nerodine

 I started this gang a few months ago, and ended up pausing it in favour of other projects, and also there was no need for a Necromunda gang while we were in lockdown. But as part of my effort to clear the WIP projects before the new year, I wanted them finished. It's a pleasing visual contrast to my more dour Enforcers, and I'm super happy with how they turned out.

 These two character figures from Heresy Miniatures are wonderful and on purchasing them I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. The car was a find from an eBay seller who does resin vehicles and it's close enough to what I had in mind to work. The floor pattern is a roller from Greenstuff World and sci-fi enough to satisfy my needs.  

 I don't paint Ultramarines often. As a chapter they don't appeal. But this sculpt, as part of the Conquest subscription, was too nice to pass up. I like the "right, enough of this nonsense" pose as he steps forward. Basing deliberately black as I plan to eBay this to help offset the hobby spend this year, and want it to be available to anyone to add to their army.  

And so, here we are. The full army, finished.  Total time spent was 120-130 hours. Many corners were cut, and if you have a good look up close, well some of it would benefit from a little more time. But you know what? I'm delighted with the outcome from a month of painting. It's a whole army on the table!

Over the last couple of weeks the most frequent question asked has been how I've managed to push through my army so quickly, to a reasonable standard. This week I wanted to cover some of the things that have allowed me to get so far on this project in a decent time frame. And apologies for the repeated use of "me" and "I" in the below. Elephants A phrase I use in my day job is "how do you eat an elephant?". The answer, of course, is one bite at a time. But initially it seems so daunting to look at a mass of unpainted figures and think "I have no idea where to begin" or "I can't do this". I'm 84 hours into this project now, in around four weeks, with just over a week left, and have applied a few key learnings. Deadlines Set a deadline. If you don't set a deadline, you'll definitely miss a deadline.  It started from realising in mid-September that I had enough unassembled Orks to make an army, and Armies on Parade

 When the Ork 4th edition rulebook was released in 2008, it rekindled an old love of the Orks and that quickly spiralled into our gaming group jumping into 5th edition and enjoying Warhammer after a few years I never built any Burna Boyz, as the Lootas were my preference for a heavy weapon, but adding them to the army now is a real pleasure.  

The ridiculousness of Orks never ceases to amaze, and the Stormboyz are a great example of this. Backpacks with rockets to get them closer to the fight, faster. I'm using the check pattern on large surfaces to break it up and be more interesting. It's fun on missile warheads, and good for weapon surfaces.

Rokkit Boyz don't have much in the way of armour. But what armour they do have is yellow. Lot of fabric on these models, so I gave them lots of check patterns for a bit of interest. When everything's painted and on the table, the heavy checking should differentiate them nicely, but remain coherent in the army.  This unit also features a sneaky Death Skull, as a little tribute to Warbringer who has spent the last two weeks saying "you're painting things yellow, but blue are the best orks".

So now we have a basecoat of yellow in place, we can start to see the task ahead. It's definitely yellow, but without edging or highlights, it's quite dull. You could certainly go "it'll do" for a challenge like this - but that isn't what I want. Before we get into detail, I want to mark out areas to be check patterning. Couple of reasons for this. One, cleaning up any accidents with black will be a real problem when I have yellow highlights in place, so getting this stage out of the way now will help me. Any overpainting can be cleaned with the basecoat yellow, Scrofulous Brown, with very little effort. It also lets me see the effect and check it doesn't overpower areas of the model. With the test model done, it's time to hit the other models in the first wave of batch painting. Small panels on vehicles, heads of rockets on troops. I wasn't brave enough to try fancy swirling patterns on the rockets, but happy the check effect looks good.