What I've been up to lately

 Been a little while again. I've been pretty busy with Battletech lately! Started up a local group a couple years ago and it's quickly grown to nearly 20 people a week! Not too bad. I've also joined an AD&D 2e group and found someone to play old GW games like Space Hulk with, so my motivation for miniature painting has come back quite a bit recently. I'll just show off a bit of what I've been up to!

This is my most recent project I just finished:

A garden variety snotling, Peasebloom the musical pig, and a friendly toad enjoy an afternoon in the forest.

This project has been in the back of my head for probably about 10 years now when I first got the Peasebloom model from White Knight Miniatures, sculpted by John Pickford in 2007. Something I acquired way back in ye olden times I think on the Bugman's Brewery forum when his landsknecht dwarfs were made available for purchase to the members of the forum. (I always really enjoy it when forum members do their own limited runs!). The tree was made by me for this very project approximately 10-11 years ago back when I had very little confidence in my hobbyist skills so while it may not be the greatest tree, I'm still fairly proud of it as it was my first tree! Made of twisted wires covered in greenstuff and sculpted to look like bark. Unfortunately, the more interesting side of the tree with a little hollow ended up on the back side. Oh well. The ground, the pond, and the mushrooms were all sculpted out of wads of green stuff as well.

The pig, unfortunately, was chewed on by my dog probably about 7-8 years ago when it was a puppy, so the feet are rather mangled and detached. The rest of the model, however, was fine, so I made a little log for the pig to be sitting on and just kind of tried to bury it's "feet" in the dirt. The toad is from one of the old Reaper Miniatures Familiar packs way back from the late 80s or early 90s I forget which, and the snotling I found in a bag of random snotlings while looking for a good companion piece for the pig. Oddly enough, this one was not carrying a weapon or looking aggressive at all and I thought the watering can actually worked well with the little pond. 

Overall, I think it ended up not too bad. Finally finished my first diorama after ten years! I sure need to speed up my painting or I'm never going to get done with everything.

Next up, here's my AD&D Character: Largo

This miniature is one of the old, I want to say 1984?, RuneQuest miniatures by Ral Partha. One of the adventurers from the box set. While digging through my old non-citadel miniatures I came across this one and felt it resembled how I pictured Largo to be well enough!

Largo is currently a level 1 fighter who specializes in the longsword and uses a small-medium shield. So far he's had a couple near-death encounters, particularly with a Dwarf smacking him for 8 points of damage with a warhammer! (He only has 9 hp!). We'll see how long he survives!!

Next we have some Terminator Marines for Space Hulk!

Some good old metal Crimson Fists Terminators. I did not assemble them, they came this way, so you may wonder why the Captain has a normal power fist and an assault cannon and why one has a single lightning claw, well, it wasn't my decision! I just went ahead and painted them. I think they look cool, anyways. They also survived their first Space Hulk mission!

At some point I would like to get some proper crimson fists decals for them and I think they would look good with some extra decoration on their power fists. Perhaps some stripes or something. So I still consider these a work in progress. I also have 4 more that are primed and waiting to be worked on to join the team, bringing the terminator squad up to 8 marines. I got a little tired of painting terminators after these though, so the others might wait for a little bit before I get to them.

I painted this guy for a friend's Battletech demo at a local gaming convention:

A big ol' 3D printed Shadowhawk done in the style of the old Dougram anime mech which the Shadowhawk was copied from. It was a bit of a pain to paint, being like spaghetti in certain parts, but it seemed to be popular enough with the con attendees! My friend built an oversized board to play on and a few of the guys in our weekly group painted these up for the con. 

Anyways! That's about it for now. Right now I'm thinking about painting up one of the old 80s Dwarf gyrocopters. That sounds kind of fun! We'll see what I get to next! See ya!

The Guardian

 I've been slowly making my way through painting Knightmare Miniatures' Pantheon of Chaos range of miniatures, which are all really awesome and creative. I love them. Many of the designs are based on unused Games Workshop concept art for followers and daemons of the Chaos God Malal who was the 5th Chaos God early on in development which unfortunately never got made due to some copyright stuff. 

This fellow, called "The Guardian", is a rather unique looking warrior of chaos. Elongated neck, disproportionately long arms, covered in platemail and with a head like a statue. When I saw him, I immediately thought to paint him in gold. He reminds me a lot of Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls. Might be why my brain immediately went to gold but I think it's very fitting.

Here he stands with a few of his fellow followers of chaos. These models are truly a ton of fun. You should check out Knightmare Miniatures if you are a fan of Oldhammer inspired chaos stuff. They also have a whole range of orcs and goblins and Rogue Trader inspired things as well.

Next up... I might attempt one of the bigger models. I'll have to get my courage up though!

Chainsaw Goblin

 

Just for fun, a good old Blood Bowl chainsaw goblin. I much prefer the smiling variant to the non. He's so excited to be cutting people apart. I probably could've done the blood better but it gets the point across.

I've also managed to finally finish painting Thrugg Bullneck. I just need to get him based properly and finish the heavy weapons guy and I'll have FINALLY finished the squad I started two years ago. (Man time goes by fast!) I have quite a few more space orcs that need painted too. I seem to be well motivated lately so I'll get them done soon!

The Protonid and Zoats eat Oats (Or Zoatibix)

 It's been a while since I've posted on here. I feel a bit bad about that but things have been very busy what with the end times coming and all that. But I'm back! And I have some cool stuff to show.

Late last year I finally managed to acquire one of my most long sought-after models. It took ten years to find one. Here it is; The Protonid.

Word around the internet is that there are only 17 of these guys in existence but I feel like I've seen a number of them around in online collections and photos so I'm not quite sure how much I trust that number. If anyone can verify for certain, I'd love to hear. I know there really aren't many though and I feel very lucky to have found this one when I did. 

I feel it's a bit of a shame the model was never a full production one as early on in Rogue Trader there weren't any really good models for tyranids as they were described in the book. Later on you could use termagant models in its place, which are smaller but seem to be based on this design. I always found it a bit odd that the "Tyranid" as described in Rogue Trader, only existed here. I think it's a really cool design and an awesomely detailed model. I did not paint this one, this paint job is how I purchased it.

For a long time I've wanted to build an authentic RT Tyranid Space Zoat Squad (TSZS?) so now that I have the tyranid overlord, I felt inspired to paint some zoats.

I thought purple would be a good colour to contrast with the green skin of the zoats and it feels pretty alien and organic to me, which is what Tyranid technology is. I also just really like the purple/green colour combination.

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out and I think they look good with the protonid. I need to paint two more for a full squad, which I already have primed. I rolled up a squad just for fun already too. I would LOVE to play a small skirmish game of Rogue Trader with these guys. Hopefully I can someday if things calm down with the whole virus mess. 

For now, I shall continue painting.

Bugman's Cart and re-evaluating my perspective on painting

It's taken me 10 years to finally paint one of these, which is far too long, but for such a favourite model of mine, I wanted to do a good job. Since getting back into painting with my Battletech miniatures, I've been thinking long and hard about my giant pile of unpainted 80s lead sitting in boxes that I had vowed 10 years ago to paint. I'm now realizing that it won't get painted if I don't actually put in the effort and time and work it takes to do so. 10 years... 10 years have already gone by and I've made such minimal progress. But I've learned a lot in these past 10 years. So much. 11 years ago I didn't even really know what Warhammer was! Now I have a large collection of 80s citadel paints and inks, have learned all the old painting techniques that they used back then and a feeling of determination to see my dwarfs fulfill whatever destiny they were created for.

Now I feel like my painting knowledge and experience is pretty decent, even if it's not great, but I know now that not every one of these miniatures needs to be perfect. They don't need to be at the extremely high standards I tried to hold myself to years ago. I would agonize for days or weeks over what to paint something. It was just so exhausting and not fun... but now I think I just want to make decisions and get shit done. I have over 600 dwarfs to paint, 200ish squats, at least 100 chaos warriors, a crapload of space orcs and a decent amount of space marines as well as blood bowl teams and heroquest miniatures and whatever else is in my closet needing a coat of paint. I can't be picky. I just have to limit myself to one basecoat, one or two washes and maybe a highlight and move on to the next thing.

I spent about 7 hours total on this cart, which while being longer than I wanted, was quite a bit less than I would have done it 5 years ago. If I spent my usual 8 hours a miniature on 600 miniatures... well, i'd never get finished. I did want to put in a bit of extra effort to make this look good though, as it's been one of my favourite warhammer models since I got into the game and acquired my army of dwarfs. It's something I've spent a long time staring at, thinking about, and imagining being painted. In only 7 hours of work (Maybe really 6 because I took a lunch break) I ended up with pretty much exactly what I had envisioned years ago. I want my miniatures to look like they could belong in the old 80s rulebooks and catalogues. I don't care about them being 2019 golden demon worthy. Today's standards are far beyond anything I can accomplish or even want to. I like the 80s aesthetic, the simplicity and style of it. Something about the look of swamp brown with an ink wash on wood just makes me happy.

I hope to make many more posts like this in the future, but with more results and less retrospective ponderings. Hope you like the cart.

Cheers!

No guts, No galaxy!

BATTLETECH!

It's been a while since I've posted here. (I've been much more active on Instagram.) but I wanted to make a post about something I've been really getting into lately. Battletech miniatures!

About 4 weeks ago I joined a MechWarrior roleplaying group. You do the roleplaying as a character in the battletech universe and when battles happen, you kind of switch over to classic battletech rules. It's been a lot of fun.

The character I made comes from a family of knights in the Taurian Concordat on the periphery of civilized space. Like on the frontier I suppose. In order to maintain his family's status as knights, each generation must prove themselves, so he has gone on his own quest, taking his family's Warhammer out on a treasure hunt of sorts, looking for LosTech (or highly advanced technology created hundreds of years ago by the now crumbled galactic-wide Star League)

His name is Diego Ezquerra and this is his Warhammer:



The other players in the group are a capellan technician, a comstar operative with a phoenix hawk, a kuritan assassin with a valkyrie, a scottish highlander with a commando and a kuritan princess/pop star with a wolfhound.

Just for fun, and because I've been itching to paint some more mechs lately, I painted my phoenix hawk model in a comstar paint scheme.



It was a fun experiment that took me about 4 hours in all to complete. I've never done an all-white model like this. It required SO much drybrushing. But I think it turned out well despite the low quality of the 80s plastic models.

We narrowly won our battle yesterday. My mech took 62 points of damage total during the battle and I was pretty effective in disabling 3 mechs. I scored one kill. A jenner, with legs blown off, jetpacked his way at me, trying to kamikaze me. I managed to blast it out of the sky with my short ranged missiles before it struck me.

For that, I painted a notch on the warhammer's gun. Hopefully there will be many more in the future.



In all, it's been a very fun time. It's great to have an incentive to start painting again and to be able to play with miniatures finally after all these years.

Rogue Trader RTB02 Space Ork Raiders - RT Ork Squad Painted

RTB02 Space Ork Raiders

I purchased this box set from 1987 on ebay a number of years ago when I was first getting interested in Rogue Trader era Warhammer. At the time I was super into modern Orks but I thought it would be cool to have some RT era orks and I was able to get this box surprisingly cheap. It came with 16 unpainted fresh metal ork miniatures however my box had Thrugg replaced by another ork model. (I recently purchased a Thrugg model by himself.). I kept the box on display in my room, however I never actually began the process of painting them until now.

I spent a long time looking at the models on the back of the box while painting these. I'm still not sure how they got such brightly colored skin for their orks. I may have to experiment.

After painting up my LE1 Space Orc it got me really excited to work on making an entire squad so I opened up my RT book, rolled up a 10 man Ork squad, opened the boxed set, chose the 8 models I liked the best who along with my LE1 and the Thrugg model I had ordered would make up a full squad. It was really interesting going through the box's models with the intention of deciding what to paint as I really began to notice all the minor differences between models. Figures that I thought were duplicates were actually very similar but with different faces, shoulder pads, equipment, whatever. There's actually quite an impressive amount of variation amongst the models in the box.

The robot and Red Gobbo wait to be painted soon.

I finally decided on the 7 shown above plus a very badly painted heavy weapons trooper I had lying around. I had never actually painted in groups before aside from some modern space marines which basically just required spray painting and minor detailing and my original tau force with was basically the same thing. I barely even painted those things, it was pretty much white primer and a copic marker. These orcs, however, are much much more individualistic than a bunch of modern space marines and so require individual detail and attention. I feel like doing 7 at once was a bit too big of a bite for me, but in the end I managed to finish them. Only took about 3 weeks.

A savage band of raiders!

A big part of my goal I have with painting my old vintage miniatures is to give them a paint job that they might've been given when they were new. For many years with painting I struggled to do my absolute best job, watching tutorials, obsessively going over minute details. I even spent 4 hours once just painting the dorsal fins on a couple of skinks. But honestly, no matter how hard I push myself, I feel like it only burns myself out and I'm really not willing to put in the consistent and constant hours of practice it takes to reach the level of Crystal Brush and Golden Demon winners. Instead, I find it's actually easier, more fun and overall more rewarding to aim for an oldschool look. I really love how the models are painted in the White Dwarfs of the 80s and in the old rulebooks. The paint jobs for the most part really aren't that complicated or difficult but I think they look great.

A view from behind.

So my goal is to take more a purist approach. The past few years whenever I find lots of 80s citadel paints come up available on ebay, I try to purchase them. By now I've amassed far more vintage paints than modern paints. In order to make sure these models have the look and feel of the 80s I've painted them entirely (with the exception of black and white) with original 80s citadel paints.

Hhruk, the Ork Leftenant.

You may also notice the very simple bases. A couple rocks, goblin green with black rim, grass and sand. All very intentional. I'm really happy with how these guys came out. I may add little details here and there eventually, such as tattoos, symbols or whatnot, and I'm definitely going to name each member of the squad, but for now I'm really happy with them and ready to move on to the next models. I'm not sure if I want to try to do so many individualized models all at once in the future, I may try to do them 1-3 at a time as it was a little stressful trying to get so many done at the same time. I also nearly passed out while blowing all the loose grass off the figures in the bathroom sink. 7 figures, lots of grass. Oof. I should've taken a break. I was spinning by the end.

Next step is to paint up the heavy weapons trooper (who has been stripped and primed) and Thrugg Bullneck (also primed). I also just managed to acquire 8 of my favorite space orc models from this era who will form up another squad, but they will have to wait until next time.

Thanks for reading! Waaargh!

I love how the hex bases fit together so snuggly.