The Blood Angels come to the fore

So last time Games Workshop released the Space Hulk set I was able to snag one and the last couple days or so I've been working my way through painting the Terminators from the set. I have to say that while I'm generally not a fan of mono-pose models, GW's recent efforts with them have been very impressive. The Dark Vengeance box set and the Space Hulk set have some really nice models in them that even though there's only one way the model can be built, the finished result looks incredibly dynamic when placed with its set-mates. The Blood Angel terminators from Space are a great example of this:

The Terminators as they stand today.

You can see how the assembled models still look dynamic and varied while still being unified in appearance. What exactly am I talking about? Lets take a look at them:

 Brother Valencio is the youngest of member of the 1st company, and is eager to prove his worth. The 'dashing forward' appearance of the model carries a strong 'eager to engage' kind of look to it. While it's a fairly basic stance the details are the part that sell it. The swinging chains, the purity seals, the tassels of the cord, they all move in the same direction and with very sharp angles giving the impression that Volencio is charging forward.

Sergeant Gideon. Maybe it's the half-face look, maybe its the way the character was shown in that Flash Gitz Animation, maybe it's how the character is described as bucking advised tactics by using a thunder hammer, but I get the impression that this guy would just be a royal jerk. Very much one of those guys who are basically high on the fact that he's in charge, makes absolutely no effort to help you unless it helps him, and loves to remind you that he is the one who is in charge. The 'charging hammer of thor' pose just seems to emphasis this for me. He's very "I AM AWESOME! FOLLOW ME CAUSE I AM AWESOME!" in appearance.

 Sergeant Lorezeno looks very much like a 'lead from the front' sort of commander, somewhat removed from how Gideon is portrayed he looks more team oriented. While he is certainly fighting, his stance is open enough to suggest he is positioned to help cover his team mates if the need should arise.

Brother Goriel... or rather "Brother Gorey" is just so utterly brutal in his appearence. I mean he's holding the head and spinal column of a gene stealer. Do you know what else does that? The Alien hunter from the Predator movies! And somehow I get the feeling that he removed it from the gene stealer the same way the hunter removed it in the movies. Just straight up tore it out of the body.




Okay so we've had lightning claw equipped terminators for a while. What have we not had? Wolverine in terminator armor! Okay okay, I'm kidding. Still prior to this model most lightning claw equipped terminators just had their arms hanging at their sides or raised up and forward of their body. This was a nice and welcome change of pose, and one that was later used in new terminator sets.

"Okay, so we can't go forward, back, to the right, or to the left. I'll just open the floor and go down." I love the way that the Brother Scipio is modeled, he's just tearing up the floor to make an exit or perhaps to use it as a shield. Maybe he's going to grab a power cable and use it as a make shift weapon. Just so many possibilities and so dynamic a pose for a model that is typically portrayed so stoically. 

An assault cannon is pretty ubiquitous in a Terminator Squad, so even though it's a little dubious in a space hulk, there pretty much has to be one in the Space Hulk terminator squad. Leon is that one in this case. Now a Terminator with an assault cannon is kind of hard to pose dynamically due to the size of the cannon relative to the Terminator itself. Leon is fairly well done given the limitations and it's nice break in design to have him aiming across his axis rather then along it.

There's a character blip in the mission books about Brother Omnio where it talks about him being extremly level headed and how Gideon had once joked that Omnio was actually a servitor that got promote to the first company by accident (What did I say about Gideon being a jerk?). While I can see what they were trying for, I think the pose of this model in comparison to the others gives the look of someone who is more interested in his smart watch then he is in the fight at hand. Still I'll give the designers props for the quality of the design.


So that's the break down of the 8 Terminators I've started painting so far. I'm using a varied approach to painting, rather then going through all 8 of them and doing the same the same step, I'll go through 3 of them with one step then I'll let those three sit for the paint to dry. While those 3 are drying I'll work on another 4 until I reach the end of a given step with those, put 2-3 of those down to dry and then pick up another 1-2 and work on those three. I don't have a particular reason for this approach beyond my ADHD kicking in and being relatively unable to focus on 8 models straight through. 

Today I'm just going to talk about doing the reds and golds on the model.

Painting started with a black spray base. I originally primed the Space Hulk models last fall by affixing the models to a series of lengths of 1" wide wood by way of tape. This gave me a series of paint sticks so I could work in batches and orient the models to get maximum coverage.

I put down a base color layer of Mephiston red. I watered the red quit a bit and it took a series of 3-4 coats to get a smooth solid color.  In order to shade the red I make a mix of Rhinox Hide and water, to a ratio of about 5 parts water to 1 part Rhinox Hide, and then went in with a detail brush to pick out crevices, lower panels, and anything else that would be shaded.

For the gold details I put down a series of 3 layers of Gehenna's Gold. In hind sight I think I should have put down a light brown base color, like Dryad bark or Mournfang brown, before putting down the Gehenna's Gold. The gold was then shaded with the same Rhinox Hide/Water mix as what I used to shade the Mephiston red.

Once the gold and base reds were down I came back in with Fire Dragon orange and picked out the edges of the armor doing a bit of an extreme high lighting effect. 

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Well here I am

Greetings once again all. So some good news/bad news time. Since I prefer the approach of "Bad news first that way the good news sounds that much better" I'm gonna start with with that.

I lost my regular job, yeah the one where I made about $2k a month.

I wasn't fired, the company went through a re-org to stream line a lot of things and my position was one of the ones that got eliminated. Because of my pay rate at the time I wasn't able to take any of the job openings at the time with out a major pay cut and the company was obligated to offer me the same pay rate I was presently getting. So why pay a guy $2k a month to do a job when we can pay someone else $1250 a month to do the exact same job? Yeah, I can't say I fault them. Given the situation I would likely have made the exact same choice. So since I was laid off, as opposed to terminated, I got a pretty nice severance package so I'm not exactly hurting in the money department right now. But I am without regular income. I still have my side jobs and free lance work so I have money coming in, but yeah.

So what's the good news? Got more time for my hobby stuff. Which is kind of a good thing actually because I'm coming down to the wire on getting ready for the Apocalypse game. I've been working with a friend to get the large scale terrain materials completed but her schedule and mine hadn't been syncing up terribly well previously do to school and work between the two of us. But with my schedule freeing up the way it has been it makes it easier to sync up now. I've still got a fair amount of work to do on the terrain. The war wall needs to be finished being built and then painted, the orbital defense laser needs to be built and painted, the orbital lander like wise needs to be built and painted. The annoying problem with these projects is that there are sections where all you can do is wait for the glue to dry. And by large sections I mean like 1-2 days. So yeah... makes it interesting.

Now, has you all know I have an incredibly bad case of ADHD when it comes to projects so yes I will be working on the stuff for the apoc ga... SQUIRREL!

Sorry what was I saying? Oh right, what I'm working on.

Well a while back I did a HelBrute conversion with a Twin-linked Lascannon. You'll remember that this was back when all we really had was the HelBrute from the Dark Vengeance set. And then later I rebuilt another Helbrute to have two power fists. Well I've been working on painting them. Oh and the standard HelBrute from the DV kit as well. I mostly finished the Dark Vengeance Helbrute already, minus the tentacles on the side that is.

The Dark Vengeance HelBrute in Crimson Slaughter Colors

I need to get a good base color for purple on the tentacle. Surprise surprise I don't have one. But with that one largely done I was ready to start on the other two:

The three Crimson Slaughter HelBrutes!

The other two helbrutes are only base colored so far but I am working on them in spurts.

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Repainting a tool

Okay so I lost my tape measure sometime before last Thursday and I had to buy one at the shop at the last minute. All the store had in presently was one of those Servo-skull looking Tape measures Games Workshop releases with the release of 6th Ed. I never much cared for those ones, but I had little choice so I bought it. While I played the game with it I got more and more annoyed with the coloring of it. So I resolved to dismantle it, stripe it, and paint it to look more like... well like a servo skull. So Here we go:

Got it dismantled:

I had it mounted on some cork board and got it primed today. I was going to take a picture of it, but the black primer made it really hard to see details of any kind. So I didn't take a picture of that. In place of it, see a picture of it assembled after being primed black:

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Remember these guys?

Do you remember back... hmmm about 8 or 9 months ago when I said I was working on De-Dark Angeling the Terminators from the Dark Vengeance set? Well I've been working on those guys again on and off as the mood hit me. Mainly for a difference in pace, but also because I had wanted to try out the then new GW paint range, I painted the first member of the squad in Ultramarine colors. So following in that first members foot steps I've continued working on the squad in Ultramarine colors.

Ultramrines terminators stand ready, mostly.

The above image shows the models in mostly the base colors, though the blue has been highlighted using the directions from one of the Games Workshop tutorials.

One thing I very consciously did was follow the color directions for the Captain Sicarius painting tutorial from the Digital Codex Collection. While the Terminators are from the first Company of the Ultramarines, I wanted to make it look like they were perhaps attached to the 2nd company and thus be under the command of Sicarius. I really like this deep rich red color which can be seen on the Sergents sash:

The, and most of the reds in the squad are done using a base color of Khorne red with a Baal red wash (The equivalent wash in the current series is Carroburg Crimson) gives the sash a deep crimson coloring that I then highlighted using Khorne red, followed by mephiston red followed by Blood red (wazdakka red).

I tried doing some wear and tear coloring on some of the models, again using the tutorials from the digital collection. The best example of this I can show is on the helmet of the Sergent.

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New Drop pod for a new list

So I've managed to get a couple games in against a friend and I think I'm getting a better handle on how I'm going to run my Space Marines. I've come up with a 2k list I'm calling the Iron Wind fall.

HQ-
Space Marine Captain on Bike with Relic Blade, HellFire Rounds, Melta Bombs

Troops-
10 man biker unit with a Multi-melta armed Attack Bike

10 man biker unit with a Multi-melta armed Attack Bike

5 Man Scout Squad W/ Telion
-4 Sniper Rifles
-1 Missile Launcher

5 Man Scout Squad

Fast Attack-
2x StormTalon Gunship armed with Skyhammer missile launchers

3x- Landspeeders W/ 2 heavy bolters each

Elite-
3x Iron Clad Dreads with Seismic Hammer and Meltagun, 2 HK missiles and Hurrican Bolters in Drop Pods.

Fortification-
Aegis Defense Line with Icarus Lascannon

My plan is to put the Telion Scout squad in the Aegis defense line, that way I can use Telion to control the Icarus and thus get BS 5 against enemy flyers while his Camo cloak will give the Scouts a better cover save. My biker squads and Captain move forward hitting the enemy in concentration. As the Dreads become available I'll drop those in behind the enemy lines causing a pincer between the bikes and the dreads while the 2nd scout squad follows behind to grab another objective.

At least that's my plan anyway. We'll see if I can actually pull it off.

In the mean time I am building the list. I've already built the Bike Squads, the scouts, one Ironclad and one drop pod. Now I'm working on the second Drop pod.

The base, painted and assembled.

 Thus far I've been working on the internal sections of the drop pod. A solid black base coat followed by a healthy dry brushing of bolt gun metal with a wash of Nuln oil works well as a machine base for the drop pod. I tried to paint the center console like it was glowing red indicating that it was time to deploy. I figure as a drop pod comes smashing down from the sky, the indicators inside it will flash red when it his ground and the marines come charging out.

The upper section of the drop pod.

 I picked out some of the details in the upper engine in Runefang steel and then back and washed those details with nuln oil.

The parts of the new drop pod next to the previous drop pod.

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trying the newer GW paints

Okay, so I decided to take the plunge and give the current GW paint line an honest go. So I grabbed one of their painting tutorials, this one for Ultramarines, and grabbed the paints it listed for the model. Those paints included Macragge Blue, Abaddon Black, Rhinox Hide, IronBreaker, Drakenof Nightshade, Nu;n Oil, Etherium Blue, Altdorf Guard Blue, Calgar Blue, Runefang Steel, and Guilliman Blue. I managed to assemble a terminator from the Dark Vengence set and set to work.

An abaddon Black prime coat went on the model. Then I based the model in Macragge Blue for everything that was going to be blue, Iron breaker on the metallic parts and Rhinox hide for the leather pieces.  I then went over the blue with Drakenof Nightshade, and applied Nuln Oil to the metal area. Dry brushing a layer of Etherium Blue lightened this up very well. I then used Calgar Blue to layer up the blue sections, and RuneFange steel on the metals. The Altdorf Guard blue provided a final blue shade. I then applied the Guiliman Blue glaze to the model. Over all, not bad.

The Nuln oil is basically Badab black while the Abaddon black seems a bit thinner then Chaos black was. The Drakenof Nightshade is a fantastic darkening shade for blue. I'm rather amazed at the Etherium blue dry compound. It makes a huge difference and I will be experimenting with the GW dry compounds.

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Thank you Virginia!

Okay, it seems like Virginia has FINALLY decided to give us spring time whether and with that has come temperatures that permit priming. Now I know this is going to sound a bit odd in relation to my most recent post where I said I'm largely done with Games Workshop products, but I still have a sizable stockpile of 40k miniatures waiting on my shelves to be painted. Many of them have already been built and I do intend to still play from time to time. So that's what I've been doing today, working on my ready stocks:

In this case I'm working on a drop pod and 3 land speeders. You can see the lower frames of the land speeders mounted on the tooth picks with the central computer console for the drop pod on the corner of the Styrofoam block. I only partially assembled the land speeders and mounted them on tooth pick this way purposefully to make painting them easier. Easier in that I can get at the interior details and then assemble. You can see the legs of the marines have been painted all the way down to the ankles.

I ran into one little hickup with the land speeders though and it is a minor one, though worth noting. See I got 2 single Land Speeders, and the Dark Angles Raven Wing battalion box set to get the third. Well the Land Speeder in the Raven Wing box is the older design of land speeders so I've effectively got two different models. It's not a huge problem, but it has created a few minor planning issues. For instance the newer version of the land speeder allows you to build the lower section of the entire Speeder body and then apply the top of the body to that. if you look at the land speeder body on the right you see how the seat backs are attached to the bottom of the speeder, but on the left the seat backs are attached to the top portion. Like I said, not a huge problem just an annoyance.

So far I've only managed to paint the central console on for the drop pod. Nothing terribly note worthy here. But worth the picture.


Now one other thing I've started working on, a new game. Does anyone know the Mobile suit Gundam franchise? Specifically the segment known as the "Universal Century" time line? Well if not here's the brief break down: Mankind has begun to colonize space with the use of space colonies. But after nearly 80 years one group of colonies have declared Independence and launched a war against the Earth Federation. Initially the Space colony had the advantage with the advent of mechanized war machines known as mobile suits but ultimately the Earth Federation caught up and developed their own Mobile suits. That war last about a year and the following series explored the fall out from that war.

Well I'm a big Gundam fan and I was watching the series 08th MS team the other day and it got my mind rolling about the idea of a table top strategy game based on that. Meaning you get a team of between 3 and 7 pilots, outfit them with your selected mobile suit, and then equip the suit with the various weapons and then you and your opponent each attempt to achieve your respective objectives. I figure you can use the 1/144 scale models to represent your mobile suit teams. it'd be a notable investment to get a basic team up and running, but $100 for a medium sized team seems almost non-existent when compared to hundreds of dollars you'd spend getting a 1500 point Space Marine army together.

I don't want to make it a Gundam version of 40k, I intend to make it a bit more complicated than that, but not up to the level of an RPG. Right now it's all in the conceptual stages and the only thing I've managed to accomplish so far is compiling a list of weapons from the first couple series with some rough notes about concepts and ideas that would apply to those weapons.

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