the theme to a vote and they came out with a tie and combined Jan/Feb. I have chosen to do the oldest miniature but they wern't specific as to whether it's the production or purchase date, so I went of the miniature where the two combine; Manufacture '95, Purchase '02.

I have only done the body suite so far, I have chosen red so it fits with my GK colour scheme and I'm referencing Deadpool comics for the overall look of the miniature.

pic from wikipedia

Until next time .......

Mark

Midweek Mayhem

After taking on the task of running a local 40k tournament I realized last week that I didn't have a painted 40k army to use as a bye buster. So last Wednesday I picked up a handful of half painted space marines (I think they were started around 2.5years ago), and raided what I could from a variety of other projects started over the last few years and have managed to get a 1000pt Dark Angel Army painted albeit to a basic tabletop quality. 

Now all I need to do is paint the rim's of the bases black and apply the dreaded water slide transfers and I will be able to call them completed (I apologise for the worse than usual photo but it's 37 degrees Celsius in that room at 19:30 and I don't want to go back ). I'm using the Chaplain I painted last month as the HQ. My list is as follows:

HQ Chaplain with jump pack 120

Troop1: 5 man tactical squad, meltagun, razorback TWHB 150

Troop2: 5 man tactical squad, meltagun, razorback TWHB 150

Troop3: 5 man tactical squad, flamer, razorback TWLC 175

Fast1: 10 man assault squad, no upgrades 235

Heavy1: 5 man devastator squad, 4 missile launchers 170

I don't know how well it will go if I need to play, I haven't played much since the last 40k event I ran almost two and a half years ago. I'm a little rusty and I really don't know the current meta.

For anyone who is interested the players pack is up on scribd

I have also managed to put some paint on a dreadnought through the week. I'm thinking I should have sprayed the green first then masked the armor plates, before doing the silver and wash rather than the other way round. I ended up deciding to base coat the green by hand. I just wasn't confident using the airbrush without being able to easily mask the surrounding areas, but I'm toying with the idea of trying to highlight with the airbrush.

Until next time .........

Mark

Wood Elf Wardancers #2

I have managed to finish another 5 wardancers for my wood elf army, I have also managed to put paint on enough space marines and vehicles for the first 1000pts of my Dark Angles army, due in no small part to the fact that the compressor for my airbrush arrived this morning. I have laid down the highlight a little bright compared to the ones I painted by hand but this is nothing that a wash of Badab Black can't fix, I hope.

The two on the left are there for color comparison

I am hoping to get them finished by next weekend where I am using them as the bye buster for a local 40k tournament that I'm running.

Miniatures Painted: 5
Miniatures Purchased: 20 (Empire Militia for Mordheim)

Until next time

Mark

WIP Chaos Sorcerer

I started this guy a number of years ago with grand plans in mind, but lost momentum with the army and he was left sitting on the shelf gathering dust. After watching Tim's video tutorial on sculpting Barbaric Fur I felt inspired and picked up the sorcerer and sculpted a shag pile rug on his back. This is the first time I have done anything with green stuff other than filling gaps, and I don't think he has turned out too bad.