Mechanicum Cerastus Knight-Atrapos WIP

At the Warhammer European Open Day in Amsterdam I picked up a Knight-Atropos as an implus purchase. I really like the model's look for a Mechanicum LOW. I also count it as a plus that it doesn't toss around multiple pie-plates.

Be that as it may, I have a tendency to let big Forgeworld models sit for a while after reaching a milestone. That isn't necessarily bad, since I find myself wanting to redo models before I finished their army, since my skill improved and I don't really want to see the previous result anymore.

Friday after work I saw a YouTube video by Moggy displaying a Knight-Atrapos. I loved the paint job. I had also picked up the new Horus Heresy themed Forgeworld Master Class book, which has a red candy-paint Knight on the cover. This pushed me to get started on the model, so I washed, trimmed and sanded the parts. Then I assembled the torso with epoxy glue. I hesitated when looking at the legs. Four toes, two parts for the foot, then the lower leg, upper leg and hip joint. I did a quick and dirty pile of cork and hot-glue with some plastic pipe and I beam sticking out before slapping the first foot down. That got me going to where I left the model with the legs glued up to the hips overnight. For that, I wedged them in and used a metal strip to hold it up by the magnet I had put in the hip for the torso.

The next morning saw me happy that the glueup had gone as intended! I reinforced the hip to leg joints with 2mm brass rod and did the same to firmly anchor the lower leg through the feet in the base. Then I merrily built on until I arrived at the model fully built - with the armour plates only placed, but not glued in position.

As soon as I got there, I primed the model and all the armour plates black with Vallejo Airbrush Primer. I had to get something else done, but continued in the evening with Vallejo Gumetal all over the metal parts and a highlight with Steel, following Moggy's scheme.

Next, I followed the Forgeworld book and preshaded the armor panels with blue and a little bit of green.

Today, Forgeworld offers more hobby materials. Back with the previous Masterclass books, Tamiya Clear Red is still used instead of the now available FW product. So - did a test piece for that. Based on that I just use the thick Tamiya paint as is - without thinning it - and applied it pretty much in a single coat, maybe a coat and a half. I have a habbit of using higher pressure than you find recommended, in this case 60psi through a 0.4mm needle.

After that, I went after the trim and painted that with steel, which then got knocked down with Drakenhof Nightshade, which I thinned a lot. I liked the blue tint, so I liberally applied it to the metal parts. This turned out to have one nasty sideeffect. This mix dried pale yellow in recesses, so instead of a deep blue shadow there is a little light spot. I followed up with a clear coat and oil shade, which took care of any shadows nicely.

 

In retrospect, I find that I didn't take pictures documenting what I did to the base.The base is cork, hot glue to attach the cork and also the toes to the base and cork respectively, plastic parts sticking out from the cork and as fence posts. I liberally applied hot glue to the flat area of the base, because I like the wobbly, muddy effect this gives, expecially when combined with the regular PVA glue with  sand/gravel mix.

I went over the base with primer, then used dark red followed by a heavy Zamesi Desert drybrush. Then I started messing about with pigments, a sand colour and a darker brown at first, later also adding a black/oil pigment for machine bits.

While I was really happy with the result, the armour plates are darker than the FW approach left them which makes the whole model relatively dark, considering that I also washed and dulled all the metal.
I figured that attaching some decals would brighten it up some and contacted a friend who has a bunch of Knights as support for his Space Wolves. He was kind enough to spare me a transfer sheet from a plastic knight.

Battle Report: Imperial Knights vs Necrons 2500 Points

A fellow player my local tabletop club wanted an opportunity to field his Imperial Knights. He has been encountering reluctance or refusal from other players to face these warmachines. Granted, I cannot come up with many lists made up with commonly used units that has reasonable odds against these things. AV13 with ion shields, loads of ordnance with strength D and Stomp in Melee isn't easily brought down with shooting or melee.

Since I recently picked up to piles of Necrons, I decided to use the Gauss rule to my advantage. A decurion detachment with 4x 10 Warriors in Ghost Arks, 2x20 Warriors on foot, a Monolith, 2x3 Tomb Blades, 5 Immortals and a vanilla Overlord and two Harvest formations was my force. This was my first time playing Necrons.

The Imperial Knight force was a detachment of five knights led by a Cerastus Knight-Lancer with a Cerastus Knight-Castigator, a Cerastus Knight-Acheron and two plastic knights. These all had their BS and WS improved to 5. A sixth knight came along vanilla. All knights were equipped with the weapons as modeled, except for the carapace weapons, which were all 8/3 missile launchers.

Deployment

Turn 1.1

Turn 1.2

Turn 2.1

Turn 2.2

Turn 3.1

Turn 3.2

Turn 4.1

Turn 4.2

Victory (by points) 9 : 7 for Necrons.
The Lancer had 1 hull point left, the lone other remaining knight was at 4 hull points iirc.
Three decimated warrior units, a unit of tomb blades, two ghost arks and a unit of immortals were remaining of the Necron force.
The Imperial knights had no achivable objective cards, the necrons did.

New (used) Necron toys!

Paint job: Bloodthirsters and Bloodcrushers

The other day I played Iyanden Craftworld against Khorne Deamonkin. My opponent had all three variants of the new(ish) plastic Bloodthirster at hand, but they were all unpainted. Feeling tempted myself to buy this kit even though I don't really need (ha!) a new bloodthirster when I hardly play with my old metal one, I offered to assist with priming and base colour. This led to the question if I'd paint them up.

Here you can see the result. The idea was to stay close to the paint job that these have in the KDK codex. The owner wanted these guys to forego their armour and had built them without it. I magnetised the wip and chain-hammerthing to ward against breakage and hit the models with black primer followed by zenital light grey primer.

Since the models are big, but fully assembled, I opted to do the remainder of the paintjob without the airbrush to avoid masking or overspray hassle.

I used Vallejo Model/Game Air colours, well thinned with Vallejo Airbrush thinner to retain the pre-highlight. I followed this up with dry-brushing, a semi-gloss coat and oil shade. Leading to this look:

Also lacking proper Khrone colours were a bunch of blood crushers, which received the same treatment, apart from applying the base red colour with the airbrush.

I finished this almost a month ago, but got lazy with this hobby diary. I am now sorting pictures for a bunch of battle reports ;-]

Vraks Unending Host Update

As part of a 250 points a month panting challenge of my local gaming club, I took on the first platoon of renegades in my unending host.

Since the last picture, I covered all the bases with black Vallejo Primer, separating the minis from the bases which were hit by the same zenital highlight.

Expecting some serious motivation fatigue as numbers mount, I decided on a minimal paint job. I used VGC leather brown to pick out gloves, boots and rebreathers, as well as a bunch of straps and the nub on the back which is meant for a backpack that came with the Warzone minis. It makes a decent looking rebreathing unit in a pinch I think. I mixed some VGA chainmail silver and black for the gunbarrels. VGA pale flesh hit the few bits of skin for the weapon teams.

I used VGA gory red, dark fleshtone, cold grey and Citadel squig orange to split the platoons and squads from another.

I will weather those models when I got all of them on the level of the first platoon.

Deamons of Slaanesh

Looking for something different to paint, I took a look into my hobby queue and fished out some deamons. I had Zarakynel waiting for some attention and intimidate me a bit with the slender resin bits and the work required to make it come together organically.

I used plasticard, chaos vehicle icons and brass clips to make armbands and shoulder pads. That's because I didn't want to glue all those extended parts into place and have them break at the earliest opportunity. Since the arms do not fit seamlessly to the body, some gapfilling would be needed - so I went for a coverup.

The result are the four arms and the head being attached with magnets. The magnet link is flexible, permitting the limbs to bend with any force applied rather than break off. That also goes for the heat-bent dreadlocks. The horns didn't have a clearly defined fit, so I used tiny magnets there as well.

Looking at some gaps in my Slaaneshi infantry, I also picked up a box of deamonettes to sort another unit and a spare banner and grabbed a box of seekers to bring my total up to 18 and get two banners and an instrument out of it. Below you can see the result of those efforts for my deamon forces.

While at it, I also finally slapped some paint on two metal deamon HQs that I had picked up off ebay OVP some months ago: Be'lakor and Kairos Fateweaver as well as a keeper of secrets which was built, but bare metal.


I went with thinned VGA black over a zenital grey highlight. Sticking more black on the wings. VGC glorious gold took care of the gold applications. I followed that with a clear coat and black transparent oil shade.

 Kairos was easier than expected, except for the tangle of limbs to work around. I used Vallejo Air colours thinned with Vallejo air thinner to slap two coats of blue and white respectively on the model, going with some gory red for the book cover and using browns for the paper and the scrolls. Gold, clear coat and oil shade as before with Be'lakor.

The keeper was a quick and dirty job just ahead of a game for which I needed him in my mono-god list. Nothing much to report here, just thinned airbrush paint on pre-highlight followed by a clear coat and oil shade.

While I'm at documenting what I did without taking pictures a the time, I also grabbed this line-up of all my current Slaaneshi forces.

Clearly, what is missing are chariots to round out these forces. I'll however first pay some attention to other unfinished deamon minis before blowing money on more stuff ;-]

RC Bodies - first steps

I've now done a couple of lexan bodies for  remote controlled electric cars, for three chassis a colleague of mine uses.

Lexan bodies are different to work with than anything I previously hit with my airbrush. Firstly, they are painted from the inside which also means that one has to very carefully plan colours for each part of the body and take even more care to mask anything that isn't supposed to be hit with the current colour.

My first attempt was made on a big 1:10 chassis, which came supplied with window masks, which is a great convenience indeed. My buddy wanted the body white with yellow mirrors. All other paint would be stickers.

I used the supplied masks and Fascolor paint for this. This paint gave me a spot of trouble, since it didn't seem to be impressed with my airbrush cleaner at all, I had to flush the paint mechanically, with Q-tips and valliant use of the destilled water squeeze bottle. I realise that there will be a cleaner and thinner for this stuff, but I've stayed clear of it for now for this reason.

The result was good though, even after shoe goo was used to reinforce the bodies edges and stickers were applied, the body weighted in lighter than another one done with rattle cans.

Next was a cheap 1:12 body, with the request to hit it with "any colour", which I understood as green light for an extra manly paint scheme. This is quick and dirty over night with rally stripes masked with blue tape.

Following the purchase of a new chassis called X-Ray, my colleague wanted a red and white paintjob with some chevron style borders. I tried to mask these borders with tape and regretted this when I discovered some bleeding paint. :/ 

 

This was rather deftly fixed by my colleague with strategic use of the supplied decal stickers. =]

For the second X-Ray body I was supposed to follow the Team Force India scheme. This was the first time using liquid mask for me. This worked great, no question, but is also a skill to improve where small details matter. Unfortunately I messed up one of the colours in this body. The red was supposed to be orange, but I used a non-opaque neon yellow instead of an opaque yellow and ended up with basically just red parts. Since I'm unable to properly see red and green colours and failed to do a mix test and proper dry comparison... it's red. Ah well. The clear and neat separation of the green, white, red and black areas does look nice.

The previous results must have been sufficiently good to make some more bodies come my way. Six 1:12 bodies reached my desk. My first step here was to apply liquid mask to all of them. I bought finer markers, since the one I had were not fine enough to define a line for the exacto knife. The design is marked from the outside on the clear foil which protects the body from accidental overspray.

I got creative, admittedly with the use of Google Image Search for inspiration, and ended up with the following results.

 

My takeaway from this batch is that it is a good idea to separate colours with black lines. :)

Battle Report: Vraks Unending Host + Renegades vs Orks 3000 Points

This game was meant to be another test of new or unfamiliar units, both for my opponent and for me. We agreed on a game size of 3000 points and a random maelstrom mission. The Ork force was spread across two CADs. I apologize for not having a proper force list, but here is a line-up snapshot:

The orc force included: a unit of meganobs and a unit of nobs, both lavishly kitted, boys, commandos, lootas, burnas, a bunch of killa-cans, a def-dread, one of the new big walkers, grot artillery with a bubble-gun, a snotzoga with grots, some grots with herder, two trucks, a tank and a dakka-jet.

Since the last game, I primed all models black and applied Vallejo Primer desert tan very lightly with a low angle and heavy as a zenital highlight, resulting in getting a start on getting the lot painted.

On my side, I played the same 1500 points Vraks Unending Host list in the previous battle-report and tacked on an contingent of regular Renegades based on IA13.

The addon list is using a blood-handed reaver demagogue with a nurgle covenant, since I wanted to try grenandiers (as shown in the picture above) and a bunch of plague zombies as troops - having a boatload of infantry platoons on the other half of the list. I wanted to try some tanks and a valkyrie. I brought  two vanilla Leman Russ with battle-cannons, lascannons and heavy bolter sponsons, a Leman Russ Punisher with heavy bolters and a stubber, a Executioner with plasma sponsons as well as two hellhounds.

We played mission 4, the orks the deployment/initiative roll-off.

Turn 1.1
The orks advanced - shocker! - pushing forward as far as possible and blew up a hell-hound!

Turn 1.2
The heretics blew up the mega-nob trucks and fired the executioner at the lot, which promptly got hot, and lost a hull point. The remaining hell-hound fired it's cannon into the ork artillery hiding in ruins - without much effect thanks to without much effect since DS4 didn't impress the carriages 3+ too much.

Turn 2.1

Turn 2.2

Turn 3.1

Turn 3.2

Battle Report: Vraks Unending Host vs CSM 1500 pts

This game was intended as a test of the second edition of the Imperial Armour Vraks battle-forged detachment "Vraks Unending Host" from my side, and testing some CSM HQs by my opponent, who usually plays Khorne Deamonkin.

My List consisted of four troup units of renegade infantry with three 20 man squads each. I swapped five gits per unit for a chaos sigil carrier and two heavy weapon teams each. This left me with 4x2 lascannons, 4x2 autocannons and 3x2 rocket launchers and 192 T3 infantry without armour but with flashlights. Three sentinels with heavy flamers did away with the points otherwise needed to buy each git a 6+ armor save, I did spent the points for militia training though. As my one heavy support choice I picked 4 quad-launchers with three crewmen each.

Knowing a week ahead what I'd be doing (since I didn't want to play something this unorthodox as a surprise), my opponent brought Fabius Guile, Arkos the Faithless, four bikers, one eight and one ten man squad (with the ten man squad being Fabius-buffed), twenty cultists, autocannon havocs, a mauler fiend, a Sicaran with heavy bolter sponsons and a lone baleflamer helldrake.

The shared idea was to have a giggle. Right on!

We diced off the random stuff, got maelstrom mission one. My opponent set up the terrain, I won the first player turn.

After setting up I discovered quickly that I deployed my lascannon units wrong, since they caused a traffic jam of units that couldn't run forward properly due to this. The Quad-Launchers killed all but one of the cultist units thanks to a lucky roll of the scatter die.

My opponent advanced, with the mauler fiend taking the first volley of fire and being wrecked in the second round. My quad launchers took out all the autocannon havocs, leaving the aspiring champion alone. My sentinels got blown up, all but one. I failed the roll for the return of the first completely wiped out infantry unit. HA!

The Chaos Space Marines then got into melee and slashed through quite a few units like a hot knife through butter.

After that can of woop-ass was cracked open, I had five units eligible for respawning on 2+. I made all those rolls and brought the units back from the flanks. That's a hundred wounds bouncing back! However, since those models moved, that means neither assaults nor as accurate shooting as BS 3 permits. A mistake, since I forgot to take my maelstrom cards into account, I could have not rolled for at least one of them to bring it over my table edge and seized an objective.

After turn five, I was behind on points and would have clearly lost the game had the dice ended it there. In turn six, the units that respawned in the previous turn were firing at full ballistic skill and wiped out the remaining CSM units.

While the movement phase took a bit longer (doh!), skipping the psychic phase and being done quite quickly with shooting meant that game progressed nicely.

The quad launchers played out significantly above average, wiping out cultists and havocs down to one dude each and blasting another marine unit to smithereens. My opponent also taught me the proper way to do multiple barrages, I had the hit mark wrong. Being able to cut down on scatter with hit blasts really helps.

The chaos sigils are worth much more than their point cost (3 base for the guy +5) and also worth more than the opportunity cost of special weapons. Being able to reroll failed tests is a great help with 4+D6 random leadership.

Overall this was a fun game, playing markedly different from what I'm used to. The list definitely has potential for entertainment. Motivated by this, I primed all the infantry models black and gave them a zenital highlight of desert tan on the following weekend and wrote this report. Right on!

Vraks Unending Host

Half a year ago I bought a lot of 200+ Warzone minis via eBay. These models are plastic and came on sprues marked with "Target Games 1998". The models are not quite as detailed as the Citadel plastic troopers, but they do come with basic armour, weapons and - quite convenient for the Vraks setting - rebreathers all around. A major advantage in my view is total lack of six aquilas per model.

My motivation was getting a bulk of GEQ minis to use as Renegades for the Unending Host. At 3 points per model, there are likely to be a lot of models to be fielded indeed.

After spending hours to clip all of the bits from the sprues and gluing the bodies to the bases, I took this picture as a starting point. That are 251 models to do, quite a daunting number.

My plan is to remove the mold lines and gate connections that I judge to be visible from above. Then prime black, apply a white zenital highlight, spray highly diluted colour for the gear and finish by picking out some details with the brush. 

I left sprue attached to the backpacks to serve as holder. The backpacks will receive basically the same treatment as the body, but will get a darker colour.

So far the plan, let's see how it goes!