Super Heavy mayhem...

I have finished building the first Stompa -  at least as much as I can assemble before priming. There are a few hatches and armor-panels that needs to be glued on after priming and some initial painting. Hopefully there will be nice weather for priming this weekend, so that I can get it done and start the paintjob.

I have been to my storage room and brought home two cardboard boxes full of models.
For the Orks I have brought home sets of all sizes. Tuesday I assembled a Painboy (no converting on him), and I also have a Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun that I plan to build this weekend. There are two resin figures (don't remember what figures right now) that I will assemble in the near future.
Among the sets I have brought home are also two boxes of Burnas/Lootas, and right now I'm leaning towards assembling one box of each as I like both units and plan to have them both represented in my army. With these units there are several possibilities of converting and making the Orks look special, so I will take a little time building them and use parts from other sets I will also see if I have to paint them in stages or if I can assemble them fully and then prime and paint.
I will also built the five Nobs from the Stormclaw set, and the three Killa Kans that came in the same box. I have brought home one more box of Killa Kans, so I have six Kans that need to be assembled from scratch. I also have tree Kans that are partially painted and assembled from earlier that will be worked on along with these.
The Orks will also get some more heavy support, as the second Stompa is home. This one I plan to build with a heavy flamer instead of the sword, so I am looking into ways of building that. One idea is to use the flamer of an Imperial Knight (brought one of those home as well), but I have to see what is possible.  I would like to add a belly-gun on this Stompa, and I have a Baneblade cannon barrel for this purpose, I just need to think of a way to glue it to the Stompa so it doesn't fall off. This should be possible, as I can do almost what I want inside of it as long as I manage to glue it together in the end. To make it stand out a bit more from the first one, I also hope to include parts that will be left over from my first Gorkanaut/Morkanaut (need to decide what version to build first) and rokkitz and bombz from a flyer set that I plan to build as a Dakka jet. This will help to modify the shoota on the other arm of the Stompa so that too looks different from the first one.

Right now I am assembling a Super Heavy tank for my Imperial Guard (Astra Militarum) army. It came in a huge boxed set (and I do mean HUGE) called "Hammer of Cadia". This box is one of the largest I have seen from Games Workshop in size, and is about the same size as the Relicos Militarum scenery box (that I also have and look forward to building in the future).
The box includes one Super Heavy tank that can be assembled either as a Baneblade or a Hellhammer (I'm building the Hellhammer version). There are also three Leman Russ Battletanks and three Hellhounds in the box.

Right now I am trying to decide if I should have flamers or bolters in the side sponsons og the Hellhound. I am leaning towards flamers as I've read somewhere on a Wiki that the ideal configuration for city fighting is flamers, but I do like to use the bolters because of their look. 

I have two more boxes of Super Heavy Tanks, and one is going to be my second Baneblade, and the other will be a Shadowsword with it's fearsome Volcano cannon (range 120").
If I can motivate myself, I plan to build all three Super Heavy tanks in the near future.
I also have a "Leman Russ Tech-command" box that I brought home. This is a special box that came out at about the same time as the "Hammer of Cadia", containing a Leman Russ Battletank, a "command upgrade sprue" and a Tech priest Enginseer. I should probably build this quite soon, as all the new tanks will need someone to tend to their Machine Spirits.

All the Super Heavy tanks comes with one spare officer on foot, so for the Super Heavies I assemble now that means three officers. They wear the longcoat of the Cadians, and I plan to make one of them into a female officer. Not sure if I will use a head from the Daemonettes as I did with my other two female soldiers or if I should go for a Necrumunda House Escher head (if they are compatible).

Ork update

This weekend I have continued to work on my Stompa.
It took some time getting the glue to set on some of the larger parts, so I couldn't do as much as I had wanted, but I think I will get the rest done this afternoon if nothing very important comes up at short notice.
What remains is gluing on two poles to the shoulders and back of the Stompa, the big scull on the belly, and a lot of metal struts around the bottom part.
There will be five pieces that will not be glued on until after I have primed and done a little bit of detail painting.
Two armor panels in the back are partly covering up a driveshaft of some sort, and I would like to paint the pipes and the other parts that will be partly visible behind the panels before I glue them on.
Also there are three armored viewports on the belly of the Stompa where there are Grot heads visible behind them. I will paint those heads green after the entire Stompa is primed, and then glue the hatches on. The five parts will be primed with Imperial Primer, and then painted up along with the rest of the Stompa. When everything is painted up I will glue on the Grots that came with the Stompa on good locations where they can add to the narrative of the model.

I used some liquid greenstuff on the Stompa on Saturday to cover the cracks between the panels that were not supposed to be there, and I think that helped the overall look of the model. When it is primed it will hardly be visible that something has been done to it, and if something should be visible then it can be explained with sloppy or hasty work from the Orks and Grots...

While the Stompa is being worked on and dealt with, I have also started on some other Orks for the army. When I went through my inventory to get the Stompa, I found a boxed set called Sanctus Reach - Stormclaw. In contains the Ork boss Grukk Faceripper (I had built him already), five Nobs, a Runtherder with ten Grots and three Killa Kans
Facing them in combat is several Space Marines from the Space Wolves chapter. After inspecting the Space Wolf Marines, I have decided that it will be too much work to tun them in to Gatekeepers, so I will give them away or trade them to someone who collects this chapter, and concentrate on keeping my Space Marine army to consist of Ultramarines and Dark Angels blended quite seamlessly together.
I have also added some Horus Heresy 30K Space Marines in to my army, as this works well with the fluff saying that the Gatekeepers have been in the outer reaches of the galaxy for a long time, so they naturally have lots of older wargear that they take care of and still use. I will have a few units dressed in Mark IV power armor, and some old style terminators, along with the Marines that came in the Horus Heresy Betrayal at Calth boxed set (that I have two of ). The Idea with the Betrayal at Calth boxes is to paint one box up as Gatekeepers and the other as my Chaos Space Maines - Knights of Oblivion.

But for now I will paint Orks, and along with the Stromclaw box and the Stompa, I will try to paint up some of the Ork models that I have started to work on but not finished. That is a unit of three Killa Kans, a Mek gun (don't remember what version I made it as) with five Grot crew, and some of the old War Trukks that will serve as Warbuggies or small trucks in the army. Three of them are mobile rocket launcers for my Grot rokkits, and I will try and see if I can replace the Ork drivers with Grots to better serve my loose idea for Armies on Parade 2018.

Something huge is comming...

This afternoon I started on my biggest build in Warhammer 40K so far (not counting scenery).

A long time ago, while Apoclypse was still something people played, I bought several Ork Stompas(yes I did write several, I think I have 3), and I've finally brought one home from my storage to build and paint. I also bought several Super Heavy tanks for my Imperial Guard army to make sure the Orks had someone to fight, and just one has been built and painted so far. But the Super heavies are a future project, now back to the Stompa...

So far I have built the body, feet and head, and some poles and chimneys that will be attached when the arms are built and fitted to the torso.

I can truly say that this is one of the worst building instructions I have ever seen, and that says a lot when it comes to Games Workshop. They have never been that great making instructions (weird really as they are so good at making miniatures of all sizes), but in all fairness the instructions have become a lot better in the later years. With the Stompa you only get one drawing of what to attach, and some of the parts you only see from behind so you have to look through the sprues and choose the parts that looks right. All the parts have numbers on the sprues, but no numbers are included in the instructions.

I plan to build this Stompa following the instructions all the way. When I start the second one, I will start to do some modifications so that not two Stompas look alike. 

This Stompa have horns on the head, and because of that I have decided it needs to have the name of a bull. Since the Ork army is named after movie characters or actors, I felt it was right that the vehicles and walkers got the same attention. So this Stompa will be named Ferdi-naan after Ferdinand the bull. Now Ferdinand was a very kind and peaceful bull that just wanted to sit under a tree and smell the flowers, but that is part of the pun. Originally I was thinking of calling it Raging Grox after the boxing movie Raging Bull with Robert De Niro, but I will leave that for a Gorkanaut (or Morkanaut) at a later time using the horns from the second Stompa. Not sure what I will do with that head yet, but if I have the pieces I might add some rockets or something. 

I am adding a scull on the belly of the Stompa, as this is a possibility, and it's going to be painted white and rusty. Because of this, the Stompa Ferdi-naan has gotten a nickname, and that is of course Da Pun-isha after The Punisher, and it will be painted mostly in black with some metal and rust plates and maybe one or two different colored plates here and there to make it more orky.

What's going on

After Armies on Parade was over this weekend, I wanted to do something completely different for a little while. So I sat down and assembled 5 Tartaros Terminators (these can be used both in 30K and 40K games), 5 Ork Nobz and 3 Kurnoth Hunters. The Nobz actually came on 20 or 25 mm bases, and I've been told a long time ago that Nobz needs at least 32 mm, so I put them on that. My regular Boyz might get 25 mm bases, but the Nobz are a bit more powerful and needs to stand out a little more so they need bigger bases. I will come back to these units in more detail when I have primed and painted them up in the future.

I think I have presented this unit, or at least the females earlier in the blog before they were primed. This is my first attempt at making female guard soldiers, and based on this I am quite sure I will make a few more in the future. I have just replaced two heads with the most human looking heads from my Daemonettes of Slaanesh boxes and I will stick to that making more in the future. I will not have very many females, but I still think I need more than just two. This unit has a female sergeant (the one with purple hair) and a trooper with blonde hair. I have not done anything with the bodies, as the armor is quite bulky and comes as "one model fits all" from the producer. I have wanted some female guard models ever since I read the "Valor"-series written by Tanya Huff where the hero is a female Marine sergeant called Torin Kerr.

When I was looking for basing material for my AoP board I stumbled across a little box with miniatures. These are my only unit of veterans so far, but I will add more in the future. This is my way of giving Imperial Guard troopers some special weapons, as veterans can use almost everything as they pick up things on the battlefields.
Back in the days there was a character named Luc Bastonne. He came from a "fine" family on Cadia and could have been an officer if he wanted. Instead he joined as a private and has been promoted to a sergeant. He remember every trooper that has died under his command and have their named tattooed on his body. Ever since I read about him in the rules I have wanted him for my army. And even though he is no longer an official character, I will have him in my army. I changed his name and home planet to fit my army, so he is now Sergeant Bastion, and his squad is known as Bastions Bastards.

The final figure I have taken a picture of is a Sister of Battle figure that was released as a special figure. For some reason I can not get her to stay glued to the base. As you can see from the glue puddle on the base I have tried several times and with both thin and thick superglue. Recon I'll take her with me to the Games Workshop store and ask them to give it a try for me. Maybe they have a trick. Worst case I will have to do some drilling and pin her to the pile in front and greenstuff her other foot to the ground.

After this I also managed to finish another figure that has been around for a while. That is not a Games Workshop miniature (don't have many that aren't) but it is a female Commissar. She is also made of resin, but she was quite easy to glue together with thin superglue. I plan to paint her up and put her in my Imprial Guard army, but I will leave her out of the game if I go to play at Games Workshop. I plan to prime her along in the first batch of figures to be primed, and paint her up soon after that is done. I know most of the colors I want to use to paint her.

Armies on Parade, finished board (picture heavy)

This weekend was Parade day, and I got everything ready for the event just in time (as usual).
I was washing and basing a lot of Dwarfs Friday afternoon and in to the night.

I see that I have not taken a good picture of the lower table before I put the top on, but hopefully the pictures that are taken under the board shows what needs to be seen.

First up is two pics of the entire table, and then we'll get to closeups of the units.

At the front of the table there was a separate little cave where my White Dwarf subscription Vampire hunter model was located. This model has been laying around my workspace for a long time, but I'm really glad I pulled myself together and finished it, as I think it is a great little model. The next Subscription model to be worked on is the White Dwarf World War 1-style pilot.

Then we have come to the pictures from the mine on the lower level.  The first picture is taken from the front. The Grudge Ponies are going up the hill with full wagons. For this event they were loaded with chocolate that looks like rocks. In the front of the picture the unit with 15 Miners working in the mine can be seen from behind. Then in the middle the Ironbreakers are marching to stop the Goblins in the back. To the far right you can barely spot the old Prospector working on a potential new place to make a mineshaft.

And here are the same scenes seen from the back of the board. I am quite pleased with how the Night Goblins turned out, and look forward to painting up a whole lot of them for my greenskin army in the future.

This picture doesn't really show much of the figures, but I think it shows some of the terrain in a nice way. The small knolls were made with expanding foam (byggskum as we call it in Norway). It was just sprayed in a big lump on a piece of plastic, and when it was all dried up then I carved out the pieces I wanted to use. Next time I work on a board I might use this instead of styrofoam as it looks much more natural. This was proven by the winning entry in Oslo. She had used this material to build up hills on her board.

Here is a closeup of the Grude Pony coming out of the mine, up the ramp. I had a little accident with the moss to the left of the pic, as it was damaged in transport. So I had to do a hasty repair in store before the competition.My wife came up with the idea of attaching moss to the front and side of the opening of the mine to make it look better, and I think it worked well. Next time I plan to do something like this I want to make sure I have dry moss, as that could be glued on. The moss here is attached with wire and gluedots.

To the left of the ramp up from the mine, I had lined up my Dwarf Rangers. They are basically Quarrelers with an axe glued to their back. This used to be a separate unit entry back in the days...

This is the Warden King, and he is the leader of the dwarfs in this keep. He is standing on an oath stone in the front of the outer walls of the keep, rallying his troops around him.

Next up is my Longbeards. I only had time to paint up one box for this competition, but I have two more so this unit will grow in the future. The boxes can be made up as either Hammerers or Longbeards, but I want to use my old metal Hammerers so these new looking dwarfs will all be Longbeards. I'll make one more unit with full command, so I can field two units of 15 or one unit of 20 and one of 10.

An old metal Dwarf Thane on the left. The Thanes seems to have disappeared from the Duardin model range, and I find this a little sad as they used to be the leaders of  their clans. There are many lovely sculpts of Thanes, and I hope to find a way to use several of them in my army.
To the right is a slightly newer metal model, a Dwarf Engineer with lots of guns. 

I am very happy with the beard on the Engineer, and I wish I could remember what color and wash I used to get that look as I would like to have more dwarfs looking like this. It might be the perfect color for my Fyreslayers army. I will try and experiment a bit on spare heads and see if I can recreate it.

I love the old dwarfs, so I just had to have this unit in a visible place on the board. They are in the middle of the board, and have just marched out of the keeps gates. This is a unit of 16 warriors, and they have two handed axes slung over their shoulders. They have a lot of soul and character, and quite a different look from the regular plastic dwarf warriors. They have a more slim look to them, and some of them wears leather vests or sheep skin vests outside their chainmail. They also appear to have groomed beards, not the wild and bushy beards that comes with newer dwarf boxes.
My back story for them is that they have returned from the big city where they live among humans, to assist their clan in times of war. Living around humans have made them adopt some of the human traditions in clothes and style.

The two gun crews are lined up on each side of the gate. I originally had planned to have them on top of the gates, but  in order to do that I would need to modify the gates quite heavily with plastic sheets and I never got to drag myself to a store where I could find what I needed. So I put them on each side of the gate instead. It is not so visible on the pictures, but they both have a trolley of extra ammunition, a scope for aiming and a trough for dipping the rod they use to ready the cannon in. Both cannons also have a shell inside them.
I had a gap between the wall and the mountainside, so it was fixed by adding moss to look like a bush or a small tree.

On the top of the keep a Gyrobomber is hovering. The number is just to indicate that I was the 3rd entry in to the competition, so pay no attention to that. This set was a lot of fun to build and paint right until it was time to build the rotors. I did exactly as the instructions said, and still the rotor blades did not attach perfect. I have more of these, so I will try again at a later time. I had originally planned to have a blimp, but I never got around to making the cabin on it. I will make one in the future though, and maybe a few balloons, so that my Dwarfs can have that even though their cousins (the Kharadron Overlords) have airships that they will bring in support if it is called for.

Here is another Engineer, this one is a resin model. He has a huge mechanical hammer. Sorry for the bad pic of him, but I had to take the pictures after my army was set up on the table, so I couln't get any better angle without messing up one of the units on front of the wall.

Then we have a former character, the Engineer who lost his arm and made a mechanical one. I belive his name was Burlok Damminson, but I am not sure what he will be named in my army yet. In the Games Workshop catalogue he is now only known as Cogsmith. I think it's really sad that they removed so many nice characters without introducing new ones, but at least they kept many of the models in the range.

Here are my two Runelord figures. The figure came with alternate heads and arms, so naturally I had to buy two so I could make one of each. They will get names eventually...

This is the last unit I finished before the competition. It is 16 warriors with hand weapons and shields. I like this configuration, as I love the shields the dwarfs have.
I plan to have more Dwarfs armed like this, but also some Warriors with two handed weapons to have this configuration represented as well.
There is a big possibility that this unit will be extended to 30 warriors in the not too distant future.

I also managed to paint up a unit of Irondrakes. Originally I wanted to have more Ironbreakers, but the new plastic Ironbreakers looks so different from the old metal ones that I made them in to Irondrakes instead. I have more boxes of these, so I will do the same as with the Longbeards longer up in this post, and make it so that I can use larger or more units depending on the gameplay. I would also like some more of the old Ironbreakers, so I might look around for some used ones to repaint.

And finally I have two more Grudge Ponies These are loaded with equipment, so I felt it would be better to have them above ground. These will accompany the Dwarfs on their march to war, carrying equipment to the front, and maybe some riches back to the Keep when the fighting is over.

All in all this was a nice event, and there were plenty of people who came by to look and vote. I do not know how many votes I got (and I don't really want to know either). I have come a long way towards getting a Dwarf army ready for the tables by working on this project, and I have many more dwarfs to come in the future. For a little while now I think I will work on something else, but I will continue to expand my Dwarf army until all sets I have bought are assembled, primed and painted. 

And who knows, when that is done, I might return to the army and make another display just for my self...

Armies on Parade - Board update

Yesterday I told about the snags I had while building the Armies on Parade (AoP) board, and that I felt it looked a bit like something a 10-year old kid would do for his home project.

I complained even more to my wife about it from the day I started working on the board and experience the snags, and while I was out leading a youth bigband yesterday she helped me a bit with the finish of the mine (the lower table).

For a long time she has been into scapbooking, and she know a thing or two (maybe even three or four) about washes, shading, and things like that as this is techniques that also is used in that hobby. So she made the mine come more to life with some shadows on the recessed areas and a bit more light where that could be expected. And also she added on some gold and silver areas in the mine, to show off that there are rich mineral ores down there. 

I am very grateful for her assistance, and I think the board increased its quality at once. There are still some work to do on the top table, but this is minor work compared to what needed to be done down in the mines.

My board will automatically look a little less shiny compared to other boards for many reasons. First mine is made of plywood and is thinner and flatter than a Games Workshop tile, second it is a mountain area, so it is mostly gray compared to other boards that can have more color on them.

I had hoped to use a Games Workshop tile for my top, but when I got to the store to see if they had tiles for sale, they were sold out on the Age of Sigmar tiles, and the 40K tiles were city tiles and they are way too futuristic for my purpose. So I ended up with plywood both on top and on the bottom.

And even though my tiles are Mechanicus Standard Gray (with some added shades and highlights) I plan to brighten them up a bit with the dwarfs I bring to the table.

The dwarfs uses many colors, and some of them are quite striking while others are more neutral. There are metal, silver, bronze, gold, greens, blues, yellows and other colors to help lighten the table up a bit. There are also quite a lot of figures that will go on the tables:

Down in the mine I will have 2 Grudge Ponies with carts, and a third on the ramp going either up or down.

20 Nightgoblins as one unit

15 Dwarf Miners working along one wall

1 Dwarf Prospector (old Miner) working as a sort of mini diorama, on a little hill down in the mine. He will have a wheelbarrow and dynamite around him.

10 Dwarf Ironbrakers (the old metal ones) marching to stop the Nightgoblins

and in a special cave I have the White Dwarf subscription Vampire hunter miniature with a coffin with a goblin in it.

On the top table there will be:

2 Grudge Ponies pulling carts loaded with equipment that the dwarfs will carry to war with them.

2 Dwarf Engineers

1 Dwarf Warden King

1 or 2 Dwarf Runelords (little uncertain if I have 1 or 2 of them)

10 Longbeards

10 Irondrakes

20 Dwarf Rangers with crossbows and axes

16 Dwarf Warriors with shields and hand weapons

16 Dwarf Warriors with long axes (the old type of plastic dwarfs)

3 Goblin Nasty skulkers 

2 Cannons with 3 Dwarf crew each (6 figures in total)

1 Dwarf Gyrobomber (helicopter)

This leaves me with 47 figures on the lower level, and 86 figures on the top level (if I get to place them all I will see how much space it actually takes when I set up the board). That is a grand total of 133 figures. 

As promised yesterday, pics will come. I will try to take some pictures on Friday while finishing the boards, and then I will take pictures as I set the board up on Saturday.

Armies on Parade - just a few days away now...

It's just a few days left until Armies on Parade for Age of Sigmar (they split it in two this year and completely forgot the Middle Earth/Hobitt brand while doing it).
My Dwarf board looks like something a 10-year old has put together at the moment, but I am hoping that with a little touch-up with some more paint and details it will look ok before I go to bed on Friday night.
I have encountered almost every snag possible on this project. First of all my glue did not set as I supposed. I bouth special glue for styrofoam, but insted of melting the two plates together it made a small gap between them. But they stuck togehter for the most part... This was very obvious when I started to cut the plates in to the correct basic shapes.

Then the plates were cut in to rough shapes, but now it was almost impossible to cut them in to the detailed shape I wanted to make the mountan sides. Here you can see my design drawn on the styrofoam, but it diodn't end up quite that way.

I thought I could make some nice terrain with plaster, but that dried so fast it was dry before I got it out of the mixing bowl.So the result looked like this when I gave up. The rest of the board was painted over with PVA glue. This took 24 hours to dry, so I lost a lot of time to work on the board while I waited for this. I had thought it might take some hours, but not 24...

There are quite a lot of dwarfs that needs to be painted up and based. Here are some work in progress pictures from the weekend. They are now painted up, but still needs their bases done and a thin layer of wash.

My centerpiece on the top board is the tower gate, and this is what it looks like after wash but before I tried drybrushing it. I was so sure I had gray dry-paint to use for the drybrushing, but that was about the only paint pot I didn't have when I looked through my paint boxes. So I ended up using regular paint and making sure I got most of it out of the brush before I stated. This is the one thing I am satisfied with on the board so far.

The plan for Friday is to base about 60 dwarfs, wash about 30 more and about 25 goblins. Then I will clean up some paint on the boards and add some streaks of gold and silver down in the mine and glue some turf and moss to the top board. Somehow I don't think my wife will see a lot of me before after the AoP event is over...

I will add some pictures of the finished board when I set it up at Games Workshop on Saturday, and post it here when I get home.