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. 

 

 

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. 

 

Goodbye 2017 - and welcome 2018

Greetings folks. 

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and the end of 2017 is nigh. Non-marine projects have been pretty low key this year as expected but there's still been some love for them. To recap, my grand plan is to finish my Marine armies to a stage I'm happy with (which I hope to achieve by June latest next year - see my other blog) and then move on to non-marine/non-chaos projects before selling my soul to chaos entirely. Here's the run down:

Talons - I built up a couple of boxes of Talons and had a great game with them a few weeks back (land raider is a beast) - they look awesome on the tabletop and are rock hard in combat. Hoping to get more games in next year. 

Harlequins - Finally assembled the death masque sets and had a bit of a painting disaster when my corax white spray peppered them all. A day of stripping paint solved it and then I got a game in against death guard. Wow, they're fast but flimsy. One of my favourite model ranges GW produce. 

Eldar - When the codex dropped I split my Alaitoc force up to give me a smaller Alaitoc army and the beginnings of 4 smaller forces each representing a main craftworld. I aim to bolster these over time. The new codex makes Eldar a lot of fun to play with and I've got a couple of games in with them so far. I finally reassembled my poor, broken Phantom and got him sprayed up. Now I need to find somewhere to store him!

Necrons - earlier in the year  I had a Necron hobby sesh and now there are just a few scarab bases and characters needing a spray left. 

Genecults - The army I've been working on most recently as between Overkill, a FB trade buy and a couple of the Xmas box sets I've got a decent sized army. Only a few infantry and vehicles left to assemble and I can start spraying them up. 

Scenery - the past week I have had a good go through, assemble and spray of all the scenery I have to make it more tabletop friendly. Still missing LOS blocking terrain sadly but next year I am aiming to add a realm of battle to my collection and now I have scenery to populate it with. It will get its own post in the near future.

Going forward into 2018 I hope to transition from marines to non-Chaos armies in the first half of the year. The two armies I want to address mainly are Guard and Admech, both of which I have sitting in boxes waiting for some love. Towards the end of the year I then want to start moving towards Chaos, starting with Death guard. Obviously GW will throw some interesting releases out there over the next year (Sisters please!) so that's sure to shake things up a bit. As well as  getting the rest of the codexes updated and focussing on secondary games like Necromunda and Titanicus, I'm really curious to see what the next year holds for GW releases. Predictions: Khorne marines, Sisters of Battle, Arbites, more Primaris, Slaanesh daemons. We shall see.

All the best folks.

Eldar craftworlds bases tutorial

Hi folks,

I am about to make the transition from my marine projects being better stage and non-marine projects taking a back seat, to the reverse. This will entail only ticking the final few boxes on my marine projects over the next few months while spending more time on both finishing up older no -marine projects as well as bringing some new armies to the fore, namely harlequins, talons, admech and genecults.

Presently I am assembling my harlequins which I accumulated during the release of death masque. I'm almost there with assembling everything and have now turned my attention to basing. I had always intended to use the same basing scheme with them as with my alaitoc eldar, and with the introduction of the ynnari I also intend to rebase my dark eldar in the same way so as to add unifomirty to the aeldari.

Previously, my basing theme was wraithbone, in this case an ulthuan grey shade, with swirling geometric shapes on them. This was designed to fit somewhat with the shapes seen on the wraithlord 60mm base. It was quite simple to execute, by pressing a layer of greenstuff atop the base and then carving some swirls into it. However, over time I have perfected it somewhat to the point where you can make a base in less than 2 minutes and so I thought I would share it as a tutorial.

What you'll need:

Plain bases.
Hobby knife
Vaseline
Greenstuff
Some round lids, ideally different diameters and thicknesses
A non stick surface - I've found magazines still in plastic wrappers useful.

Get everything together and have one attempt first to get the idea before you try to do too many at once.

Step 1. Mix your greenstuff 1:1 as normal. No need to add Vaseline at this stage

Step 2. Run a small amount of Vaseline on the end of the knife and on the non stick surface. You don't have to do this each time just periodically to avoid sticking, say once every 4 bases.

Step 3. Break off a bit of greenstuff, about what is shown in the picture for a 25mm base, and stretch it across the base to a thickness of no more than 1mm ideally. A little goes a long way.

Step 4. Now press this face down  against the Vaseline area on the non stick surface and move it in circular motions to smooth it over. Don't worry if it spills over the edge for now. Keep pressing in different areas until you get a smooth finish. Even pressure is key here or else you may end up with one edge being too thick and the opposite edge to thin so as to show some of the black base through the green stuff.

Step 5. Using a sharp knife with some Vaseline on the tip, cut away any excess from around the edge. Don't worry about bits on the base rim as they can always be filed off when everything has set. .

Step 6. Using your lids, press firmly to make geometric shapes on the bases. There's no real right or wrong here but I try not to overlap them too much. If you don't get an even depth when you first press, line the lid back up and try again.

Step 7. If indenting the pattern has disrupted the surface of the base, give another gentle press onto the non stick surface.

Step 8. Allow to dry and repeat. There's no reason you can't do say 10 bases at a time for each step rather than 1-8 for just one at a time. Whatever suits you best.

There we have it. That's all there is to it. See some examples of them (before I perfected he technique) below, though bear in mind that as I wasn't using the lids to make impressions in he green stuff most of the impressions are free carved with a hobby knife - there's no reason you can't include some of this in your designs for variety. Simply paint in your base colour, paint a shade darker in the recess and a shade lighter around the edges. Cheers.

Eldar titan resurrection

Hi all

Been a little while as I've been busy with Luna wolves and sons of orar. However, I have always planned to turn attention toward a few non marine me side projects right up until the end of the year when I plan to turn to non marine projects, namely harlequins, admech, talons and genecults. The other day I therefore turned my attention to a few Xenos side projects. A few necron and tau characters are now assembled and basecoated, but more importantly I turned my attention to my eldar titans.

The revenant has been sitting pretty with a grey basecoat on it for sometime now. In fact, since the day that I transported them to Alex's house for spraying and the phantom collaped into pieces on the way out of the door! I've now used some skeleton bone spray from army painter to give it some proper colour as can be seen below.

As for the big chap himself, here is a pic of the pose I achieved for the phantom initially and the subsequent collapse:

It spent just over a year in pieces in a draw awaiting me to finally try and put it back together. As it happens it wasn't such a big deal in the end. A few hours of minor repairs (most damaged areas were on the joins anyway), some reposing of the legs to give it both feet on the ground for stability and extra lengths of brass rod being added have led to its resurrection.

It was also given a few coats of the skeleton bone spray and I even went a step further and started to add the blue colouring on it to match my old school Alaitoc wraith constructs. WIll be a while until I add any more work to them but for now at least I give you the happy couple. Cheers.