Adeptus sororitas army update

 Greetings all.

I only touched upon these with my last update post, but this past year a lot of my hobby time / budget has been sunk into adeptus sororitas. I have long awaited a plastic sisters range and GW did not disappoint! I love everything about the new range and seeing as there are only 2 new units (as opposed to models) in the new codex I hope the 9th edition book will bring some more units / models also. As mentioned, I have been holding off investing in the range until plastics were released, painting only a single test model years ago in sacred rose colours (mainly as I lived in Yorkshire for 15 years, for those who don;t know the white rose of York is what the sacred rose symbol is based on) but have ultimately decided to go with a very unique colour scheme for them.The collection is pretty comprehensive at this stage, consisting of every model in the range released to date. 

 

 

 

For the colour scheme I wanted something unique. I am increasingly finding one of the challenges of having so many different armies is coming up with a unique scheme for armies in order to keep things interesting. I decided to utilise both contrast and clear paints to achieve a unique, purple look to the models painted over a silver basecoat. The first layer was simply eidolon purple clearcoat and the subsequent 2 layers were mostly eidolon but with some of each of the two contrast purple colours mixed in. I applied by brush on the infantry and airbrush on vehicles. It took a bit of experimenting for me to come up with a scheme that I was happy with in terms of the additional colours. My experiments can be seen below:

 

 When I finally settled on a scheme I liked I set myself a hobby challenge to paint up as many as I could over a month in order to make some headway with the army. I was reasonably successful managing to get 25 models to the point where I was happy all they needed were decals and a varnish, with the rest of the army undercoated and ready for attention further down the line. Sadly, I had a disaster while undercoating about 1/4 of the army (too hot outside so they ended up furry) and so I'm left needing to paint strip them and respray before they can have any attention. 

 

There are a few models on the painting desk still (as below) but I am mainly focusing on other projects for now and hoping to revisit the sisters sometime next year. Ultimately, my hope is to use some water effects and resin on the models in order to make them appear to be standing / running in shallow water but I would need to experiment with this extensively before committing it to finished models. Cheers.

Long overdue hobby updates

Hello everyone. I have been off the radar for almost 2 years now it appears from the date of my last post. Many a reason for this. Exams, new baby, new job, working on the house and garden, COVID etc etc. the blog(s) just fell by the wayside sadly. Hobby output is less now than previously but I’m still plodding on through the endless backlog. Sadly not gaming at present due to COVID (my last game was 8th edition). Still, today I am sitting down for a few hours and updating some things on both sites, as well as clearing out the spam comments. Hopefully this will be a more regular thing from now on but as my hobby output is less, there'll be less to share.

Previously I have let my love of loyalist marines dominate my hobby time, but am branching out now into other armies. The past 2 years I have expanded several fledgling armies into full blown complete collections, most notably imperial knights, death guard, genestealer cults and adeptus sororitas. These are collections that are fully assembled and basecoated. With a couple of hitches that is. I stupidly (after several weeks of hard labour) took a load of sisters and death guard outside to spray them on an unusually warm day. Long story short - the spray finish was rough rather than smooth on leaving me rather annoyed that I'd tripped at the final hurdle. I still need to strip a load of them.

For loyalists, I've made a good start to my sisters (another separate post on them coming up in a while) with a fair few fully painted. Several of my custom knight household are painted as things stand. The admech have been updated with all their bases done and 'most' models basecoated, though I am slowly ploughing through airbrushing chrome onto the vehicles. I have a small cadian (necromundan) infantry army which I have developed a speed painting technique for as seen below. I also have a leman russ tank division but am struggling to find a colour I like for them. Once I've decided I can blast through spraying them fairly quickly. 

Moving onto chaos now, I've done nothing in terms of daemons (except a copy of wrath n rapture gathering dust) but have collected a fair few chaos marines for an upcoming black legion project. I assembled an alpha legion force (Test models seen below) and also the aforementioned death guard - my only  army painted using contrast. (Note the skaven cultists)

 

 Lastly the xenos. No action for orks or tau, though I did paint up a fair few nids for a game at whw pre-COVID. I've recently started to put the finishing touches to my Alaitoc army incorporating some corsairs as swooping hawks and rebasing most of the army. I'm now starting to move on to updating my necrons with the new releases. Fingers crossed I will post up about my sisters soon as i'm particularly proud of them. Cheers. 

 

 

Necron army showcase

Hi folks,

Time to get the shiny army out. These chaps are mostly coated in chrome or brass paint which makes them super shiny on the battlefield. Some green crystals to decorate the bases with and a few conversions with the lords / crypteks / destroyers / warriors and the flying base. Army pretty much complete - would love a tomb stalker and tesseract vault to round it off one day though. Cheers.

Ryza adeptus mechanicus army takes shape.

Greetings all.

Thought I would share my latest hobby offering. I decided to go with ryza for admech - I like the fluff, the name and, most of all, the colour. For the cloaks I went with a layer of troll slayer orange over jokaero and then shaded and highlighted with fire dragon bright and carroburg crimson. Lastly, a glaze with an old lava orange ink brought it all together. For the robots and other vehicles I used alclad candy lacquer with an airbrush. Tricky to get right as the coverage has to be total but worth it. The airbursh was also useful for the plasma effects. Lastly, they were all ryza transfers apllied then based with the martian texture paints, varnished (gloss for the bots). They are complete aside from some highlighting (ran out of time) and thus I will probably now move on to assembling the rest of the army. Very happy with the results and how they performed at the tournament, 

Cheers.

Imperial Knights take to the field

Greetings all.

I've finally pulled my finger out and got these guys magnetised and assembled. What started as a single freeblade back when knights were first released has now grown into a small army. I purchased the Renegade box a while back but was never quite sure how to split it - I wanted one knight to be mechanicus and another to be chaos, which left me with my original freeblade. However, the advent of forgebane, the helverins and now a second copy of Renegade (new version) has left me able to still retain a knight each for chaos/mechanicum and still start a knight army.

I decided early on that I didn't want a whole knight army painted in the same colour as my ryza mechanicus, and thus I have adopted the colour scheme of my original knight freeblade. This is gold skeleton, black armour with silver trim and flames painted on the panels. I found an airbrush to be relatively useful in getting this done quickly, though my inexperience with it did result in several blockages. Of course, before embarking on a spray-fest I fully magnetised them all.

Fluff-wise, these chaps are called the 'Knights of Avalon' and I have used them as Taranis thus far as it fits with what I wanted for them. They are a band of freeblades, exiles, lone survivors and knights who have answered the call. They believe themselves to be on a holy crusade following the Emperor's will as divined by the Imperial Tarot. Upon forsaking their original oaths they repaint their armour - this is to represent the gold of the Emperor encased by black night, and flames to mark his eventual resurrection. They are named for Arthurian legend.

Ultimately I would like 12 Knights, (as in the number who supposedly sat around the round table, though this varies wildly) but am setting a milestone of 10 for end of the year - the last two probably to come when GW updates knights again or from FW. I have 7 thus far and the addition of a valiant, castellan and preceptor with make up the numbers. Only one of them is painted in the flame scheme thus far but more to follow. CHeers.

Latest projects hobby update - thousand sons, knight and eldar.

Hi guys,

I've been in a bit of a hobby lull for the past 2 months without much progress on things. I was supposed to be participating in a tale of gamers project with others at the gaming club but unfortunately failed my first months pledge of thousand sons terminators, but instead completed a custom heldrake. I was supposed to then complete the terminators for the second month but have barely done a thing to them due to working on our club scenery and also making a start on my knights. A bit of work on dark angels and eldar to prepare them for games has also drawn me away. I guess it's not as if I've ultimately done no hobbying, just focussed more on gaming and other projects not on the schedule. 

On the plus side I've hit a hobby milestone by finally investing in an airbrush, the results of which can be seen above with my scratchbuild Heldrake. I'm pretty pleased for my first effort and hope that once I get a decent extractor setup I can do more airbrush projects. As for conventional bursh painting, below can be seen my finished scarab occult terminator and a WIP custom autarch 'Kayleth' base on dawn of war 2. Speaking of airbrushing, I've made a start on expanding my knights collection. I previously had a freeblade knight and a couple of unassembled knights from renegade and a pair of armiger warglaives from forgebane. I've now started to basecoat these chaps using the airbrush so hopefully won't be too long til I have my custom house comprised of various outcasts and freeblades ready for action. 

 

Imperial soup army - Ultra-Mordians. Plus Thousand Sons.

Hi all. Though technically this isn’t exclusively a non space marine army I just wanted to share it and haven’t updated this blog in a few months. Sidetracking for a moment, I’ve organised a tale of gamers type event at my local club with 12 of us participating, mostly 40k. This is to incentivise is all to regularly commit to painting up and gradually building an army of choice. Although I still have a couple of outstanding hobby commitments (namely admech and imperial guard) I’m trying to move on to chaos stuff now and this seemed a good way to do it. My first fully painted model can be seen below. Another aside, I will share pics of my genestealer Cult army in a post soon. 

Back to business. I chose this army as I wanted to paint a few marines to base standard and some imperial guard also. I’ve always loved the Mordian models and so though lt a small detachment of them would be great. In addition, I have the Guilleman model but have never used him in battle so now seemed a good time. Hence the ultramordians were born. It was a 1500 point battle and I think at this points level g-man, beast that he is, is a little too pricey relative to the overall army cost. I won one game and lost 2 (one of which was to the overall winner) but had a great day and feel I made a good achievement getting everything painted to tabletop standards. Cheers.