Damn it takes time to paint

Between lots of things needing to be done and generally being tired (I miss AC! I want to be able to sleep when it is warm out!) and that little pesky issue of yellow paint, I haven't actually painted as much as I had hoped to. I might just be able to finish my 7 Boltgun Tactical Squad Marines tomorrow though. Painted 8 shoulder pads today and have worked on the arms/bolters as well. Slow going, but it would be so nice to have 7 fully painted models. Then I just have to paint 2 special weapons and a sergeant.

I did cheat a bit and have painted two Ork Nobs, for fun, and it was a lot of fun! I don't have any Goff checkmarks on them though. Should incorporate them in the future. Gotta make Mr. Thrakka feel welcome in the future :)

I really should take some pictures of my progress tomorrow. For fun :)

1000 points of Imperial Fists

I am hard at work (or, well, at least now and then) on my 750 point list still. But I am thinking about what I could do next, how I could up it to 1k points if I want to compete in the upcoming tourney. I fear I must take the simplest route, i.e. the one involving the least amount of miniatures as my painting is slow moving. Pictures will be up when I can get my hands on a camera again. I'm working on 7 boltgun marines. I'm leaving off all the "extras" such as grenades etc. Cutting corners:) I might add them later on though, I just have to be super careful with the glue. I have found that putting some glue on a piece of cardboard and holding the plastic I want to glue and gently dipping it in the little pool of glue works far far better than trying to apply directly from the bottle. Don't want glue all over the place anymore after all!

So what would I want to add? I want to add two land speeder storms. Which means 12 (!) scouts and two (!!!) vehicles. Released on the 18th of July none the less. On top of that I want one squad of Space Marines scouts, half of them with sniper rifles, that I split into two combat groups each boarding a storm. Fast, open topped, skimmer. It opens up for some interesting tactics for sure. I should probably drop my dreadnought if I do that and replace him with a devastator squad or something (since I plan on painting them anyways). But I would have 22 scouts and 2 skimmers to paint then. Over a weekend. Doesn't sound like a realistic plan to me :(

That said, it would be a great way to move my army up to 1500 points. Add one more Razorback to that mix, and an extra HQ (thinking something rock hard, to go in the other 2nd Razorback) and some mobile elites. Maybe on or two drop pod terminator squads. I do hope you *can* drop pod them. A squad of three land speeders would be a cool addition as well. Would make my army quite fast I hope :)

What I will not add is bikes. Not a fan of them at all. Nope, no bikes.

Hmm

Hmm, maybe one should get one of these in the future:

The Spear of Sicarius

But then again, what's the odds that the thing will be around for long enough for that to happen :) I do quite fancy those spiffy drop pods though. No idea if they will play well, but they look really neat :)

More Razorback

The Razorback is now glued together into one and is starting to resemble an actual dedicated transport. I do notice that trying to paint individual pieces at different times was a huge mistake. I have put foundation on the body of the tank, but the bottom have one color and the hatches another etc. I don't think the body will match either. Oh well, it's my first try with yellow, and I have found it to be better to move on than to get stuck. I've got another tac squad to paint after all (and a few other pieces).

I am seriously thinking of investing in an airbrush in the future. The cover well and I could easily put down many coats of paint evenly. See how the hatches stand out here (even if I haven't actually started the yellow coat over the foundation coats yet).

You can even see how the yellow is uneven as hell here :(

The back hatch is magnetized, that is a part I am pleased with :) Also the tracks looks real nice.

Funny enough the inside of the Razorback looks, to me, real nice. Fenris Grey all the way baby! Also brushed metal + Badab Black is a fantastic little invention. Or rather metal + any dark wash. Maybe I should try it with green, purple, or blue, just for the heck of it :)

But you can see that I now have Fenris Grey insides on all that hatches. I plan on having anything that isn't outer hull in FG and add transfers and some black details on the outside to make it a bit more interesting. I will number it 'I' as it is the first armored vehicle I do have for the Fists. I do feel a bit miffed at how much that isn't included with the Razorback though, the second bolter that goes in the front isn't available so I can't build a Rhino with two bolter-thingies for instance. And only two main weapons out of five or six for the Razorback. Bad Games Workshop, bad, bad, bad.

I am getting really curious of what a 750p army can do. We'll see if I am a tactical genius or a heretic :)

Working on my Razorback

I need to get my Razorback in at least a state where I can play with it, even if it won't look finished or pretty. But being the little weirdo I am I do want to paint the inside of the tank, and to do so I will have to do some assembly - paint - assembly - paint iterations. I have assembled the sides with the tracks and glued them together, but I haven't glued them together with each other yet, so they are not glued to the bottom nor the panel+weapon "thing".

Here's a pic of the inside:

It's a bit hard to see (I need more sources of light to get better pictures) but I hope you can see that I have painted the inside in my new favorite color: Fenris grey. It is one awesome color and I couldn't wait to get to paint Space Wolfs with it, so I chose it for the inside of the tank. It's just the foundation paint and sometimes I used a little blue wash (GW line) and a lighter blue foundation paint to highlight buttons etc. Painted the triangular buttons red and green as well, as I wanted them to pop a bit. They look like door open/close buttons so I thought, what the heck :) Here's another shot at the inside. Not that I painted the floor gunbolt metal with a badab black wash and touched it up with some more metal. I need new drybrushes though, they are already worn out from Cygnar painting:) Wish GW's new huge drybrush was released. Guess I will just buy GW's two drybrushes plus a large one (tanks need large brushes!).

I am pleased with the tracks. Tin bitz + some gunbolt metal + devlan mud wash and voila. Stole that one from GW's site :) It was real simple, fast, and looks good.

Less easy is this darn yellow. I do like the foundation WAAY better than the failure that was the Army Painter spray, but it is really hard to get an even coat on there. I have been playing around with how much I should water the paint and such, but it is still really really hard. Oh well, maybe in the end I'll learn something :) Plus I've got Orks and Eldars to learn how to paint as well. And Retribution, and Space Wolfs, and more Cygnar!

This part I do like. It looks pretty good (even better RL). Just enjoy the picture:

I wanted to have working side doors, and here you have one of them. I did change my mind about the color though, and now the inside is Fenris Grey instead. To match with the rest of the insides. The backdoor (*tihi*) will have the same setup with Fenris Gray inside and yellow on the outside so it will match.

The neat thing is that I have magnetized the door so I can pull it off, put it back on, and have it open for the Marines to run out. Like this!

You can also have it shut. I hope I won't end up having it get too thick because of paint and be hard to fit. I've got the other door painted and magnetized as well.

I have painted some more after these pictures were taken and I am going to finish magnetizing the back door tomorrow. I had some mishaps and will have to redo the fitting of the magnets. The magnets are 1 x 1.5 x 5 mm btw. Quite a handy size and fairly strong. Thus far recommended :) Bought of a German site.

Stay tuned for the next update. I am determined to get this Razorback in playable fashion this week, maybe even fully painted! I do need to start using the transfers though. On the squads as well.

//Brother Captain Flekkzo

Terminators

I've painted one out of five Space Marine Terminators now. I am still playing around with different ways of getting yellow to not look awful, and I ended up with a way to bleak looking terminator. So I gave it some more wash and then drybrushed a bunch of yellow on it and gave it some slightly more pronounced edge highlights. I am not too fond of the look you get from it though, and I don't particularly like the idea of layering like crazy (nor the idea of painting smaller and smaller areas as I get lighter and lighter colors). I am still sold on the idea of wet blending. Tried it a bit on the cloth of the sergeant of the tactical squad earlier. Maybe I'll go nuts and use it much more on the Captain :)

Here's the Terminator! I'd love some opinions! I will paint the other four with similar highlighted edges (i.e. painted on instead of drybrushing, with the exception of the helmet).

Warmachine league

Something I didn't expect happened today. I now have no less than six wins and one loss in the FLGS Warmachine/Hordes league. Six in a row even. And with a pretty themed up army even, and sometimes some pretty awful dice rolls. Life is sometimes funny :) Cygnar will prevail!

I also started to paint one more gobber today, but I think that I honestly failed with the skin. The drybrushing just made it look weird instead of a lean green machine. Gotta figure that one out. I've got no less than one lots (technical Mekboy term mind you) of Orks to paint even for my 750p list, and a lot of them have green skin to be painted. Or I could turn it around, after painting that many Orks I better improve my technique *somehow* :) And one nifty thing with Orks is, they shouldn't look uniform, so if I try out different colors and techniques, that is just Orky anyways.

In Space Marine land I've painted a termy today. The GW foundation colors thus far has been a hit. I recommend! Go buy!