More Chaos Marines built

I have just finished a unit of Khorne Berserkers, and I am quite happy with the way they look.

It is a little weird that half of them have a standing pose and the other half a running pose (6 of each), but I am considering getting one more box so that I have one unit of each, but I will have to see how it fits with the amount of heads I need. As I mentioned in a previous post I decided to use heads from the Age of Sigmar Chaos range, and I ended up with heads from the Chaos Knights box and the Chaos Warriors box (about half of each). The heads fitted well and they give the Berserkers a unique look in the army.

I also decided the Berserkers should have a banner, so I took one of the two banners from the Chaos Warrior box and just cut off the hand and glued it together. The arm is a tiny bit loner because of it, but not so much that someone will notice it when you see the unit together. If I end up with another unit as well, that unit will not get a banner, as it is probably enough to have one banner for all the Berserkers. 

The Berserkers are armed with chainswirds or chain axes and poltpistols. The Stanfdard bearer only have a bolt pistol. I am still considering adding some seremonial swords, but I might use them on various command models in my army instead. as there are not enough to go around to all of the Berserkers.

The next unit out now will be my second Chaos Space Marine box with 10 Marines. That is also an old box, so they come on 25 mm bases, but I have just enough 32 mm bases in my spares for this unit. And I have a lot more bases waiting on my at Games Workshop, and I plan to go there early next week and pick them up.

Space Marines progress

Let us start with something else. I have primed all the remaining Sylvaneth I own, and now remains the huge task of painting everything up and basing it. I might need to prime the base on my Blood Bowl Treelord, but I have not built it yet, and I have to see how it looks when I do if I need to paint it or not.  

My plan is to build a pile of rocks that the Blood Bowl Treelord can stand on to get some height, and depending on how this will look when glued together I am debating to either leave the rocks looking like natural rocks or to paint them and try to make them look like rocks to fit in with any plastic moulded rocks that should be on other bases. But because it will not be any sculpted rocks on this base I really don't think it matters, and it would save time and work to leave them natural. From the rockpile there will be a little stream as I have some water effects I would love to try out, and I also plan to use some spare pieces from the Sylvaneth sprues as brush to give the base a little more life.

Then let us get to the progress of the Space Marines. 

I have finished assembly of the Dark Vengeance Boxed set and both the Space Marines and the Chaos Space Marines are ready for priming. Most of the figures needed new bases ,so I had to cut off the handle that goes in to the slots on the original slotted bases as the new bases didn't have slots. Only unit that went straight on existing bases was the Chaos Cultists as they are still on the same size (25mm).
For the bikes I actually drilled holes in the new bases and stuck the pegs in them as the bikes was supposed to be slightly tilted (at least one of them) and that was easiest to achieve by using the pegs provided. Everything is placed in cardboard trays and are ready for priming.

I have also assembled a box of the current Chaos Space Marines, and armed them according to the rules in the codex. A leader (Sergeant?) with boltpistol and chain sword, a standard bearer with a very cool standard with the skeleton head of an Imperial Guard soldier (helmet still on, that's how I know) stuck to it, two heavy weapon dudes (one with a plasma weapon and one with a flamer), and 6 regular Chaos Marines with boltguns. I was a little unsure about how to arm them, as there were enough chainswords to go around, but from what I understood in the rules the regular Chaos Marines can'tt use a boltpistol and chainsword, but they can replasce the bolt pistol with a chainsword. The marines that can use boltpistols and chainswords are the Khorne Berserkers.

And Speaking of Khorne Berserkers, I have a box of them as well. They come 12 in a box it seems.
I do not like the heads that come with them as they have very wide "horns" made of the same material as the helmets apparently. So I have decided to have some fun and do headswaps. Originally I thought about just using spare heads from the regular Chaos Space Marines but I figured that would make them hard to separate, at least if I find out later down the road that I can actually have boltpistols and chainswords on the normal Chaos Space Marine.
So what I ended up with was going to my other Chaos faction, the one in AoS that is. I got a box of Chaos Warriors, and I plan to use horned heads from that box to build my Berserkers. The set has something like 24 heads for 16 warriors. This means some of my Warriors will be headless, but not for long as I plan to substitute the missing heads for the Chaos Warriors with spares from the Chaos Knight sprues.

So I guess I will build the Chaos Warrior box when I have finished my Berserkers. I have so sickly many Chaos Warriors that is partially built/painted (at least 20 in a block, could be 30 or more, and there are 3 different blocks). So maybe this will give me an excuse to finish some of them as well. I don't remember if they are missing heads, but I know they are missing arms as I didn't want them to get int he way of painting the bodies. I have sealed plastic bags for each unit, and the arms (and maybe heads if they are there) need to be painted. I think the bodies are about done, but since I painted them Games Workshop has come out with Contrast paints so maybe I will use some of them to brighten them up a bit. I'll have to see how toned down the colored metal is after all these years. I already know that the red ones (followers of Khorne) are almost pink because that was the color of the red wash I used. Also I have purple tinted armor and green tainted armor for (Slaanesh and Nurgle). The Slaanesh warriors I planned to use alongside the old metal Sigvald The Magnificent figure and I plan to paint him up in the same way. I think he looks good and that the new plastic miniature looks a bit "much", wo I will not upgrade him to the new model.
I have not decided what kind of leaders there will be for the other two factions yet.

Of course I also have the Slaves of Darkness Chaos Warriors, and they will be the traditional black armored warriors they are in the pics from Games Workshop. I have a paint scheme I liked a lot when I worked on them last (way back in the days) and I intend to use that for most of my warriors.

Space marines

I felt it was time get rid of a big box, so I decided to assemble some Space Marines.
I've had the Dark Vengeance boxed set with Dark Angels and Chaos Space Marines laying around for ages. From what I have been able to find out my box was released back in 2014, and I guess I must have gotten it about then as boxes like these usually sell out quite fast. Seems like the base sizes for some of the units have changed since then (from 25mm to 32mm bases) so I will have to fix that.
For some reason they are on slotted bases and not just bases with holes to stick their legs in, so I will have to do like I did with my Night Goblins and cut the "taps" off them and glue them on bases that aren't slotted. Luckily some of the models like the Terminators and bikes for the Dark Angels and the Chaos Cultists and the Chaos Hellbrute can use their original bases.

It seems like the Chaos Space Marines are followers of Khorne originally, but I figure if I just paint them up in the same scheme as the rest nobody will need to know. They will just look a bit blood-thirsty. I don't think I can explain that my Chaos army has a third faction, it was hard enough comming up wtih a story explaining why I have two so different types as the regular Chaos Marines and the Nurgle stuff so I don't want to even try to explain why some are red and worship Khorne. So I will paint them the same dark green as the rest of my regular Chaos Marines and just say they are blessed a little bit more by the Chaos Gods. Or maybe it is the other way that the regular Chaos Space Marines have not been blessed by the Chaos Gods (at least not yet). But no matter I will find good explanations why it is so as I would like to use all the models I have. 

One thing that I really like about the Dark Angels in this box is that they have printed shoulderpads both with the Dark Angels symbol and the unit designation. There are two small problems though. The first is that the shoulderpds are molded on to the minis as they are snap/fit and monopose. The second probleem is that I don't have a Dark Angels army, so I will either have to cut it awway, explain why there are regular Dark Angels in a Ultramarines successor chapter, or run them as Dark Angels. The Dark Angels I have in my army todayhave given up their colors to have their armor painted like the Gatekeepers. This is in agreement with the current leaders of the Dark Angels and is a rather complicated agreement that I will try to explain in the back story and it has to do with The Fallen and where these Marines were at the time when those events took place. But even though they might have a shield or a weapon with Dark Angels symbols on them, they look like Gatekeepers in most matters. This will not work with the Dark Angels in this box though. It would be a shame to cut away the symbols as they are excellent. I will not think too much about that at the moment as I am sure it will take some time before I get around to painting them and things might look different by then. I guess they could be a separate Dark Angels army just fighting alongside the Gatekeepers on the same battlefield or something like that. Well see when we get there.

I have built my Aspiring Champion for the Chaos Marines today, he was the only model in the set that was not snap/fit, and I believe he was a special character added to the box to give it more value and give the box something exclusive. I know they did the same for the 2012 version of the box, when they added an Interrogator Chaplain. I remember getting him off Ebay as it was awesome. Now you can get them in the regular range though, but back then you couldn't. Next up will be to build either the Chaos Cultists or the Dark Angels Terminators or Bikers as they will go on the bases that are in the box. The main reason for this is that when my wife has to go to the office we get up a bit earlier than when she can work from home, and then I have some time from I have walked the dogs to when I have to log on to to my work, and I have found working with miniatures in that time is a good way of getting stuff done. 

And the Gloomspite Gitz army keeps growing...

I have managed to work some more on my Goblins, but not as much as I would have liked as I have been distracted with some other not miniature related stuff like watching my favorite female football team (or soccer team depending on where you are from) loose another game (but we'll beat the next team for sure!) and watching Formula racing on the TV.

I have re-based my Goblins that were on grass turf and they have now moved from their square bases to new round ones. So now I have a complete unit of forty Night Goblins armed with Spears and shields. Also I have fixed up seventeen Night Goblins that was armless and placed them on new round bases. I had planned to glue their arms on this weekend but I will do that one of the days next week. They will be armed as Stabbas with swords, clubs and different one-handed weapons. I had three extra Night Goblins from the bag I brought with me back from storage that will go with these seventeen to make a unit of twenty. One of them already has a stick with a spike through it, and the other two is a spare icon bearer and a spare leader. Then I just need to bring another box home to make this grow in to a unit of forty.

I have also built the last of my Goblin Regiment. I ended up with sixteen instead of seventeen as I managed to loose one torso. I talked to the boys at GW in Oslo and they told me that I could use the unit with less troops and just pay for a full unit. So I will do that for this unit. For my Wolf Riders I bouht a box with three wolves originally for Warhammer underworlds. The wolves look a little different, but I already have two different wolves in the unit so that will probably be ok. I will have one too many, but then I can use one of them as an extra Boss, and the one armed with a spear can become a standard bearer if I just change the angle of his spear and put some sort of banner on it. Either I find a banner in one of my bitz boxes  or I'll have to make one with greenstuff.