When even a regular Dreadnought just won't do

Back when I was starting my new Ork army I realised that between the bits and pieces I already had I had more then enough Killa Kans along with my Dreadnought to make a apocolypse formation.

However I decideed that the dreadnought as it stood was not quite what I wanted to lead this formation as it was " straight out of the box" as it were. So I decided to invest in a second dreadnought.

To make him different from the first dreadnought I decided to do a couple of things differently. Firstly I used the "long eye slit" from for the main body and added the lense that comes with the sprue. But I then also added two more lenses using the technique I have found successful of pushing a small blob of green stuff through one of the sights from the Ork Infantry Sprue. So I'm not sure what you would call something with three eyes but that's what this dreadnought has.

Secondly I cut the attachment points away from the shoulder and army guards allowing me to attach them more securely to the Dreadnought. I've never like the support pieces for these shoulder pads. In fact with my first dreadnought the support staped on one of the pads when Iw as putting the dreadnought in the carry case for the very first time!

By cutting the support it's reduced the height of the Dreadnought slightly but signifcantly increased the look of it's overall bulk and thus menance.

And here's my new Lead Dreadnought in his (almost) painted glory.
Lastly I wanted to give the dreadnought a forcefield generator. Now I wasn't very impressed with a suggestion from the GW site as it just showed a dreadnought with the metal Big Meks packpack stuck of on top!

So to solve this problem I decided to think like a Ork. On the back of the Dreadnought are two distinct engine blocks. So I moved all four of the exhausts to one block and carefully trimmed the top out of the other block which gave me just enough room to slot in a piece of plastic rod. Which gave me a solid base to the generator "stack" and also made it look part of the "design" of the Dreadnought. Well as much as you can call anything the Orks make "designed!

For the top of the stack I used four Tau gun drones stacked on top of each other. A couple of aerials and a lot of wire and as the meerkat would say
"seemples!"

A Long time ago, on a painting station far far away

A long time ago, before the Salamander novels I had another Space Marine force on the go. In fact it was a chapter of my own creation.

A successor chapter of the 9th founding ( but successor to who? Well that would be telling) The Cereberus Knights guarding the Icarus sector. A highly industrialised sector on the flank of a major trade route to the eastern fringes, and the only through route to the Echidna sector or rather what was left of it after a Chaos incusion, that had been swiftly followed by Orks taking up what was left.

Clad in their ancient colours of Grey and Red if the Cereberus Knights guard the gates of Icarus,
determined never to fail in their ancient duty.

Of course all the knights guard these days is the plastic boxes they have found themselves demoted too in the loft.

However in the past couple of days I've found the last project to be added to the army before the Orks and Salamanders stole my focus.

A Ironclad dreadnought of the 4th Company, whose obivously been putting that seismic hammer to good use if the amount of building debris is anything to go by.

Still with the next Salamander novel not due to come out for sometime ( I'm just finishing up the last couple of bits and pieces for that army) and I'm not really feeling like painting Orks right now, it might be just the time for the defenders of Icarus to march forth once more.

Be sure to stay tune

Tommies on patrol

So after undercoating my first test group of the new Warlord games British infantry, I needed to paint them which would be a very different challenge to a lot of my previous painting, as after all I couldn't really paint their uniforms bright blue now could I?

Now inititally I thought I would have to try and find either the closest colour in my GW paints or try and mix up a close match. However I suddenly remembered something which was with my bitz boxes in the loft.

I had at one point toyed with the idea of starting a flames of war army. However after buying the starter set and a box of paints my enthusasiam faded and it all went up into the loft. Fortunatly the box of paints were the English paint set which meant the problem of what colours to use was solved.
So here is my finished unit. I was happy with how the paint scheme turned out even if I found the paints a pain to use as they come in "squeezy bottles" as opposed to pots which meant as I wasn't used to using the bottles I kept pushing out more paint then I needed. Which although annoying shouldn't become a issue unless I start a full army.

The second grip I have is the transfers warlord provides for the divisional badges. I have never, ever used transfers that are so damn fiddley! I must have lost three just to accidentally squishing them when trying to put them on the models. Plus you have to use a modelling knife to cut them off the sheet as there's literally no room between the transfers to use anything else to cut.

Still in the great scheme of things it's only minor and I was overall very impressed with the overall standard of the kit and the advances Warlord have made since their first plastic kit releases.

Sons of Vulkan

Well my Salamanders Vanguard squad of Firedrakes is coming along nicely and I must say I'm very pleased with how they've turned out. I seem to be hitting my groove nicely with painting right now.
I decided to go for red with the Sgt's lighting claws and the power sword rather then my usual blue as I thought the red effect fitted much better with the green of their armour and secondly

was a nice nod to the volcanic theme that runs through their background.

In fact the squad has come along so well their almost finished and will soon join the rest of the army that will probably never be totally finished.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for shiny army syndrome.

weirdboy, weirdboy watcha gonna do now

After sitting somewhat negelected on my painting station for a considerable amount of time, I finally got round to undercoating and painting my Ork Weirdboy conversion.

Now anyone who read my intitial post on the model will be aware that I wasn't totally happy with the conversion, however I was surprised to find that as I added more paint to the model, I found myself reversing my opinon.

So here is my Weirdboy freshly painted in his new colour scheme.
The one thing I've discovered about taking photos is that it can show up every little imperfection and I'm well aware he has quite a few, so he'll be on the painting station for a while yet.

However for a initial paint job I don't think he's turned out that bad.

A new coat of paint

Now the weather has finally improved I've finally had a chance to undercoat my looted wagon and start painting it.

After much debating I decided I would give it a red paint job as after all Red ones go faster and it would make it stand out from the rest of my Death Skullz army. So here you can see the looted wagon with it's initial paint job.

I'll be posting more pictures of the wagon and it's crew soon as I start to add more details.

Death from Above

So being on Holiday this week I have been steadily sorting through my bitz box to see what I could find and what I could build.

Now I have a salamanders army up in the attic which I had started after reading Nick Kymes Salamanders series of novels. Strangely enough most of that army has come from my various bitz boxes as I had not intention of starting the army but I found myself inspired after reading the novels.

Now it's probably going to be one of those armies that will never be finished because as soon as I think I have finished it, another novel comes out and I'm soon hit with another round of inspiration.

However in this case the inspiration came from re-reading the second novel. I realised that I didn't have any fast attack units in my Army. However I didn't just want to go for a regular unit of Assault marines, I decided I wanted a unit of Vanguard veterans.
Rather then just using the regular assault Marine legs I used the legs from the Sanguinary guard, to give their armour that more of a "ancient and worked on by artificiers" look. Of course as these guys would be veterans they need their firedrake cloaks, which came from the Dark Elf Corsir sprue. I made sure to try and postion them as carefully as possible to fit the models stance, otherwise they would just look odd.

Finding a spare wolf sprue, I was able to give the Sgt twin lighting claws that were both plastic! It still baffles me as to why they only put one lighting claw on the Space Marine commander sprue but c'est la vie.

Now for the final touch I added flames to each of their shoulder pads using green stuff. I have previously attempted to paint fire on the shoulder pads but it never came out quite right. In fact it looked so bad it actually came out left.........

Get it? No? anyone? alright moving on.

I found that my using greenstuff it's actually fairly easy to sculpt a rough approximation of flames, and the texture of the greenstuff makes it a lot easier to paint the flames in as well. Now with my painting skills they'll never look perfect but it's still better then it was.

I'll be sure to post some pics of the finished unit soon