And so it is June...

Summer is slowly getting to my part of the world, and with that comes more spare time. The band I play in has taken summer holliday allready, and in a few weeks the School Band I'm conducting will have a summer holliday until mid-August. This means more afternoons to spend at home, and when I get to be more home I might also get more time painting. 

This weekend I managed to get two painting sessions in to my schedule. I have a Venerable Chaplain Dreadnought that has been laying in pieces on my worktable for too long. The first session this weekend gave this a good facelift, and after a few more sessions it will be ready for assembly. I chose to go for the regular blue body instead of the black armour the chaplains usually are seen with. I am not sure if this will be the rule for my regular chaplains, but I felt it was a nice touch for the dreadnought. After all, dreads are very old and vise warriors, so by giving it a blue body I signal that it is a warrior first and foremost. I also managed to do a lot of the painting on my first assault marine with jump-pack. I believe he will be ready for final assembly after the next session. This is a marine with both legs planted firmly on the ground. I am still working to find good ideas to pose the other four that hardly touch the ground at all unless I make them look very wobbly (and I don't intend to do that). 

My Imperial Guard veterans are only missing the wash and extra detailing, except for one dude that will need to get his face re-painted after I accidentaly gave him a big stripe of black with a runaway brush. 

I really like the way these veterans have turned out, and I am quite sure Forgeworld will see another order for veterans (the batch I didn't get this time) in the future. 

 The Scout sentinel got the final touches this weekend too, but I see I need to go over some details on the lascannon as the black brush ran away again... 

 My Sisters Repentia are also almost ready. There are some minor details to paint, and I need to decide what is what on the one mini that looks to be badly sculpted. I don't think the Sisters will see much action, as I don't intend at this moment to buy a full battleforce. Still they will look nice in the glass cabinet of my workspace, and I might find a way to incorporate them in some Apocalypse or Imperial units in the future.

Status update May 25th

As usual things are taking way too long...
But here is an update on what is going on.

The Space Marines have got their new insignia, and some of the 1st Company are on their way into the glass cabinet in the near future. Just need to check them a final time for details. The insignia for my Marines are a black # on white background. For the troops of the 1st Company the background and company colors are separated with a thin black line. The remaining companies will not have this line.
The Marines are now called The Gatekeepers, and their home planets are located in the Cygnus Arm and can be seen as a smal cluster of bright stars just North of the Eye of Terror.
I will use som time working on their fluff, to get it to be as good as I want it Hopefully it will be almost as detailed as the Imperial Guard fluff I have written for my IG army.

For the Imperial Guard, I noticed that I had not finished painting some of the details on the Scout Sentinel, and I will do this as soon as I have the time.

The Veteran Squad is just missing the fine details and the wash. I am quite happy with the way they turned out. I will add some grenades and extra ammunition and things like that before I put them on the base-work box.

The Ratling snipers are also underway when it comes to painting. Skin color is applied, and more will follow shortly. They have proven to be a little hard to paint, as they are both smal and detailed and that is not the best combination for me. But still I am sure they will turn out very nice in the end, as they are great miniatures.

I bought some Elf heads (wood elf gladeguard?) with free hanging hair, and hopefully these heads will make for nice female Imperial Guard heads with just small modifications.

I also got hold of a few Sisters of Battle miniatures, and they are a nice change to paint. I have not decided if they will be part of a small Sisters fighting force, or if they just will be minis that sticks out a little in the glass cabinet where my 40 K minis (Marines and Guards) will be standing between games.

The plan for the future is to paint the minis on my table at the moment, so that I can get room to do the base work on these and some previously painted miniatures.

Then when these minis are done (some Imperial Guard models, many Space Marines, and a few Sissters of Battle) I will make one Fantasy and one 40.000 unit at the same time until I have solid armeies to field in tournaments.
The plan is to make a unit of Chaos Warriors as the next new set for Fantasy, and some Kommisars for my Imperial Guard army.

Sentinel is done! (almost)

I finished building the Scout Sentinel today, all that is missing now is some paint on the engine and the drivers cage, and the usual round of washes. Plan to do this tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight.

This was the old sentinel model, and that is partly why I chose to make it a scout sentinel. The model is a combination of plastic and metal, and I am not too fond of that.

As i understand the new sentinels are all plastic, and also seem to have more equipment to add and choose from. I plan to add some to the army at a later point, but for now my main goal is to build and paint what is in the shelves and there is a lot to choose from.

The veteran squad lead by Sergeant Bastion is comming along nicely. I had a little challenge painting the resin black, as the paint wouldn't stick right, but I got there eventually.

I find this a little strange, as the grey went on without any problems at all yesterday.

What is missing on the elites now is to do the leather, the skin, and the metal parts of weapons and insignia. The sniper's cape needs to be painted on the outside, and some of the models needs to have head or arms attached to their bodies.

Catachan command squad

The eastern part of the continent is not as industrialized as the western part. The eastern part is mostly farmland, forrests and some swamps.

The troopers based in this part of the continent need to rely on airsupport to move fas tfrom place to place. They are mostly different kinds of infantry, supported by sentinels and Valkyries or Vendettas. The big unit in the east is the 82nd Airborne Division (Nicknamed the Fighting Falcons).

Their first platoon is lead by this command squad:

Lieutenant Hill, with boltgun

Medic with lasgun with foldable stock

Standard bearer with lasgun

Vox operator with lasgun

Specialist with sniper rifle

Several troopers have grenades.

The Catachan troops have flak vests, and they sre painted catachan green

Their headgear are painted Necron Abyss (same blue as the legs of my Space Marines)

Here are some pics:

Cadian Command squad

The Cadians represent as said earlier the troops from the western industrialized zone of the continent. They will be joined by Ogryns and ratlings.

The troops will have access to Chimeras, and will be backed by Leman Russ tanks, Ordnance batteries, hellhound variants, sentinels and hopefully som big and heavy tanks.

The units are gathered under the 101st Infantry Division (nicknamed The Roaring Thunder). Their tactics is based on attacking in force and hitting their enemies hard and brutal.

Here are some pics of the command squad for the 1st Platoon. It consists of the following troops:

Commander: Lieutenant Katz (might be renamed at a later time), with Plasmapistol

Standard bearer with lasgun

Trooper with heavy flamer

Medic with laspistol

Vox operator with lasgun

Here are some pics:

Imperial Guard Cadian troopers

At the moment my Imperial Guard army hails from the planet Xerxes IV (might change this name later) a small planet located in the Mordant Zone between the more known planets Pavonis and San Leor.

In my army the Cadians reperesent troopers from the industrialaized western part of the continent, and this is how the standard troopers will look like...

The helmet, boots, armour and synthetic material on the weapon are Chaos Black

The pants are Adeptus battlegrey

The coats are Fortress grey

all metal is Chainmail

The waterbottles and grenades are Dark Angels Green

all leather is Beastial brown

First Easter update, mostly IG

Just before the Easter holliday set in, I got a package from Forgeworld with the replacement for my dreadnought assault drill (that I managed to break while cutting it clean) and my Imperial Guard veterans upgrade kit.

Naturally I wanted to make my Cadian veteran squad at once, and this meant I had to clear some room on the table. I had two plastic command squads almost finished, so I finished and washed them, and I also washed the five troopers that I made earlier.

I originally wanted my troopers to have a clear contrast between the torsos and legs, but since I suck at thinning and mixing paint and washes I decided to use a thin layer of Badab black on all grey and metal areas. The result came out much better than expected and they look like a gritty band of troopers that has seen some time in the field.

The brown parts were washed with Devlan mud and the green, gold and blue got their respective washes as well.

The pictures will be in my next post, I just took them and need to pick the best pics and crop them a little to get the right sizes.

I also started on a scout sentinel (the old type that is part plastic and part metal), and wanted to make something out of the base, so I hightened the base and made a hole in the middle to create a river using my MIG watereffect set. But since it is a battlefiled I wanted the river to be red with blood, however the result looks a lot more like a river of tomato soup... Still I think it will be ok when I have finsihed the base later on, and I have thought up a new way to make rivers bloody in the future...

The cadian veterans are in different states of ready. I had a little problem glueing resin to resin, but hopefully that is solved now.

4 veterans are armed with shotguns, two with lasrifles (one of these is the vox operator), two veterans have grenade launchers, and the last veteran is a sniper. They are lead by my version of Sergeant Bastonne, armed with a powerfist and a boltgun. I have tried really, really hard to find a "regular" hand with a powersword, but I have not been able to find this. So I had to use a powerfist instead, the most important thing is that it is a powerweapon after all. Also I could not find a left hand with a gun, no matter how hard I looked. So I ended up taking a spacemarine arm and cutting off the hand and attaching it to an Imperial Guard arm. It ended up a boltpistol instead of a laspistol, but I figure that will work fine as that also is the preferred weapon for commisars.