Flakpanzer IV Wirbelwind - Tamiya 1:35

Here is another of my 1:35 dioramas.
I wanted this to look like a scene that could be anywhere in Europe during the last years of World War Two. The Germans changed their color sceme on all wehicles in the winter of 1943 from grey to dark yellow, so this scene would typically be from somewhere between the summer of 1943 and the spring of 1945.
Just like the desert diorama in the last post the base is a piece of wooden shelf with a styrofoam plate glued on top. As I wanted to make a small hill, I glued more styrofoam on a small section of the base and cut it in to the shape I wanted.
Then all the styrofoam was covered with alabaster plaster to make the base. While the plaster still was wet I placed the model on it in a few places to make some tracks from the belts.
I then based the plaster with a sand colored hobby spray-paint, before it was detailed with Tamya acrylic paints (the same type used on the model).
I glued on some small stones before I started to glue on static grass. This was actually my first time using this grass, and it was after watching the end result on this diorama I decided that the best grass was a mixture of the two types. I wanted to make a small stream and some puddles on this base, and the water is made from a 2 component water-system from Red Star.
The yellow bush visible behid the model is made of dried moss.

The model itself is a German Flakpanzer IV Wirbelwind. It was built on the traditional German tank chassis of the Panzerkampfwagen but insted of a tank turret it got an open turret with a flak vierling (flak gun with 4 barrels).
This model is also an out-of-the-box Tamiya model. It was built several years ago and was just standing on the shelf collecting dust before I made this diorama to show it off a little.

US M60 A1 - Tamiya 1:35 model

Before I got hooked on Warhammer miniatures I was building lots of scale models. I found my perfect scale to be 1:35. After a while I wanted to do more than just build and paint the models, so I started making dioramas.
We all have to start somewhere, and this is my first diorama. It is rather simple, but it still pictures the scene I wanted to show - a US Tank in the desert in Kuwait during the first Gulf war.
A pice of 20mm styrofoam was glued to a wooden base. The base is a wooden shelf that I have cut to the right size. Then the styrofoam was covered with alabaster plaster. When the plaster was dry I glued on fine aquarium sand, and when that was dry the entire plate was sprayed with a clear hairspray.
This made the glued sand buckle, but the base held, and the buckling only adds a little to the realism.
This diorama was a great learning experience, and it gave me lots of input on what to do and what to avoid when it comes to making more advanced dioramas in the future.
This was also my first time painting camouflage on figures, and I think the desert camo came out quite ok. I have done it a few times since, and I must say that of all the camouflage patterns in the different armed forces of the world, the US desert camo is my favorite to paint.

The tank is an out-of-the-box Tamiya US M60 A1 with reactive armour, and this was the main battle tank for the US Marines in the first Gulf War.

new sets and a little update

I just added three more sets to the shelf.
Space Marine Bike, Space Marine Dreadnought and Space Marine Venerable Dreadnought.
The plan is that the venerable dreadnought will be assigned to the veteran company, and the regular dreadnought will be a part of one of the battle companies.
I still haven't decided on what battle company to build first. The most sensible thing would be to build veterans (1st company) and then 2nd company and so on. But since everyone seem to build the 2nd company I would prefer to do something else.
But for now I only have one devastator, and he has not gotten his company colors yet. I guess I'll just end up building a lot of Marines and select their companies later.

Haven't been able to finish any models as I've been away for almost a week, but work continues on the latest batch of scouts.

New update

My wife had some former classmates from school visiting her yesterday, and this gave me an opportunity to spend some hours down in my basement workshop.
By luck I got some new Spacemarine scouts in the mail just a few hours earlier, so I spent a few hours in great exitement working on those as well as giving another layer of paint to my other Spacemarines.
I also got to glue the upper torso and arms together on my first devastator, but now it seems that he will have a strange twist in his hip because of the big laser cannon he is holding. But I will look into this the next time I get to work (hopefully this weekend), and see if I can make it look a little more natural before I glue the legs on to the body. Also I will have to try and find a solution for this with the next batch of devastators that I build.

The new scouts were real cool, 8 of them are carrying shotguns, 2 are armed with some heavy weapon not yet identified, 2 are armed with bolters and the last one is a sergeant with a bolter and a chainsword.

One of the minis were already painted, and it was really expertly done, however the paint was rather old and had started to chip in some places. For this reason only I will have to re-paint him, but I will wait until the others are painted to see if I can duplicate some of the techniques used. I had not expected to keep the minis in the same colorscheme anyway, 'cause I have to make them fit in to my 2. Ultras, but it sure was nice.

Status update

Just a quick little note with an update on the miniature front...
The dwarf miners are now almost ready, I just have to paint a few sticks of dynamite, put some dwarf bronze on 2 pick axes and go over the dwaf bodies to fix some minor details after I glued on some extra belt pouches and backpacks.

The Space Marines are almost done too, just have to finish the heads on the scouts and finish the head and glue together the devastator.

On the shelf side, I just bought a boxed set containing four chapter commanders (metal minis)when visiting my local GW store. I also came home with a commander boxed set (resn mini). I look forward to starting on the chapter commanders some time in the future, but before I do that I thought I'll build a few "regular" Space Marines so that the commanders will have something to command...
Also I'm looking forward to receiving a unit of scouts with shotguns that i bought on Ebay.

I just saw a picture of an upcomming scout sergeant to be released later this year (soon I hope...) and that is one mini I know I will get for my collection. Until it arrives i will have to keep making regular troops sergeants by making them look a little older and wiser than the regular forces.

I'm also working on some of the minis from Ebay, to get them painted and off the workbench. My elf archers are coming along nice, but I don't think they will be part of an elf army. At least not in a long while... The empire crossbow-men are almost ready for detailing, I just have to figure out what color I should use on their headgear (the ones not wearing helmets). Also I have to do a few more layers of white, to paint over the red gore on those places where I applied this a bit "wide"...
The oldfashioned chaos warriors have not been started yet, but I look forward to starting on them some time in the near future.

Space Marine Chapter

As promised, here is a little more about my Space Marine plan.
Ever since I was a little boy I've had "a thing" for the United States Marine Corps, and I guess my Space Marine plan has escaped my warped mind because of this.

When I decided to take the step into Warhammer 40.000, I knew I wanted to build a Space Marine army. Since my main army in the Warhammer Fantasy will be a mortal chaos army (although I probably will end up with a dwarf army and perhaps a Bretonnian army as well) I was quite clear that my Warhammer 40.000 Space Marines should be serving the "good cause" and not be a chaos unit.

I first bought a unit of 5 scouts with sniper rifles, and then I found 3 more scouts on Ebay. These will become a unit of 8 scouts, 6 with sniper rifles and 2 with Missile Launchers. The unit will be led by a Sgt. with a sniper rifle.
I have also bought me a Space marine devastator with Laser cannon, and he is currently under construction along with the scouts. This regular Space Marine will be a part of one of the regular companies to follow (have a few boxes on the shelves, and more to follow this weekend).

I realy like the look of the Ultramarines, but reading about them in the codex book, I found a few things I disliked too much to make my army straight into an Ultramarine unit. One of the things I disliked was the fact that the scouts was just a bunch of recruits lead by some experienced officer. I have seen Clint Eatwood in "Heartbreak Ridge" quite often, so I want scouts that can pack a punch and give a good fight to their enemies. To change this setting to my liking, I decided I had to make my own chapter of Space Marines.

Since I liked the Ultramarines so much, I designed a story for my new Utramarine chapter to allow me to use the Ultramarine colors and markings. Only change I've done is to paint the lower legs and feet in midnight blue insted of the traditional ultramarine blue. This change is also reflected in the scouts uniform.
It will also be reflected somehow on the Dreadnoughts and the different types of vehicles that the chapter will have at their disposal.
The chapter will be built just as a regular Ultramarines chapter, with the same equipment and will have the same units and company colors. The story behind this is that the Ultramarines outgrew their regular chapter size, and their commander gave some veterans the assignment of making up a 2nd Ultramarines company to serve in another part of the galaxy.
The veterans found a new home world, and recruited new marines, some from other standing units and some civillians from the new home world. As a result of this, the 1st company is a little thin, and they have not yet filled up all 10 companies required for a full Chapter. This will give me a long term plan of building my army unit by unit until a full Chapter. This also opens for the possibility of adding marines from other units, and give them the 2nd Ultramarines paintjob on top of an existing one.

The Chapter is caled the 2nd Ultramarines, and I plan to incorporate the number 2 into their uniform. How I'll make this is not yet clear, but I'll do some experimenting and decide along the way. Fo now the different colored legs will have to do.

What's going on at the moment

I am at the brink of completing a batch of Dwarf Miners. This is by far the most detailed set I have on the shelf. I have chosen to down-scale the details a fraction from the possibilities, but still I'm making them pretty detailed.
However their finish will have to wait until payday, as I destroyed two fine detail brushes this last few weeks. Until I can replace them, the fine details will have to wait.
So I've started on no less than one boxed set of Space Marine Scouts, two blister packs of space Marine Scouts (total of 8 figures), and one blister of a regular Space Marine.
The Space Marines has given me some new challenges, as to how I want their armour to look.
I like the Ultramarines a lot, but I don't like some of the key elements in their codex.
So I have decided to make my own chapter, based on the Ultramarines, I'm thinking they had too many veterans, so some of them were sent on a mission to found a new Chapter.
More on this in another post later on...

Old fashioned knight

I bought this knight as part of a chaos lot on Ebay. The lot had many of the old chaos warriors, this knight and 3 more horses. The other chaos warriros are built, but some of them are not painted. Some had a little damage from the shipping, so I fixed them up. I'm going to give them all a new paintjob, but I will see if I can make them like some of them look now cause despite the basic paintjob they have some nice details.

I'm not sure what this knight really is, but judging from another set I have on the shelf, it might be a second or third edition Lord of Khorne or perhaps a chaos knight. I decided to paint it as I would a regular knight though, as I haven't decided on what to do with the old chaos army. Still I am pretty pleased with this knight, and it can be used both as a good guy and a bad guy.


The Horse is painted Chaos Black.
The armour on the horse and knight are painted Bolt Gun metal.
The lance is painted Chain mail
The golden details are painted Shining Gold.
The cape on the knights back is painted Midnight Blue.
The middle of the shield is Terracotta
The tackle on the back of the helmet is painted Red Gore, as I would like it to be red but not so red as it clashed with the other colors of the miniature.
Under the raised foot of the horse I painted the grass Goblin Green to make it as close to the static grass on the base as possible.
This was a fun and rather easy model to paint, and it came out looking almost as I had thought it would do. In the future I will try to do more out of the shields, at least paint them in two colors or perhaps putting a sort of symbol on them.

First batch of Black Orcs

The first batch of Black Orcs are ready.
They look really mean and ready to go to war against anyone getting in their way.
The orcs are a rather ragged bunch, and you can see this by the patching done to their armour, but still they pack some mean weapons.
I don't imagine the Orcs having too much gold to use on their armour and banners, so I went for Dwarf Bronze. Also instead of painting the sharp weapons Chainmail, I decided to paint them Boltgun Metal to make them look a little blunter.

I have to say that I'm not too happy with these miniatures, as they all look a little hunchbacked. The Orc carrying the banner was so front heavy I had to glue some lead on to the back of the base as a counterweight.
I'm not ready to claim that this hunchbacked look is all because of the way the miniatures are designed, though I think it might be a combination of design and my skills at making miniatures.
I'll do another lot of Black Orcs some time in the future as I have one more box on the shelf, and I guess I'll wait until they are done to decide.

There was a lot of colors used to get these Orcs looking like they do...

The standard armor plates was done Chaos Black, just like my chaos warriors.
The chainmail and weapons were done in Boltgun Metal, as I think they should look a little less bright than the chaos warriors.
The Orc skin was done with dark angels green, as I felt black orcs should have darker skin than goblins and regular orcs.
The teeth, horns and skulls were painted Bleached Bone.
The tongues are Scab Red, and the monsters head on the standard has the same color. The teeth on the monsters head was painted Skull White, as I figured the orcs would have polished them to make them shiny for their standard.
The details on the armor and weapons, as well as the drumstick and the giant scull on the standard are painted in Dwarf Bronze.
For the leather I used Scorched Brown, and the details on the dagger sheads are Commando Khaki.