Kharadron update...

I have been working for a few more days on my Grundstok Gunhauler, and there are some progress.
There have been a few changes from my original plan along the way, but all to the better I think.

After the first layer of Stormhost Silver on the domes I was afraid my idea of using silver instead of gold would crash and burn, but after I applied a second coat it actually turned out quite well.

I had planned to make the hulls on all my ships  Eshin Gray, Stormhost Silver and Abaddon Black, but I replaced the Eshin Gray with The Fang (a light grey/blue color) and it was so much better.

Right now I am working at painting details and cleaning up the larger surfaces. Then I will add the washes I need and the drybrush, before I can glue the two pieces together.

I have been thinking long and hard as to how I would like to make the bases for this army. I believe I have landed on a solution to use the same technique as for my Deathwatch and Custodian armies in 40K. Astrogranite bases (like I have for all my Dwarfs/Duardin) but glazed with Guilliman Blue and then drybrushed Longbeard Gray. This leaves bases that could look a bit like clouds or magic, and both works well with the Kharadron army.

Deathwatch Watch Master - pictures

I have finally finished my Watch Master. He's gotten the same base as the Marine I sent to join the European Deathwatch, and this will be the base design for all my Deathwatch and Custodes bases.
The Watch Master is a senior officer in the Deathwatch, and this specific Watch Master has been given command over several Captains. He has not yet been given a name, but I am trying to think of something fittingly humble but noble for him.
The pictures are not of a 100% quality, as I don't have my lightbox, so I tried to set one up.

As one can see from the pictures, he is armed with a Guardian spear, this says something about his rank as this weapon is usually only seen on the warriors of the Adeptus Custodes. On his left arm he has a Clavis (a very special gadget that even the Mechanicus does not fully understand) that lets him unseal magnetic locks and that tells all servitors (both friend and foe) that he is a friend, so they stand down in his presence.

For once I managed not to break any flimsy parts, so he still have the servo scull attached to the backpack. 

The back of his cape has a fancy pattern. I am about 90% pleased with how it turned out, as I would have liked to get it to look more crisp, but the more I worked with it the worse it got.

This Watch Master will soon be joined by Captains and kill teams. I have one Dreadnought, two captians and two ten-man killteams primed, and I will start to paint them up shortly.

In the pipleine are also one Dreadnought, two captians, two ten-man killteams (one of them an all Space Wolves team)  and two five-man Terminator killteams standing waiting to be primed.

And yet there are more waiting to be assembled...

A little bit of variation is a good thing...

I have assembled yet another unit for my Deathwatch army. This time it's ten Primaris Intercessors, where one of them have been given the Deathwatch shotgun, and the remaining nine have the weapons the Intercessors normally wear to battle.
They have been given spare shoulder guards from the Deathwatch sets, so now they come from a number of different chapters.

I had originally thought of having a unit of Primaris Reivers in my army, to use as scouts and ambush specialists as I find it strange that the Deathwatch recruit regular scouts as they are inexperienced Marines in most chapters and not the Veteran troops that the Deathwatch is supposed to be. Some chapters have veteran scouts, like my Gatekeepers, but they are not very many. But the current rules don't allow Reivers in the Deathwatch, so I will wait for the new codex to come out (probably within a few months time) and see if they are added there. I have a sprue of Deathwatch shoulderguards that I don't have any plans for yet, so it should be no problem to wait.
Instead I will make one unit of Primaris Hellblasters, as they are mean looking. A ten man unit armed with plasma incinerators can do a lot of damage to big xenos scum. I plan to check the rules as to how many can be armed with the different types of incinerators, but I hope to have all three variants represented withing the 10 man squad. Hopefully I get around to building them this weekend.

I bought a second Start Collecting box as I wanted another Dreadnought. There is so much more value to the Start Collecting box that this made perfect sense. In the box I also got a second Captain Artemis, and there can only be one of him so I used my trusted clippers and clipped his head off (ouch!). I replaced it with a battle scarred one from the Primaris sprues, and armed him with a mace and stormshield .
Them I will make another captain a little later on and give him the combi weapon and backpack Artemis usually wears.

But it's not only the Deathwatch that see some progress these days... I have finally started to paint my first Kharadron Overlords. I started with an Aether-Khemist as this is a single figure, so I can use him to get the look that I want to give to all my Kharadron troops. So far I have painted his suit Eshin Gray, some of the heavier metal (like the tip of his boots and the equipment he is wearing over his sholulders) Warplock Bronze, and his gloves and  boots are Mournfang Brown. For the boots I am debating with myself if I want to keep them Mournfang Brown or paint them Dryad Bark as I did with my regular Dwarfs.

I have also started to paint my first sky ship. It is one of the smallest, the Grundstok Gunhauler. I have decided to go for black panels, and paint the top board as a silver stripe. Where the official pictures use some sort of gold on the globes, I plan to use the same silver as on the side of the ship.
I like to use gold details and I am not that happy with some of the gold paints in the GW range. The one I feel I get the best result with is Retributor Armour, and I can't have that both for the globes and the details. So I hope it will be a good look when it is done. It will be something that stands out in a crowd while it still is well within what can be considered "normal" and within the lore and fluff. I already have quite good idea as to why the Kharadrons of my Skyport use the silver instead of gold.

The ship was not primed too well, so I went over it with some of the primer I have in pots, and I also primed the crew with this primer. The plan is to start painting the crew this afternoon and use the same colors as I do on my Aether-Khemist. The crew is quite simple compared to him though.

While waiting for paint and primer to dry, I also started on the bases for my Deathwatch Watch Master and the Custodes Venerable Contemptor Dreadnought. I plan to make both these armies the same way when it comes to bases, and that is exactly like the base I made for my Deathwatch figure that I made for the GW Deathwatch army (as can be seen in an earlier post).

As always, pics will come in the future when everything on the models are done.

Building and priming

I've had a week of Easter Holiday now, and last Monday I was at Games Workshop in Oslo and collected my Forgebane boxed set. While in the Store I started to work on my first Amiger Warglaive (baby Knight), and on Monday afternoon and Tuesday I finished it at home and also built the second one.
Then I went to my Cabin where I don't have a workbench, but I built a lot of Lego instead.
Got home yesterday, and primed the Amigers as well as two Killteams for the Deathwatch and some Orks.
Before I went to the cabin I had primed all my built Custodes minitures, a bunch of Orks, and a box of House Esher gangers from Nectromunda. One thing I've learned from that experience is that the House Esher Gangers are really frail. The bases was quite stuck to the box I had them on when I primed them, and one ganger standing on one leg broke her leg clean off and another with the same pose got it badly bent. So I need to do some repair work before I start to paint them up sometime in the future.

After I got home from the cabin yesterday I sat down and started to work on the Space Wolves from the Stormclaw box that I talked about in my last post. Luckily they had loose shoulder guards, so it was easy to just replace the left one with the one for the Deathwatch.
After building the five Terminators in the box I just had to build my five other Terminators. They are from a box of Dark Angels that can make regular Terminators, a Command Squad or Terminator Knights (a special kind of Terminator only available for the Dark Angels).

I made up my five Terminators as a little bit of everything. After all, they are representing the Deathwatch and because of that they are basically allowed to be armed with anything they like. So I gave one a two-handed halberd that the command unit champion has, and I made him up like a Champion too. Then one got the powerfist with a plasma cannon that only the Dark Angels terminators can have. The remaining three were more traditionally armed. Both the Wolves and the Angels are armed both for close combat and ranged battles. They also have a healthy amount of heavy wepons.
When that was done I made the rest of the Stormclaw box, that is ten regular Space Wolves and a Wolf Lord. Some of them got weapons from the Deathwatch sprues, an Infernus heavy bolter, a shotgun, I replaced a regular Spacewolf shield with a big shield from the Deathwatch and I gave one Marine a two handed Thunder hammer.

I have decided that as many of my sergeants as possible will have the special helmet with a metal crest that comes on the Deathwatch extra sprue. I gave one to my Spacewolf sergeant too.

I have two killteams, a Dreadnought and a captain primed and ready for painting now, and I am almost done painting up my Watch Master. Then I have two five-man Terminator killteams a 10 man all Spacewolf killteam and their leader Krom Dragongaze, and a little Watcher in the dark (a small figure unique to the Dark Angels, so he can't join the Death Watch) ready for priming. And at the moment I am working on assembling my Primaris Intercessor unit.
In the not too distant future I will add a unit of Primaris Marines, probably Reivers, two five man boxes of Deathwatch killteams (will probably run them as one ten man team), a box of five Devastators, a box of five Assault Marines and a box of ten regular Marines.
This should give me quite a versatile force to bring to the tabletop, and who knows if I'll add more in the more distant future. There is a new codex for 8th edition coming out in a few months time, and I'll see what that gives me of options for troops and vehicles.