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

No cash but there is something else

With my recent cutting back on buying GW bits and pieces I've found myself going into the loft to see which half finished projects I can find to finish. And after seven years there are a lot of half finished projects.


One of the first I found was from my Chaos Space Marine army. Initially it had started life as a Iron warriors army but I found myself getting bored with that, especially after reading several Black Library novels that described great Chaos forces which were formed from Chaos Marines from multiple legions and chapters.


So to cut a long and boring story short, I got to a point where I want to add a unit of Chaos Raptors to my Army. Now I've found that I tend to prefer plastic as opposed to metal, as metals a pain what with the superglue and the difficulty in converting them so that meant the standard raptor models went straight out the window.


Not literally of course but even if they did it's okay they can fly..............


on no wait they actually can't........... right where was I?


So routing through my ever trusty bitz box I managed to find several bitz from the Space Marine assault sprue as well as several wings from the Chaos Space Marine possessed sprue. So a little bit of patience and plastic glue later we get...

Now I did make a leader from the squad initially but he didn't turn out half as well as I hoped. So I decided to use the Chaos Marine raptor lord instead and replaced his jump pack with a pair of the wings. I used the Chaos Space heads with "horns" as they fitted the "mutated" look of the squad.

This is a close up of one of the squad. As you can see they never got past the basic painting stage as something else came along and infected me with a bad case of " shiney new model syndrome" .

I went with bone coloured armour as I thought it set off the red wings very well, and it gave the raptors a very "organic" look, which fitted with the whole wings for jump pack theme.

The black and yellow stripes you can see on his shoulder pad with the white star is the over all "warband marking" I adopted for the whole of my csm army. As although it was nice to have a army with lots of different paint schemes, you really need to have something which links them all together.

When funds run low

I was looking at the latest round of advance orders to go up on the Games Workshop website and I came to the unpleasent conclusion that their prices have now reached a tipping point. I simply can not longer afford to keep buying as much as I used to of their products.

Now this means I can either just stop collecting full stop ( my Dad would be thrilled) or I can cut back and concentrate on other models outside of GW, as I find painting and modelling very relaxing and seeing as I don't have the money to keep a personal massage therapist on call I still need this relaxing outlet after a long day at work.

But where to turn?

I've already tried Privateer Press but I'm yet to find that " cool" factor to get me and keep me hooked. So I decided to have a look at the latest releases from Warlord Games. I do have a start of a Roman army knocking around in the loft which came from Warlords Roman range, which was intended to feature in a historical version of "tale of Four gamers" which unfortunatly went the way of a lot of good ideas. Straight into the bin.

I was tempted to go back to my Romans but I saw something else which caught my eye and appealed to my inner kid. Warlord have just released a set of plastic British infantry from WWII.

Now the first thing I noticed was the cost. It cost £20 for 25 figures, which works out as a very impressive 80 pence per figure. Especially when you compare it to the cost of one of the GW plastic kits which is £2.30 per figure!
Now the first thing I noticed was the sheer number of bitz you get on the sprues, a substantional increase from what get on the Roman sprues. The next thing I noticed was that you actually get bases in this set. Which delighted me no end as it was slightly annoying having to get bases together when building my Romans.

I decided to try building one lot of five soldiers first. Now the first thing I noticed was that the mould lines on the figures were not bad at all. However the next thing I noticed was that all of the pieces were quite small and fiddley which meant I uttered one or two swear words during construction.

However I quickly realised that they only seemed really small due to my years of experiences with GW kits and once I got the hang of the pieces the five soldiers went together very quickly.

Now as I was only building them for fun not for actual gaming I decided to make one officer, a bren gunner, another with a sten gun, another with a Tommy gun and finally two guys with regular rifles.

So they went together easily enough. Lets see how easy they are too paint.

And doors reopening

Sorry about the lack of posting folks. What with Christmas and the bad weather meaning it's been near impossible to get any undercoating done, I've been able to do very little modeling.

But have no fear, the regular schedule will now recommence.