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.

LE1 Space Orc painted - a new project begins

I had been painting a few of the Pantheon of Chaos models by Knightmare Miniatures (Fantastic old school styled models. Many of which are recreations of artwork from the old books) lately and while they are certainly extremely fun to paint, I was itching to do something Rogue Trader. Something with shooty bits I could put on a hex base and after thinking it over and perusing the lead pile I decided to paint up my LE1 Space Orc. He looked so sad and lonely sitting in a box of Rogue Trader era orks, the only one of the bunch unpainted, so I primered him up and got my brushes ready.

Primed and ready

His space suit was a little.. confusing to me. I wasn't sure what color to paint it. At first glance I thought he was wearing power armor but after looking at him more closely it seemed like perhaps it was instead something more like that of an astronaut suit. I decided to try a basecoat of ghoul grey which looked a little.. meh in my opinion. His shoulder pads, however, distinctly reminded me of Spinys from Super Mario Bros and I had to paint them as such.

Ghoul Grey basecoat

I fussed around with the space suit, adding washes of red ink, blue ink, some other ink I think until it ended up looking like a bit of a hodgepodge of colors. However, I think the rather dirtied look fits the ork just fine and serves as a fine contrast to his unusually clean shoulder pads and boots. I definitely wanted him to look fun and old school, not taking it too seriously as I feel orks should be made fun and with plenty of character and individuality. In the end, he's perhaps not perfectly how I imagined him looking, but he is definitely a model that I can be happy with.

Based and finished

I'm not sure what that tank is for but it looks dangerous

After I finished this model I remembered that I had a complete unassembled RTB02 Space Ork Raiders Boxed Set. 16 shiny new unpainted, untouched Rogue Trader era orks that were begging to be given colour. With a little encouragement from one of my friends, The Rebel Grot, I thought "Why not start painting some RT orks and build a squad?" So that is going to be my next project. 9 happy friends and a transport for this fellow to lead. Very exciting!

First post of the blog - Introduction

Hello and welcome to Knee Deep in the Lead, a blog where I attempt to paint the multitude of metal models which surround me and hopefully record some games of 3rd edition Fantasy Battle and Rogue Trader too.

First off, an introduction. I am not a longbeard. I didn't grow up with Warhammer as a kid, nor was I alive in the 80s. I did often paint Battletech and similar miniatures (poorly) with my brother in the 90s but I had never even heard of Warhammer until around 2008 which sounds absurd to myself now. I had heard about it from a guy in high school who was building a Blood Angels force. I was living in a lonely desolate house in a canyon in the middle of nowhere in eastern Idaho with nothing to do, so I ordered a Tau Battleforce off Games Workshop's website and had some fun assembling and painting figures from it. I never finished it, never got to play any games with it (The guy who got me interested flaked out and wasn't interested in playing after that.) but it made me aware of Warhammer and got me interested in what it was.

My first painted Warhammer models

It wasn't until about three years later in 2011 that I came across a second-hand store find which I believe changed my life for the better. At this "Used Store" (I believe that was the name of the store) in Pocatello, Idaho there was a pile of boxes in a corner filled with strange little lead miniatures. They looked so different from the modern Warhammer that I knew. I only assumed they were Warhammer because there was a Warhammer Battle Magic box and a couple old books next to them. The store owner was reluctant to let them go, however he had no idea what they were and in the end I walked out with nearly 600 Citadel, Marauder and Ironclaw metal dwarfs from the 80s plus a plethora of siege weapons, vehicles and even a Blood Bowl team for only 100$.

The complete Dwarf army as I found it.

I soon became obsessed with researching them and finding out what they were. I was and am still very grateful to the members of the Bugman's Brewery forum for helping me out so much in the beginning with identifying them and introducing me to places such as SOLegends and CCMWiki. From lurking about the forum I learned a lot about the hobby in general and an environment that was much different to the Newhammer mentality of preparing for cutthroat competitions and just getting as many figures painted to a suitable level in as short amount of time as you can in order to simply field more forces. When it came to the older miniatures there was love for the miniatures, the history and the game that I saw. Great care was taken to paint these very characterful and highly individual models, with many often being bestowed names upon their baseplates to further highlight their individuality. There was a special kind of magic that attracted me to it. Something that seemed to be lacking from the newer stuff.

Fantastic little models.

Of course, my love for Oldhammer didn't simply occur overnight. It grew gradually through the years. I still collected and painted the newer stuff (Mainly when it came to 40k. I had fantasy all set with my dwarfs) but as time went on I became less and less interested in GW's new releases and I wanted more of those Gorkamorka Orks, Squats, Beakie marines and Chaos Renegades. I wanted more story than just straight wargaming and I wanted characters rather than faceless soldiers. It was probably around the time that the Oldhammer forum came into being and GW ended production of metal miniatures that I fully embraced the ideals of Oldhammer and left Newhammer behind.

The first dwarf I ever painted

I hope with this blog I can be more part of this community and find motivation to paint these great many miniatures because sometimes I feel like I really am knee deep in the lead. Seriously, these things are all over my house.