Completed Warpwolf Stalker, and a bit extra.

Finished off the Stalker last night, and he seems to have finished drying:

Warpwolf Stalker 2

Glad he's finished up, because work already began on Mr. Stalker #2:

Warpwolf Stalker 2 Conversion WiP

Daemon Princes and the next steps.

     I opted to not do much to the armor plates. They started to grow on me, so I'll leave it to be changed later if I decide to do that. The quality is high tabletop standard on my Chaos army, or that's what I'll be shooting for. That'll be the baseline, and I'll go the extra mile for more special models.

Converted Tzeentch Daemon Princes

     Also, here's a better photo of the Rhino's I finished the other day:

Pre-Heresy Thousand Sons Rhinos

     That puts me on good ground to push through the 10-man squad, hopefully finishing them and a commission I have by Friday. I'll be taking a bit of a break from building and spraying for a few days/a week, so I'll be turning my attention to painting whatever's built or ready. I may take the opportunity to build some bases for the 40 pink horrors I have on the horizon.

The Weekend Progress.

     Everything came along pretty nicely this weekend, especially considering the wife and I spent a good chunk of it binge-watching X-Files. Even with that, I managed to airbrush my 10 CSM and get most of the work done on my Daemon Princes. Here's what I ended this morning with:

Click to Enlarge

     I'm happy with the colors, but I'm a little unsure of the armor plates. The black to red may be too extreme, but I do plan on ending it with a Tamiya Red glaze if my trials come out well. It doesn't look horrible, and definitely better in person, but worse case scenario has me going back over the black areas with just a darker red. I don't think there's too much more to do as of this picture. I need to finish the metal wash on one of their wings, finish the weapons off (one more wash and one more white highlight most likely), add flames to the swords, do gems, dull cote it all, highlight the metal, and do the red glaze and 'Ardcoat. Okay, seems like a lot of steps, but they should all be pretty quick. And after I'm finally happy with everything I get to practice my weathering pigments on the base. Fun times.
     Two hours of my weekend was also assembling a Heldrake. Oh yeah, got one of them. Kind of necessary for a CSM list, as it's still kind of a big deal when it hits the table, and one of the few power units in the codex. No conversion work was done, as I suspect I may want more just for how great they look. I didn't fully assemble it, but I probably will be the time I get to work on it.
     There was a huge chaos space marine codex leak, but apparently that's bogus. It did remind me pretty well that if I can speed through the "core" of a CSM and Daemon army (Tzeentch-themed "core"), I can really just add a unit here and there. I still have a pretty large list of stuff to paint in that core, but a sample list (from what I own, mostly) is:

- 20-40 Pink Horrors (with an airbrush and my experience, I expect the bases to take longer than the pink horrors).
- 9 Screamers (another super easy to paint unit)
- Heldrake (assembled, so close)

What else is there? A Lord of Change or two and Fateweaver, I suppose. Of course there's a ton more I COULD add to that list for stuff I want to run, but that's the core of it once my DPs and 10 marines are finished up. I'm avoiding Cultists since I want to see if Age of Sigmar gets Tzeentch-themed guys that can act as Cultists. But largely I'm avoiding a lot of things with rumors and obvious codex (CSM and Daemons are owed a new Codex) release window with new stuff. So starting with the "should haves" and going from there.

PS: Amusingly those two DPs are more points than I have painted in Orks total. Orks are so cheap.

MK1 Rhino Conversion.

I'm trying to be productive with my three day weekend, and started today by painting up my two Rhino conversions. This is my first time using such heavy pigments, so there's some clean up that needs to be done. They're practically finished besides that.

MK1 Thousand Sons Rhino Conversion Painted

     My two 5-man squads still require some conversion work, so I won't be able to get to them. That leaves the pink horrors and the Daemon Princes as my goals for my own army stuff the next two days. I want 20-man Pink Horrors painted up in blobs so I can vary ever 20 pink horrors (since I'll probably end up with much more than 40), so that leaves them out. So the Daemon Princes seem to be the default choice to be worked on next. Points-wise they'll knock out a significant amount from my 1,000 point list.

Thousand Sons Progress.

     Everything is coming together pretty nicely. I've built the 10 marines I need from the Betrayal of Calth box, leaving with a huge 50 power armor guys left. In the end, I opted to go away from a melta gun in each squad just because I'm still not sure what my 30k list will look like, and I'm thinking I'll want special guys like that to be "that" much more interesting to look at. So the "generic" marines I built are a good start, and I have some conversions to toss onto them.
     As I'm a sucker for good looking models, I grabbed the new(ish) Dark Angels Interrogator model-guy and did some simple swaps. When all was over, I had two Thousand Son sorcerers (or librarians, or whatever). Both still need a bit more work and some final decisions on how to base and whatnot. I expect to have 4 or so Sorcerers, to either act as Librarians, be special dudes, or the actual 40k Thousand Sons sorcerer model. The real question I'm asking myself is whether or not I want these to be magnetized on their feet so I can swap them for standard bases or plop them on Discs of Tzeentch if necessary. If we see a Daemonkin: Tzeentch that follows a similar route the Khorne one took, Sorcerers on Discs with Screamer units will be hotness. Otherwise I'd need to figure out a chaos spawn conversion idea to have them with.
     Here's the current progress, even though it's early days:

Thousand Son Sorcerer Conversion 1

Thousand Son Sorcerer Conversion 2

     I'm digging the stance of effects of the first guy a lot, but the overall look of the second guy takes the cake, IMO. I'm really not sold on the top swap of the second's weapon, and think I want something similar or exactly like the first once I get the bit. The cool Egyptian Khopesh thing feels really awesome for a Force weapon, since it could easily act as an Axe or Sword as the occassion calls for.

     After today, I have three days off of work, and I plan to do some serious painting during those days. I hope to paint up a Blackclad Wayfarer, the two rhinos I made, and at the minimum start work on painting the Daemon Prince conversions posted recently. The only thing that could interfere with those plans is Fallout 4 and wanting to relax.

Thousand Sons Update.

The Daemon Princes have come along pretty nicely, and I'm satisfied with them. After some mold line clean up and a few gap fills, I should be able to get them on the paint table within the month. I'm still a bit undecided on how I'll be basing (other than just sand), so left and area on one open to toy with.

Blurry Tzeentch Daemon Princes Conversion

I also picked up a mold making kit and tried my hand at creating some resin copies of a MK1 Rhino conversion I worked on. This is the outcome after some priming.

MK1 Rhino Conversion

I have another in the exact same stage, so I didn't see a reason to take pictures of both. Both are close to being ready for painting. I cut down to a 1,000 point list to make painting and building a bit less of a chore. Zenithal Highlighting was used to make the models look a few stages above "crappy and not primed". The 1,000 point list keeps it to me just having to finish off the 2 Daemon Princes, 2 MK1 Rhinos, 10 Space marines (two squads of 5 with a melta each), and 10 Pink Horrors. Since I need to spend extra time building and painting summonable stuff, every list point value is much less than I actually anticipate putting on the field.

And the army is complete...

...ly built. Now I can get back to painting.

I added magnets to the base so I can try something a bit ambitious. Here's a VERY ROUGH CONCEPT. It was put together to get an idea of what it'd look like, and the end result would be much more refined. I'm not sure about how I feel about it, but minus easier to travel with the bigger reason for the magnets is to just not use the idea if it looks stupid.

Next up we have...

... Maulerfiend number 2. I had to make this guy pretty quickly to elevate my current list to 2k points, but I'm happy with the way he came out. He's more of the "scour the battlefield collecting corpses" kind of creation. There's still a lot of sculpting and trimming and hacking and sawing to be done before he can hit the paint table, but the general form is complete. 

   I elongated the body to give him a more dog-like appearance, and used the Maggot Lord head bit that has two sacs (which make it resemeble testicles - pretty intentional). He's ready to start ripping apart the Daemonkin army I'll be facing this coming Wednesday! So look out for the companion battle report on that one!

Targ and a Typhon conversion.

    Busy times. I've been hanging out with some friends during a Thursday night stream over at Hungry Badger Games twitch channel. It's been fun. Last Thursday I worked on Targ and I managed to finish him up yesterday. It's a quick paint job, but effective enough. I'm slowly getting everything painted for the beautiful army that is the Thornfall Alliance! Unfortunately I'm debating dropping the Gator side of Minions that I own. It's nothing against them, but I just prefer Thornfall in every single way. One day they'll get that one model/unit that'll make them extremely competitive, and then they'll be all I play in Warmachine anyways.

Targ, Thornfall's Igor

    And then I created this monster:

Typhon Heavy Siege Tank WiP conversion

   It's still a pretty heavy work in progress, but the bulk of the look is there. I'll be adding some Maggot Lord maws to the doors and try to make it look like a huge daemon grew inside the shell and is bursting out. Even though it doesn't have Daemonic Possession doesn't mean it can't look like it does. It's a Lord of War, hopefully a future centerpiece model, and a hefty conversion idea - so I don't feel like I can go too far with it. Once the shell of it is completed I'll go ahead and snap a picture of it before I start doing the green stuff work (green stuff shown now is just to help reinforce the structure of the model).

   That pretty much leaves me with nothing left to build to start playing the list. While there is still some massive amounts of work to be done before I even start painting a few of the models, they are tough enough to endure playing games (and if something isn't then I'd rather learn that sooner than later to fix it up right for future playing). I have a second Sicaran tank coming in, and just put together the one I got in the mail on Friday evening. I'm very excited to start playing all these crazy chaos creations, and hope I can find time with everything I have going on. Because we can add the fact that I got engaged on Saturday morning to the list of things keeping me busy. And we are already looking to buy a house in the next few months. So, yeah. Woot. And busy,busy,busy.

Some more Nurgle conversions, and a "studio" update.

     I managed to secure a good section of one of my rooms recently. It took some bargaining with the Other, but I'm trying to set up some good lighting to try to stream and have a better work area in general. It's pretty exciting!
     I'm forming an 1,850 Nurgle list since I have enough stuff to create one from pretty much scratch. There's a bit of a stand-off between whether or not I want to include a Typhon Heavy Siege Tank or not. Obviously there will be quite a few more points available for fun times if I don't, but I really like the idea and backbone of 1 sure-shot that can annihilate serious issues from an opponent's list (while having the caveat of being a serious issue itself). But anyways. I was planning to run two Maulerfiends, but having recently won an auction for a Sicaran Battle Tank - it's likely I'll be using that bad boy instead. I'll post a refine list later on when I've had more time to think things through.
     In the meantime I've put together some more heavy conversions.

Maulerfiend:

Nurgle Maulerfiend WIP

Hell Blade:

Nurgle Hell Blade WIP

Both need green stuff, and the Hell Blade still requires a bit of additions before it's at the green stuff stage of the conversion. It worked out that I hate the Hell Blade model, and creating crazy conversions is a huge plus to playing Chaos.

Nurgle WiP.

Kind of took today to just relax and get back into the swing of things. I managed to complete two conversions. The green stuff work is nearly complete, although none of it is in these pictures. After a few years of bits hording, I have more than enough to really customize the Nurgle side of things.

Converted Nurgle Heldrake

Converted Nurgle Daemon Prince, Black Mace

Nurgle Lord is finished.

Pretty happy with the way he came out, especially considering painting him with a cold. My sickness is almost gone, though, so getting closer to being able to start pumping through all the paintings that need doing.

Nurgle Chaos Lord.

Nurgle Chaos Lord on that bitchin' bike.

Slimy as all hell.

Happy Nurgle Chaos Lord.

Bad weather and bad health. Sat on the coach all day watching Futurama and putting this beast together. Probably going to make a small allied force of Nurgle CSM to join up with my Dark Eldar just for fun. Love me the Nurgle.

Is that a Combat Familiar? Or just a stray Nurgling?

Nurgle Chaos Lord on Bike

That tank might end up oozing some vile liquid...

Tentacles bursting from his stomach steer the bike.

Happy Holidays! ... and a return to normal.

I've had a decent painting break, and once I finish a bulk of 40ish chaos cultists I'm grinding out for a friend I'll be ready to start back pretty hardcore on some painting this year. I'm hoping by the end of the year I've purchased little and painted quite a bit, so look forward to that to make the short list for my resolutions for 2015.

I had a great holiday vacation, and hope you have as well. I got some cool board games and some other nifty stuff, but the biggest gift I got was the opportunity to shop at some gaming stores in an area that is a bit repelled by 40k and Fantasy. So the stores had some pretty old stock, including Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Epic, and other delights. I knew these stores would have some cool stuff, so I brought the money. Now that I'm broke, my collection has grown drastically. So I'm anxious to get some serious building time to get things together.