Army development snapshots

I've been taking pictures of my Chaos Army every couple of weeks. Flipping through these now, I can see that I am way to willing to add models to my army. Let me say up front that the silver sheets are just sheet metal, roughly 10" by 20". I magnetize the bases for easy transport without fiddling with foam.

This is a snapshot from end of April, showing the army which at the time didn't have any plan to speak of. I had picked it up on eBay, scrubbed, repaired and painted it, but had no clue what units might actually be needed for play. Out of pure fancy, I had added another daemon prince to the two that came with it, a forge fiend and a soul grinder. I had also mixed some daemon prince parts into a broken loyalist cybot. 

End of May, a lot had changed. I had picked up a bunch of vehicles, some predators, a vindicator and a rhino of eBay and built a heldrake, two land raiders and another predator. Another bunch of possessed was added, old metal robot style obliterators showed up. A squad of raptors added. A nurgle daemon prince and some plague marines added. Some more regular chaos space marines, berzerkers and terminators came with the stuff I wanted. I diligently scrubbed, repaired and based them. I also tried to pick up a bunch of bikers, adding eight to the lone rider I had before. I built three helbrutes to keep the refurbished one company. I had also chopped up and modded a load of cultists, but those are not shown here.

 End of June, a plastic Khorne Lord on Moloch with a bunch of chaos spawns and a Nurgle General on Trike joined my army. I had also chopped the defiler up and converted him to the upright version. Another squad of plague marines was added and a couple more old style obliterators were added, bringing the count up to nine.

 End of July, I've added 40 zombies, the cultist mob is in the picture for the first time. Another raptor squad joined up. Seven seven man plague marine squads with reinforcements showed up. All metal minis, some with the same mold as the current products, some with the ancient spiky helmet style. A greater brass scorpion and a skull lord of khorne are assembled, but not quite finished yet.

All in all, I think I'm making good progress in building a nice battleforce. I'll try to finish more units off completely now so I can close those nagging thoughts about incomplete paint jobs and missing base decoration off for good. And yeah, I'm well over 10k points now. ;-]

Plague zombie kit bash

One of the many things that I wanted to try out with the Chaos Space Marine Army was the option to run Cultists as Zombies with compliments of Typhus' special rules. Fearless, Feel no Pain, Yay!

I didn't want to use regular Cultist models for this though. I mixed two boxes of Cadian Shock Troups and one box of WHFB Zombies to build 40 Plague zombies. This required some creative cutting and gluing, since the Zombie parts do not fit together like the Guard parts, that is to say, they have a hollow or a protusion instead of a flat surface. With a bit of patience, it does come together though.

When mixing those kits, I tried to have at least one green Guard armor part tie the look toegether for each model. That could be a helmet, shoulder piece or chest piece or a combination of those items. Rather than go to much medieval, I only used some scythes from the Zombie weapon kit, and improvised others. I added zombie hands to guard arms. The hands with the stretched out fingers really go with the zombie theme and the guard arms provide uniform pieces.

Not wanting to spent too much time on these cannon fodder models, I hit them with the sand and green colours first via airbrush, then added the yellow GW fleshtone I like for this using a normal brush.

Afterwards, I added some Leadbelcher for the metal parts, various browns for accessories, wood and hair, Administratum grey for the Aquilas and rank stripes. I then washed the minis with Reikland Fleshshade.

In the front row you can see the nice effect of trimming down some zombie heads until they fit into the spare helmets that come with the guard sets, as well as some Tamiya clear red on the exposed guts.

The bases I covered with Stirland Mud and their sides with Black. I've been too distracted by alsways new shiny things to get any basing done. In so far even this minimal alibi-style base work is a step forward for me. ;-]

I'm quite happy with the overall result!

Metal plague marines to the rescue!

While I haven't completed something awesome in the last days, I've not been idle at the hobby front either.

My greater brass scorpion got Nuln Oil on the non-armor parts. I had to strip my paintjob from the claws and re-prime them. It's my first time working with a Forgeworld model and wasn't prepared for how smooth (and possibly coated with release agent) some of the parts were. I intentionally scratched the claw pieces with a wire brush and used 600 grid sand paper on it to give the primer a chance. I then primed it with black Vallejo Airbrush Primer. I'm hoping for better luck this time around.

My Skull Lord is assembled and magnetized for weapon options and some flexibility on pose and primed. I'll get to him when the Scorpion is done.

I've bought two lots of Nurgle themed eBay auctions. One for really old Plague Marines with spiky helmets which had never been assembled, primed or painted. Really nice lot with five full seven man troups of plague marines with metal bodies and plastic accessories. I've based those on magnetized bases now.

 

The other lot was a small death guard army which looked to be composed of plague marines. I gambled on that one and was very happy today to find that it contained 25 metal plague marines, most of them with the same nice mold as the currently offered ones. The lot also came with a metal Typhus, a great unclean one, four metal plague bearers, a rhino and some plastic marines and possessed.In addition, there is also a pile of bits that came with it. One can never have too many bits!

 The plague marines were just primed. I'm just running them through the ultrasound cleaner with some warm water and dishwashing detergent. I'm guessing they'll be good for painting after that. I could of course rip the primer off the models, but there will be always tiny remains making repriming no better than just using the existing priming.

I already had two units of plague marines from the current type, but their plague knives snap of very easily. Because of that and since I like minis to have some variation, I wanted to get some older metal models.

Nerd collides with Warhammer

The last few months have been an absolutely ridiculous amount of fun! Just before Easter I walked into a Games Workshop Store to find a model to serve as marker for my pen and paper RPG character. After building that model, I got myself a used Chaos Space Marine army of eBay.

In the course of removing the paint from these minis, repairing them and repainting them I learned a lot of basic hobby skills, which I then I expanded to magnetising, airbrush and scratch building. In the course of this I made a few YouTube videos to show off successful builds.

Now I decided to dust off my Blogger account and document some builds, techniques, tactics and whatever else might come up in an easily referenced location. I will backfill this blog with some content which I previously posted on various forums or just stashed on my computer.

Greater Brass Scorpion construction

I got an incomplete Greater Brass Scorpion Forgeworld kit for a good price from a fellow member of the local warhammer club, which gave me the chance to lay my hands on a Forgeworld monster without selling a kidney first.

It is still not finished, but I just noticed that I handn't really said anthing about it so far on the blog. I started out by carving the massive amounts of sprue from the parts that appear to be typical for Forgeworld kits.

Then I connected the tail to the main body part using two pairs of 6mm x 6mm round neo-dym magnets. The tail makes the model a good four inches taller, so I figured it would be good to make this removable for transport. I also connected the maw cannon with magnets for easier painting access.

 Next I had a look at the missing parts. I found a picture of all parts laid out in sufficient resolution from some completely unrelated eBay auction. I cut and pasted together the parts that I was missing and the center piece for the tail gun which was included. Then I used BigPrint, a software made by the awesome woodworker Matthias Wandel to print a picture of the parts to scale. That gave me an idea of what I needed to make. I'm told that Forgeworld is very helpful regarding missing parts, but since I didn't have an order number, I didn't want to be cheeky and ask their customer service.

 Then I tried to get an idea of the position the model would stand in. At this point I got quite dishearted. The legs end in balls that are supposed to fit into quarter inch wide C-shapes, similar to the Soul Grinder and Defiler models. However, both parts were only approximately fitting here and there wasn't as much material around and behind the C shapes. Also, the main body is solid resin and is quite heavy. I didn't like the odds of glue holding the legs in position against all that weight, in particular if the surfaces don't mesh well.

To allow me to look at the model with armor while working on it and not have the armor plates in the way while working on the model, I attached them with magnets. Did I mention I like magnets? ;-]
I cut a small cartboard box to size to support the main body while I tried out leg positions.

After leaving the project aside for two weeks or so, I decided to go medieval on it. I clipped the head and point of a 2mm thick nail, which left it about an inch and a quarter long. I drilled holes into the ball and into the C-shape at the thorso and put about a third of the nail into the leg's ball joint and the other two thirds into the body. That nail transfers the weight quite nicely to the upper leg and leaves the glue's strength free to deal with just unwanted rotation.

Since the leg's knee joint is very loose it wasn't very convincing either. I drilled right through it sideways and used a small machine screw with a nut to compress the joint. That holds it in position even without glue, so doing this with glue should be fine and solid after the glue sets.

For the first leg I put the nail into the leg first, then I swapped to putting it into the body first. Actually, that is more logical, since it needs to go in further there and more friction may need to be overcome - for which a solid grip on the nail with pliers is really handy! This also allowed me to bend the part of the nail for the leg into place for the front claws, where there isn't enough material for the pin to bite into directly in the line with the orientation of the joint.

It stands! Yay! Happy dance! You can see four parts cut out of two different gauges of plasticard in the picture below. That is part of making up for missing bits from the set.

Talking about missing parts. The picture below shows my scale pintout with the missing parts and the central tail gun part for reference together with the replacement parts I made for the tail gun, it's armor plate and the cut off original central gun barrel.

The gun barrels are made from Q-tips (orange) and ABS plastic rods meant to be melted in place as seal between tiles. I drilled holes for the thin Q-tip rods into the solid black rods to have more glue surface. A piece of plasticard connects each barrel pair. The black stuff I also used as joints for the hydraulics, while a thin plasticard rod fits exactly into the Q-tip pipe to make a nice looking and solid cylinder.

I drilled a bunch of small holes into the thinner piece of plasticard that acts as banding for the blade part. I didn't want to make bad looking rivets, so I figured recesses that fill with shade are the next best thing.

And here is the model fully assembled. Standing strong, unlikely to collapse. Phase 1 successful.

Heldrake paint job

After playing my heldrake quite a few times with just black primer on it, I finally painted it. By no means a masterpiece, but it combines the strengths of airbrush and regular brushes to good effect. 

The armor pieces are covered in successive layers of primary blue, with each subsequent layer being smaller and more white mixed in. That gives a great colour gradient which looks interesting. This would be very hard to do with brushes, but is trivial with an airbrush. 

The fittings on the armour however, would be a nightmare to do via airbrush - with or without a metric ton of masking tape. With the side of a reasonably sized brush however, it's no witchcraft. 

After painting in the chest and eye glue and adding some Nuln Oil shade I was quite happy with the overall impression. 

I bought another heldrake kit because I really want to make one with fiery wings and gold fittings, but I would have had to break apart the wings of my first drake to properly do this.

BuyPainted has done an awesome tutorial on how to do this: