Tales of a hobby butterfly

Having enjoyed epic from asaptus titanicus in the late 80s through all its other editions the excitement of impeialis was too much for this old dude to miss out on.

Then I saw the price!!!, after Trying to work out which body part to sell I decided that 3d printing is the way forward so I ordered the new rule book and tokens from ebay, also hunted through my bits box for a bag of marines I purchased from vanguard miniatures a few years ago, turns out they are pretty much the perfect scale.

I found enough to form 2 demi companies with special weapon squads and some assault marines in support.

Luckily I also have a stash of 25mm metal washers that are perfect for bases with the added bonus of giving heft and magnetise for easy storage.

Next I need to break out the 3d printer for some teeny tiny tanks

Printed these chaps a few years ago now, every now and again I pick them up and paint them a different colour as I could never find a green I liked for the sons of horus.

Being colour blind they spent some time both grey and brown I would have sworn it was a cool green.

I should maybe have stripped the layers of paint before adding this layer as some detail has gone but was in a hurry whilst I was in the mood to get the unit finished.

Had a go with the v2 speedpaints and was mightily impressed. The metallic speed pains are very swish. The plan was to add some rusty bits to the metal but unfortunately my rusty paint is now a crusty dry lump due to the turd gw paint pots.

Decided to give the Wight a funky pumpkin head made out of green stuff

Every year we try to meet up for a game around Christmas time, because of work this is the closest we coukd get.

The game played over 3 tables with nuts vs golden Boys on one table, blood angels vs space wolfs and a three way of squats vs dark eldar and guard.

I learned two lessons don’t get in a knife fight with dark eldar and don’t get in a gun fight with guard.

The mission was to capture santa who randomly wanders the table after being shot down. You have to capture and escape your table edge with the jolly fellow. After 5 turns santa managed to evade our best efforts to capture him with only the dark eldar capturing him for a turn before escaping.

I stupidly told the opposition the squat bikers were my favourite so they were wiped out in the first turn, luckily I did get to see them again by using a cp to bring in reinforcements.

The dark eldar hold a moral victory As they were able to erase Marbo before he could cause any mischief as well as taking straken out in close combat.

The catchans did well also by taking out both my and the dark eldars warlords.

These are the last bits and bobs needed to bring the force up to 1500 points for a 10th edition game.

The tank commander in punisher and the two vanquisher tanks are from world war toons with some 40k gubbins stuck on.

The commissar in his dapper white hat and boots is there to keep order in the ranks and the counts as tech priest was added to try to keep the vehicles alive a bit longer.

Thought a yellow and green storm lord would look cool on the table and will fit most of my squishy infantry to save them walking across the table.

These models from microcosm miniatures are perfect looking bikers with an old school vibe.

You can order them with biker heads or military helmets, I chose the helmets as they fit the theme of my army better, but was very tempted by the biker heads.

The squad leader had his weapon replaced with an axe from the old dwarf warrior sprue.

In 2nd edition games they can be used in games as bikers as intended. In 10th edition games I will use them as proxy rough riders, I know they don’t have lances bur I’m sure if they were to ram something with their bikes they will do similar damage.

Picked up a pack of metal space dwarfs at a the selwig show from the bring and buy. I belive these dudes were from a kickstarter from uscarl miniatures.

The sculpts are full of detail and really catch the old school vibe with the padded flack jackets and cool helmets.

Kind of want the models to be useful in 2nd edition 40k as well as 10th I’m trying to get 1500 points painted by the end of the month for an upcoming game at wayland, will have to see how it goes.

The dwarfs in exo armour are from scibor and make a rather swish command squad, the big dude in mech suit is from gudrun studio and be used as an ogryn body guard in this force

These three minis complete two rival squads for shatterpoint so I can get a game in at the weekend.

We will use a smaller table and reduce the amount of objectives to take in to account the smaller forces but should give us a good feel for the game.

The light sabres are crazy fragile so removed them with a sharp knife, carefully drilled the handle of the sabre and my finger with a .3mm drill and inserted brass rod cut to the required length, I think if I had to do it again I would use slightly thicker rod or just remove the sabre and have the models with them turned off as they are super fiddly to fix.

Recently picked up the shatter point core set, the first chaps on the painting table were the squads of b1 droids which were a complete pain to stick together. For big models they are made up of many tiny annoying bits

The main colour on these is gw contrast skeleton hord with some thinner added and a coat of matt varnish to get rid of the contrast shine.

I was gonna paint maul next but the light sabres look very fragile so I’m looking into ways of replacing them with brass rod before I paint them.

So I stuck together a unit of clones I always find white daunting to paint and usually end up with a very chalky look so I watch loads of tutorials on you tube and kind of amalgamated bits of each video and came up with these chaps.

They were base coated dark grey then drybrushed white to show up the detail.

Then I layered a mix of off white a tiny bit of black and dark brown in the shadows.

Once that dried I added some deck tan by valkejo to the mix and kind of watered it down so the darker bits would show through  and covered the armour plates.

Again I let this dry then painted neat deck tan on the high areas.

To Finnish the white I made a mix of bleached bone and white and added this in layers each time adding more white till i got the colour I was aiming for.

The black bits were then sploshed in with black speed paint.

This weekend I visited the colours show at newbury racecourse.

Whilst there I visited the rather awesome oakbound studio stand that is filled with loads of cool sculpts. I grabbed a couple of packs of wolfs among some other things.

My plan with the wolfs is to make some hobgoblin wolf riders ti support my chaos dwarfs. using the hobgoblins I got on an oakbound kickstarter that ran earlier in the year.

The goblins fit nicely with a bit of bending and some green stuff to extend their scrappy clothing to hide any gaps between the wolfs and the goblins bums

Earlier in the week I was gifted some forge world chaos dwarfs by a good mate.

This spurred me on into working on a chaos dwarf force I have been thinking about for a while.

I already have some swish hobgoblin minis from an oakbound studio kickstarter and some 3d printed fimir I plan on using as black orks so the chaos dwarfs came at a great time to fill out the force.

I always wanted to add some bull centaur models as they look cool and really have the feel of chaos dwarfs. Looking at the prices on ebay I decided to make some of my own using parts from my bitz box.

The body is from a gw plastic chaos hound with the head and front legs surgically removed with the clippers of doom.

The front legs are from a plastic gore with the body of a chaos dwarf pinned on top.

The head is an ork skull from the box of skulls with a green stuff hat of mighty proportions, and his big axe is from the old chaos warriors set.

Once all these bits were found I stuck it all together then plopped on some greenstuff to hide the gaps and add  a suitably old school chaos dwarf beard.

I’m pretty happy with the result, just need to make 9 more now

Spent a fun bankholiday Monday painting these chaps.

Went with space wolves as its a nod back to the army my brother used to have when we were kids,my chaos army used to spend a lot of time loosing to them.

Decided on old school goblin green bases just need to find some bright green flock to bring out the 90s charm.

To paint them I base coated everything with the gw paint the fang followed by a Drybrook of ferris grey and vallejo wolf grey.

All the marine packs and tank traks were then painted black with contrast which is amazing at this scale it speeds everything up.

Next all the weapons were painted silver, then the shoulder pads and doors were painted there unit colour.

The grey hunters have red pads, long fangs have white, blood claws have yellow and the wolf guard have black.

Once this was all dry everything got a splosh of army painter strong tone mixed 50/50 with water.

Finally everything got a funky green base using vallejo goblin green.

Look forward to getting them on the table.

Kind of thought it would be cool to have him on a mule or an Ass

So got this baggage mule off ebay then started cutting up some French cavelry legs and some british line infantry bits with some big old side burns made from green stuff and came up with obediah talking to his mother in his shako riding a mule

I gave him an oversized spontoon as its better for keeping things that go bump in the night at bay

Many years ago I built up a platoon of death korps of kried using a couple of sets of the forgeworld gorgon pasengers and lots of green stuff. They moved on years ago but with 10th edition dropping recently i thought it would be cool to star a krieg army up again but this time with the fancy new plastic kit.