Space Wolves: Primaris progress

... or how to spend seven hours feeling like you've achieved nothing. NOTHING.

After priming my marines, I wanted to weather them differently to how my other marines have been done. The old method was sponge dabbing the chips on, but this time I wanted to try a different method - chipping medium.

First step is to apply two different browns on the models - starting with all over Dark Fleshtone, then covering a random 50% of each model with Parasite Brown.

Out of shot, I've applied the same process to arms, legs and other missing pieces. But you don't need to see those in the test shot.

After this, a full coverage of Vallejo's Chipping Medium - which works surprisingly well straight through the airbrush from the pot. Then it's Dark Grey Blue to cover everything so no brown is visible.

So after two full sessions I'm now back to sprue grey! Brilliant. Well done me, what a great use of time.

It's a little demoralising at this point to realise nothing appears to have changed, but I'm hopeful the next few stages will help change that impression. This approach takes a little longer in the preparation but I'm hopeful the extra effort is worthwhile, and will look great on the support vehicles later too. Bear with me, future posts should be more interesting - but this feels like an important stage of the process.

Before the chipping begins, I've also started painting some terrain pieces to act as my test area for this technique. It's designed to be debris and ruins, so if everything goes horribly wrong at this point ... it doesn't matter so much! This makes me feel better than trying it straight on the marines and failing hard.

Shout out to the excellent Crooked Dice for their junk piles and containers shown above, they're great scenery pieces and the range they had on display at Salute 2017 was excellent. Perfect test material for new techniques. Ignore the ork shaman in the corner. He's for another post at some point :)

I played with a few test colours to get an idea of how I want the highlight stages to go - and below is the very, very rough sketch of colour transitions.

This moves from pure Dark Grey Blue up to pure Wolf Grey, with a few inbetween steps. Just to stress, the above is only a sketch to let me see each colour over the top of the last. My hope is the final version will be a lot smoother!

Space Wolves: Primaris emerge

I'm jumping back into 40k with 8th edition. Hello to you Mr Bandwagon.

My gaming pretty much stopperd when 6th edition landed due to a family emerging and everything else taking priority. In the interim I've gotten big grown-up jobs and felt it was justifiable to treat myself and went all in ... so that meant a collector's edition, all five indexes and the Dark Imperium starter set.

Would I recommend the collector's edition for the price tag? Hmm, not sure - it's very expensive for what you get, and in an ideal world it would have been around the £150 mark ... but that's what tax rebates are for! However, quality is excellent and I'm a happy chap.

Building of the Marines has now commenced. I'm trying to built them as sub assemblies with the least effort possible - which is pretty straight forward so far. Mostly involving not gluing on the gun arm for the majority of figures. Assault marines glues at weird angles temporarily, because I want to do something with them that doesn't involve the transparent plastic rods.

What do I want to do with them, you ask? I haven't a flippin' clue at the moment, but can't abide their default pose which looks like they're in a local amateur theatre production with wire-flying. Next up is the painful process of mould line removal ...

Wolves, wolves, wolves - final groupshots

Well here we are - all the wolves from Zombicide: Black Plague, Conan, Blood Rage and 40k finished up! Phew. Here are the full group shots of everything.

That's a total of 40 wolves, and I feel vindicated in my decision to paint them in two large batches using the same techniques but different colours. It adds enough variety to not feel monotonous, and that's just what I wanted - so this has been a great success. They've also served a purpose as a useful palette cleanser between other, more complex pieces too. Would definitely take this approach again, as there's enormous satisfaction to see more figures leave the pile of grey and join the painted ranks.

Space Wolves: Fenrisian Wolves pt.2

And here we are with the definitely, positively, absolutely last wolves to be painted - the final four Fenrisian Wolves. Well ... until I realise more are needed, obviously ...

Similar approach to the grey test model. Started with a black undercoat and have airbrushed up to lighter colours, then washed and drybryshed. They're not much more than tabletop quality, and that's fine with me.

You may be able to see a glint of metal from underneath the base. I've added a washer to each figure. Purpose is two-fold: to add weight and to use for transportation on a magnetic sheet in the future.

Wolves, wolves, wolves pt.2

The second large tabletop-quality batch of wolves - covering Zombicide: Black Plague and Conan.

Again, there's nothing complex here, just block painted to get them in our games soon as possible. I make no apologies for the liberal use of blood - thanks to various mixes of Tamiya X-27 Clear Red and purple ink.

More figures that can move from the "to do" to the "completed" list and adding that little more character to our Tuesday night gaming sessions. Marvellous.

Homebrew Objective Markers

Dusting off the 40k boxes and found old objective markers I made from scratch and thought I'd share. Not fancy, but effective on the table.

The former is empty paintpots, and the latter is MDF offcuts from an old project, and some sort of plug that was lying around.

2017 Goals - Half Year Review

Approaching the half year mark already, so it feels fair to look back at my Painting Backlog Goals and my progress against that to-date.

Infamy [3] - No progress.

Colony 87 [9] - Completed all 9.

Hasslefree Miniatures [12] - Completed 4.

Heresy Miniatures [3] - Completed 1.

Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolves [28] - Wolves in progress. First 62 bases completed.

Warhammer 40,000 Death Guard [16] - One test model done, but will pause this as I plan to swap to Word Bearers instead later in the year.

Guild Ball Morticians [3] - Completed 1.

Guild Ball Fishermen [5] - No progress.

Willy Miniatures [1] - No progress.

So a lot still to do from the original list - but with the above progress and other pieces, that's 41 models done so far. I feel the Colony 87 were the real highlight in the first six months.

Interesting to see on my painting desk how easily distracted I am. In between inventing work for myself with the mass wolf painting, there's a lot of undercoated pieces which aren't listed above - that have somehow, magically made it to my desk. For someone who considers themselves reasonably focused for work, it's interesting how I've let that slide when it comes to hobby ... so greater discpline is required.

Onward to greater heights for the second half of the year!

Something a little different

I want to share a piece of work by another painter, and explain of why.

Neil Hollis (aka neilpaints) is a very accomplished painter and serial trophy winner as you can see from his Golden Demon collection. In addition to this he's also co-host on the 30k  Horus Heresy podcast, The Imperial Truth. In recent episodes Neil mentioned he would be putting up a model up on eBay to raise money for Evelina London Children's Hospital, a cause close to his heart.

As a sucker for good causes, excellent painting and having a reference piece for a colour scheme on my own traitor marines, I threw a bid in and was fortunate enough to win the figure. Here's how it looks.

As you'd expect, photos don't really do it justice. Neil was kind enough to drop it off in person and stop in for a chat, which was a real surprise and treat - always a pleasure to talk hobby with like-minded people in person. It's little things like this which get the mojo going!

So please consider making a donation to Evelina London Children's Hospital. You can also visit Neil's recently launched blog over here to follow his painting adventures.

Space Wolves: Fenrisian Wolves pt.1

Another day, another wolf - and this is the first from my test batch of new bases for my Space Wolves in 8th edition.

Seeing the greys against the base is a big moment. I'm delighted that the colour choices have worked out here! Especially as I'm now 62 bases into the project and hadn't done a test run. With hindsight, trying a single base and a model first would probably have been the smarter idea ... right?

Blood Rage: Fenrir

As part of the soon-to-conclude wolf project, I completed Fenrir from Blood Rage. Easily the largest wolf of the set, this is a lovely sculpt and packed with menace.

After over-committing to a proper basing scheme with the original Zombicide: Black Plague bases, an error on my part, these will all be plain black. Which is just as well, because there's about another 100 to finish up. Not to mention the other tabletop games in the queue ...

Played around with a lot of greys just to let the blue glow pop out. Hopefully that comes across in the photos.

Warhammer 40k: Sector Imperialis bases

Prepping for the new, and rather excellent looking Primaris Space Marines, I've started building out a new basing scheme and finished the first set of 58x 32mm bases! Phew.

If you're interested in repeating the scheme:

• Basecoated with Gunmetal Metal, Brassy Brass, Beasty Brown and Martian Earth on the four main areas
• Metals shaded with Army Painter Dark Wash
• Brassy Brass then corroded with Nihilakh Oxide
• Drybrushing Orange Fire over Martian Earth, and Plague Brown over Beasty Brown
• Higlights picked out with Chainmail Silver over Gunmetal Metal and Bright Bronze over Brassy Brass

If you were wondering where the missing two bases from the set of 60 have gone, they were prototypes for refining the scheme and you can find them on my Inquisitor and Daemonhunter.

Just another 20x 40mm, 40x 25mm and a few 50mm and 60mm bases and ... well, anyway ... there's few to do before it's all done. Why so many? I'm keen to get them finished up while the scheme's familiar to me - and frankly it's too warm to do detailed work on individual figures.

Warhammer 40k: Ordo Malleus Daemonhunter

With 8th edition here, there's a fresh sense of urgency about clearing the desk of the in-progress models, so here's my 90-minute paintjob for June - a Daemonhunterof the Ordo Malleus.

It's only now I realise how much I dislike the pose on the model. The Inquisitor figure from a while back is far superior, and benefits from not having the ridiculous leaning forward. At some point I should learn how to convert models, or at least how to cut the back out of knees.

Guild Ball Morticians: Scalpel

Life delays have taken a toll but hopefully it's back to normal now. All is well, just no time to sit down and photograph anything. And indeed, no desk until the other week.

Couple of quick paintjobs done in the last month to keep the momentum going - so it's still moving forward, albeit slowly. Here's Scalpel from my Guild Ball Morticians coming in around 90 minutes.

She felt very utilitarian, so everything is shades of brown and leather. "Brown and leather" may be the name of my first glam metal album.