Showcase: Chaos Chosen

So for the Combat Patrol event I attended yesterday (full look back on that event coming tomorrow!), I had to paint 5 Chaos Chosen, which were the sculpts from Dark Vengeance. As with the rest of my Chaos Space Marines, I painted these in a Black Legion colour scheme, with Balthasar Gold and Khorne Red some of the main features on the models.

I'm quite happy with how these guys turned out, and by painting these lot, I have completed another minor goal in my Hobby Progress Challenge! Yay!

Anyway, thanks for reading, sorry it is only a quick one today, but stay tuned for more posts about Combat Patrol and some of the tactics and interesting ideas that I picked up when I went yesterday.

~DaemonColin

Showcase: Box O' Tricks 5 Necron Warriors

Today I present the first showcase of Box O' Tricks models, hopefully with many more to come - Necron Warriors! Although they have the notorious reputation of being by far the easiest models to paint, I was really pleased with how these came out. After basecoating over the Leadbelcher with Ironbreaker, I then used Nuln Oil to wash them down and bring them to a darker hue. I also used small amounts of Agrax Earthshade to show rust, dirt or wear etc, which you can see mainly on the backs of the shoulders and some of the joints.

 I then completed the wires of the gauss blasters with a base of Caliban Green and then a highlight of Warpstone Glow.

You can see the Agrax Earthshade on the shoulders in this picture

However, the thing that I'm most proud of with these Necrons is the eyes. I'm useless at painting eyes and it always messes up a good model for me. I only messed up one but even he looks ok after some cleanup.

Anyway I think that deserves a minor hobby stamp for finishing some Necron Warriors, here's to doing a goal every day once a week?

Stay Tuned,

~DaemonColin

Hobby Progress Challenge 2016/17 - Clearing the Backlog and Looking to the Future!

As the new season of Dave Weston's Hobby Progress season starts tomorrow, I thought that I would make my ambitious list before the year kicks off. For anybody who doesn't know, the Hobby Progress Challenge is an event run yearly by Dave Weston, who runs Confessions of a 40k Addict, (www.40addict.uk) a blog that is mainly focused on hobby and painting. It is designed to help the 'lazier' of the painters to get motivated to paint more models and progress with the hobby. You make a list at the beginning of the 'season' which starts tomorrow, and then try and complete as much of it as possible by the time the next summer comes round. When you complete different goals you can tick them off and represent them with some cool stamps - this year they are purple!

Love these stamps!

This is my first year that I have decided to enter this, partly because of my woeful amount of painting that I have completed in the last year, and also the backlog that I now have which I need to get rid of. Also I have plenty of future projects, that I would like to undertake which I will talk about in a bit. So without further ado, let me present my list for the Hobby Progress Challenge 2016/17 season! My major goals are labelled by the bullet points and my minor goals by the dashes.

• Chaos Space Marines

- 5 Chosen (these need to be done this weekend for Combat Patrol on Monday)

- 3 Bikes 

- 1 Helbrute

- 1 Chaos Lord

• Vampire Counts/Death

- 2 Necromancers

- 10 Dire Wolves

- 1 Lord on a Zombie Dragon

- 20 Crypt Ghouls

- 20 Skeleton Warriors

- 1 Corpse Cart

- 2 Morghast Archai

Would like to have this collection finished so that I could perhaps enter the GW AoS GT next year??

Also thinking of getting 40 zombies, and the Start Collecting Skeleton Horde box to add to my collection as well.

• Dark Vengeance Dark Angels

- 10 Tactical Marines

- 1 Librarian

- 1 Company Master

- 5 Deathwing Terminators

- 3 Ravenwing Bikes

Need these just to be cleared so I can get on with other things.

• Box O' Tricks ongoing project

- Necrons - 1 Overlord, 12 Warriors, 3 Scarabs, 1 Triarch Stalker

- AdMech - 10 Skitarii with more to come?

- Orks - 1 Warboss, some Boyz, 6 KillaKans, 1 Trukk Gun

- Stormcast - 1 Lord Relictor, 3 Prosecutors

- Anything else that the club likes to give me to paint!

This will just hopefully go on in the background as I work through various models.

Future Projects!!

So here I present some of my floating ideas for future projects and things that I may like to do in the future! I'm not necessarily committing to doing these yet, but I have them in mind.

• 30k Death Guard - I've always wanted to dabble into 30k, one of the main things that has put me off is the price. However with B@C and other things such as kitbashing the entry level can now be quite cheap. I'm planning to make this completely out of this world with different armour marks, good painting, lots of conversions, as well as some cool bases. 

Also - Mastodon!

£300 of pure Forge World resin - what could be better?

• 40k/AoS Daemons - Yep! More Chaos! Well, Daemons have the advantage to be used with both AoS and 40k, so I figured that it may supplement my Chaos Marines quite well. I particularly like Khorne and Tzeentch so that should be interesting if I decided to follow trough with this.

• Bolt Action Germans - Deviating from Games Workshop can never be a bad thing, and Warlord are just as good a miniature company, and Bolt Action seems like a cool historical game for WW2. Also Commissar Raphel says its good and I would like to get some models for this.

• 40k Dark Mechanicum?? - Possibility to bolster the forces of my Chaos army, just a very basic idea at the moment.

So, I hope you enjoyed looking at my hobby goals for the next year, and the ideas of some of my future projects! I would like to hear some of your hobby goals so if you have any, post them in the comments below, or perhaps join the 2016/17 Hobby Season over at www.40kaddict.uk!

Stay Tuned,

~DaemonColin

WIP: Waffen SS

So after a small absence recently I'm finally back and ready to get writing some new content and I thought I'd share some WIP shots of my most recent project: A small detachment of Waffen SS for my Bolt Action German army.

These two are the first (semi)-finished units; a sniper team and a Panzershreck team. They still need basing but I'm not at this point sure what I'd like to go for. I'm still quite a way off getting the whole lot finished as I still have around 15 models to go however I've found a fairly simple method for the camo that isn't as time consuming as I originally expected.

The backs of the sniper and panzershreck models show the camo best I feel. I used a base coat of karak stone (Airbrushed), a layer of mournfang brown, a layer of warpstone glow, thin, short lines of black to break up and darken the colors and finally a wash of agrax to tone down and define the camo. This, on paper, doesn't sound like the best method however its quick and surprisingly effective. All I need to do now is decide how to base these models yet I might not decide how until I've finished the rest of the Waffen SS that I have to go with these guys.

Thanks for reading!

 -Commissar Raphel

Chat: My Thoughts on Age Of Sigmar

With Games Workshop recently announcing that the Age Of Sigmar Grand Tournament (GT) would be returning in 2017, this got me thinking about the game Age Of Sigmar as a whole.

Age Of Sigmar was released in July 2015 after the End Times and the death of the Old World and the popular Warhammer Fantasy 8th edition. At that time I was thinking about getting into Fantasy myself, although I didn't actually play a game of 8th edition before Age Of Sigmar dropped, I played several games afterwards and I had to admit that 8th edition was a better game through and through. Sigmar, with its 4 page rule set, lacked the structure to become anything more than a 'beer and pretzels' game, and I, along with others thought that the open rules allowed a lot of manipulation and exploitation, despite the fact that this could be argued as just being 'tactics'. This was proved at the Age Of Sigmar Schools League semi finals this year, where our team came up against the most stinking cheddar that could be thought of. As there was no point system or structure to the armies, just a 30 model limit, which allowed the 'That Guys' to go wild, building full lists of monsters and one kid with 30 Lord Kroaks, who quite clearly had every intention of guzzling his opponents tears by the gallon!

As a result of this new ruleset and game, many diehard Fantasy players got fed up and moved to other games such as Mantic's Kings Of War and fan made '9th Age', the would be sequel to 8th edition. In short, GW fucked up massively and screwed a lot of veteran players over, by removing both Tomb Kings and Bretonnia, as well as all the named characters, which in my opinion was the worst thing. They got themselves onto a loser in which a lot of players who were loyal customers had left and the new influx of 10 year olds was not enough to cover the drop. Of course, there were still many players interested and willing to give Sigmar its run, but lots didn't.
I'm sure that anyone who reads the blog already knows this, but I thought it would be interesting to look at Sigmar's rough history before looking at how the game might change. I personally only played a few games of AoS before sort of shelving my fantasy army and focusing more on the 40k side of things.

When the Generals Handbook was released in June a lot of hype surrounded it, and the question was raised as to whether this could be the book that 'fixed' Age of Sigmar? I was not particularly bothered at the time because I was focussed more on 40k, but one thing did strike me as a bit odd - it only cost £10! For GW to be selling a rulebook at this price is unheard of, but I think it was deliberately set low in order for those who had got bored and left AoS to try the new game modes, with less investment.
The one particular game mode that was of interest to most was the 'Matched Play' system, a points system similar to 40k, but for all the units in AoS. This caught my eye as a possible way to get back into playing Sigmar, and although it is unlikely I will be able to persuade Commissar Raphel to join me, I think its high time I broke out the Counts and gave it a go! Who knows maybe if its good, I'll attend the tournament next year? That would be fun.

Anyway, thanks for reading and leave a comment below if you have a particular personal experience or opinion on this - it would be interesting to see some other thoughts.

~DaemonColin

WiP: Box O' Tricks Lord Relictor #1 - Preparation

So carrying on with the Box O' Tricks project I prepared the Stormcast Eternals Lord Relictor so that I could paint it. As a whole I hate the Stormcast Eternals but this model actually looks good and is the best in the range in my opinion along with the Stardrake and the Dracothian Guard, despite their stupid names. The whole Stormcast fluff really does not agree with me as being gold souless bastards that are endlessly reformed when they die in battle just doesn't fit in with the idea of a fantasy setting. Well, that's what I think anyway.

To prepare this guy for painting I had to clear some mould lines and flash, these were particularly common around the banner area. Also the person who assembled this decided that it would be a perfect idea to plastic glue his scroll cape onto the back of the model before it had been painted. This was a nightmare for me as I would not be able to reach the back of the Lord Relictor's armour. Therefore I took the time to snap as much of this off as I could, luckily the gluing was completely awful so that helped. I managed to get one large section off and that will help me reach the back of his armour plate.

I also have 3 Prosecutors to paint from the Stormcast Eternals faction, so it was important that I settled on a colour scheme. I hate the gold and blue of the box art Stormcast and so I set out to look for an alternative scheme. I finally decided on the Hallowed Knights colour scheme, which consists of a main body of silver with gold accents and blue shoulder pads. I much prefer this to the vanilla scheme and I think it will suit the models perfectly- even if they are Stormcast!

Stay tuned for more posts and thanks for reading!

~DaemonColin 

Showcase: Chaos Knight

So today I have quite a special post for you guys - the showcase of my Black Legion Chaos Knight! I bought this £115 superheavy beast back in January when I decided that my Black Legion force needed a whole lot more punch. I have found in nearly two years of playing Chaos Space Marines one of the only ways to make them competitive is to add in Forgeworld units - at the peril of your wallet!

Although many of my wargaming friends advised me against it, I decided to paint my Chaos Knight in the colours of the Black Legion. I know that this isn't particularly fluffy as the Knights would be dedicated to Renegade Knight Houses, but I thought the black and gold contrast that makes up the Black Legion colour scheme would look quite good on the highly detailed kit. As you can see from the pictures, I think that it suits the model well.

There are a couple of things about my knight which I really think makes it unique, is the special gold on the armour plates that highlights a lot of the simple black, and the way I painted in between the cracks on the Knights carapace to show its devotion to Khorne. For the gold I basecoated Balthasar Gold, and then edge highlighted with Gehenna's Gold, I then washed it with Agrax Earthshade and once it was dry, I drybrushed the armour with Golden Griffon. This really helped to bring out the edges of the armour plates. For the cracks I wanted to create a blood effect to really show this renegade knights chosen god. I basecoated first with Khorne Red, then highlighted Wazdakka Red and then glazed with Bloodletter. To finish it off and add a blood effect using Tamiya Clear Red. In fact I used Tamiya for all of my blood effects on my Knight. I just prefer it to Blood for the Blood God! personally.

My Knight

The beautiful sculpt along with some of the best painting I've ever done has been backed up in game by an awesome set of rules in game. In the 10 tournament games I've played with this Knight I have only lost 2 of them! One was due to terribly bad rolls against Blood Angels and the other one was against some serious Grey Knight cheese.
Anyway, comments are welcome as always, and stay tuned for more posts about my chaos collection soon!
~DaemonColin

Showcase: Screaming Eagles US Airborne

As I did with my German Wehrmacht force, I've decided to put together a little showcase of a very small portion of my US Airborne section of my Bolt Action US army. These metal sculpts are loads of fun to paint with plenty of character and detail and in my opinion, Warlord Games work much better with metal than plastic or resin.

This group is even smaller than the German force I posted yet I still thought
that they deserved their own post.

The bush on the base of this medium mortar team is actually the top of a 1:76
scale tree!

1st Lieutenant and rifleman 

This is the first of two airborne squads that I own, the other is currently
around 70% complete

Close up of the lieutenant

Another Close up, this time of the lieutenant's accompanying rifleman 

This hasn't been a long post but thank you for reading and hopefully this becomes a gateway to me finishing up and posting some more Bolt Action minis on here.

-Commissar Raphel

Games Workshop Webstore Review Of The Week: 06/08/2016 - Deathwatch!

Seeing as Games Workshop recently released a rather large new box set - Death Masque - as well as some other Deathwatch products , I thought that it would be good to talk about them a bit. I was also thinking of turning this into a weekly post where I discuss Games Workshops new releases each week. So without further ado let's take a look at the new box set.

Death Masque - the latest 40k box set since Stormcloud Attack about 2 months ago

The new box set is priced at a very reasonable £95 the same pricing as the Horus Heresy Betrayal at Calth box set, and features two armies - the Deathwatch and the Eldar Harlequins. Neither of these factions have ever been released in a box set before and it is good to see them both get a bit of development. One thing in particular that I noticed was that Eldrad Ulthran has returned and this could mean a lot. Not only does he have a stunning new model but as Farseer of Craftworld Ulthwé he has played a major part in 40k lore, often predicting times of war and peril. In the Horus Heresy book 'The Last Phoenix' Eldrad tries to warn Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperors Children, about the forthcoming Horus Heresy although Fulgrim doesn't listen and ends up joining the side of the Warmaster. With the return of Ulthran, does this mean that we could be seeing a similar scale event, perhaps 40k 'End Times' coming up in the near future? It's certainly interesting to think about it.


Also in the box are a set of beautiful Deathwatch miniatures, some Harlequins and a rulebook all of which make this box set real value for money. Also out was a new codex for the Deathwatch as well as some other things such as dice. There are rumoured to be model kits coming out next week for the Deathwatch so I will cover these more in detail when they arrive!

Stay tuned for future posts and thanks for looking!
~DaemonColin

Showcase: Nurgle Chaos Chosen

While sorting out my workspace the other day (well, trying to) I came across the chaos chosen and hellbrute from Dark Vengeance. Due to the fact that my Imperial Guard forces have just succumbed to the dark gods I saw a perfect opportunity to add to that army with a small allied contingent of Chaos Marines. The fleshy armor plates and excessive amounts of bone on these models made them perfect for painting up in the Nurgle colors which my Renegades were edging towards so I decided to rescue these guys.

As per the little "Leave no model unconverted" rule that I have going on with my chaos army, all of these minis have been modified somehow. for some it was just small additions and slight reposing but for the Lord who had his sword swapped for an axe and the newly designated standard bearer the alterations were more significant. 

I replaced the strange looking sword with a huge axe; Much more befitting
of a Nurgle lord in my opinion.

Here I used a spare skaven banner painted to look like flesh and added
runes using Blood For The Blood God

This was the last model that I built and I was running out of conversion ideas;
I simply reposed his axe in the end.

For the old Sgt. I swapped his arm that was holding a shield for a chaos
warrior shield.

On this model I swapped the head to a more zombie looking one, I think
it came from the skullreaper kit but im not 100% sure.

These two models were practically identical. On one I just added a shield to
his back with some chains, the other had his bolter swapped for a
plasma gun

When basing these models I tried to add height to them. They're already taller than guardsmen but by mounting these models on 32mm bases with large pieces of slate glued on, I made these models stand out even further from the Renegade Guardsmen that they would be fighting beside. I was working on the hellbrute at the same time as I was these models yet I'm still not fully finished with him yet as I've decided to take the skin one tone lighter and use a slightly different recipe for his bone. Stay tuned for more and thanks for reading!

-Commissar Raphel

WiP: Box O' Tricks Necron Warriors #2 - Basecoats

After finally getting the necrons to a state in which they could be primed, I undercoated them with Games Workshop's Chaos Black Spray. I've always used GW primer, although it is expensive it does the job well. However, in the future I would like to try out the Army Painter coloured spray, although at the moment my local hobby store doesn't stock it.

I then applied a primary base coat of Leadbelcher over the main body of the necron as well as the blade on the end of the gauss blaster. This helped bring the models to life quite a bit, however they are far from done. Take a look at some of the pictures below:

I think that's all for this update, although I have some other posts in the works, which I should be able to reveal soon. More Box O' Tricks stuff as well as a showcase of some of my Chaos Space Marines, and some tactics posts aswell!
Stay tuned and thanks for looking!
~DaemonColin

Renegades and Heretics: My Undead Imperial Guard Force!

Until very recently, I've been a loyal servant of the one true God Emperor, that was until, Deamon Colin among others mentioned how dull my imperial guard army looked. I had 50 infantry, two super heavies, 7 tanks and a flyer, all painted in a shade of grey that was almost indistinguishable from unpainted minis. I decided to repaint them, and I remembered an idea that I'd had a good few years ago: Zombie Guard. Deamon Colin supplied me with some spares from his undead army and I started looking far and wide for inspiration. I finally settled on basing my force on the artwork from the cover of Iron Maiden's 2006 album "A Matter of Life and Death" which I feel embodies the sort of feel I wanted to go for. So that was that; less that a week until the schools league finals and I decided to convert and repaint every single model in my force. With a triumphant cry of "Leave no model unconverted" i set out on this slightly ambitions project, and this was the result.

Due to the tight schedule I was working to, every time a mini was finished, it was packed straight into my case ready for the tournament and I never actually saw the army as a whole until I unloaded it onto a tray at Warhammer World ready for the tournament. While I was happy with the results, I was not expecting the response that I got on the day. As a gaming list I don't think that what I was running was completely viable for a highly competitive setting however, I did bring something to the table for the team.

I was nominated for both "best army" and "best conversion" (For the fleshy camo netting on the russ) and much to my surprise I went on to win best army! 

This took me completely by surprise and I even though we didn't go on to win as a team, I was very pleased with what I achieved. Below I'm just going to add a few more shots of the army. I was offered to leave the models to be put on display at Warhammer World but I just couldn't bare to part with them when I finally came to make the decision.

A shot of the valkyrie on its own

Close up of the freehand work on the fuselage, again another little reference to my all time favorite band ;)

The first of the Leman Russ tanks. This was used as a Pask counts as. Got quite a bite on it yet it often succumbed to enemy fire early on in my games. 

Close up shot of "Pask"

Second Leman Russ

The flesh representing camo netting was what earned me the nomination for best conversion.

While I only used two veteran infantry squads in my games, this little group will probably be used as a command squad when I'm using this army as Renegades and Heretics rather than standard Guard

Possible contender for use as a company commander, Sgt., or priest

This was the first model I built for the army whilst toying with the idea. The main body is a DV cultist but the chest is a loose ribcage from a basing set and the hat and head are from the command squad and ghoul kits respectively.

Overall I had an absolute blast making and using this army. If I remember correctly it only achieved a win, a loss and a draw as an Imperial Guard list but when using it in all it's glory as a chaos renegades force I'm on a win/loss/draw ratio of 3:0:0, Not bad going if I do say so myself. I'm currently working out what I would like to add to this list and I have a few units currently in the pipeline already which I hope to share with you soon!

Thanks for reading! 

-Commissar Raphel

WiP: Box O' Tricks Necron Warriors #1 - Rebuilding

The first thing I tackled in the 'Box O' Tricks' was the 12 Necron Warriors. I originally thought that there were only ten of them but when I counted up I had 11. This thoroughly confused me until I realised that they came in squads of 12 and I was just missing a complete warrior from the outset. After this setback I decided to process the warriors in two batches - one of 5 and the other of 6. Luckily I managed to find heads and arms for this batch of models and did a quick repair job in order to get them complete.

Ragtag band of warriors!

To get these models ready for spray primer I had a lot of mould lines and flash to clean up. I did this using my hobby knife. I also discovered that as you can see in the picture above, these had been quite clearly assembled by someone at the club who had little idea what they were doing - note the wannabe Death Jester, one in from the right!

However after many hours of cursing as the necrons were poorly glued so bits kept falling off, I managed to get them ready for the priming stage!
Stay Tuned for more posts and thanks for reading!
~DaemonColin

P.S. If anyone is going to the Combat Patrol event on the 29th August at Warhammer World then drop a comment below - it will be nice to meet some new people!

Chat: Changes To Schools League Rules

Seeing as the Schools League Coordinator recently released the rules pack
for next years Schools League I thought it would be a great chance
to have a look through what has been changed and how it will affect the tournament next year.

1. POINTS REDUCTION TO 450 - Not overly happy with this one to say the least, I thought 750 was too small so I was a bit mad when this happened.
2. Blanket ban on FW rules - I can see why this has been done as some FW stuff the rules are very overpowered, however I believe that if you pay more for a specific model you should be able to use the rules that come with it.
3. Slay the Lord Of War - This is a new secondary objective introuduced for games which awards 8 points when scored. This basically shouts don't bring a LoW otherwise you're basically handing the game to your opponent. Not that many Lords of War fit in 450pts!
4. Game points increase - Winning a game now gives you 10pts and a draw gives you 5. This switches the tournament to have more of a game focus which is not a bad thing in my opinion.

Overall I think that the coordinator is trying to steer Schools League to more of a skirmish tournament aimed at new players. Although this is not altogether a bad thing it makes every one of your units on the table a whole lot more valuable. If you have an opinion on this stick it in the comments below as it would be intereting to get more views on this.

Stay Tuned!

~DaemonColin 

Showcase and Chat: The Humble Beginnings of my Wehrmacht Force

As we mentioned when we first started the blog, Warlord Games' Bolt Action was probably going to feature on here at some point. So after having some issues with photographing my Renegades and Heretics force I decided to try and see what I could do in terms of getting some decent pictures of a small portion of my German army.

When I first took the plunge into a new game system around a year ago now and bought the D-Day Firefight set, these (with the exclusion of the MMG team) were the first minis that I assembled and painted. I distinctly remember finding them to be an absolute joy to paint and I'm still quite happy with the finish on them now. Just the overall look and feel of Bolt Action models just inspires me. They might not be as detailed as Games Workshop minis but the simple nature of them is what I think really makes them shine in their own unique way. 

Since buying the starter box and playing my first few games I have accumulated quite the collection of a total of around 5K points in Germans and Americans and due to recently discovering the film "Enemy At The Gates" I am now turning my sights to building a Soviet Force. 

For now however I have decided to show only these few models as a little taster as to what's to come. When I have a little more space for taking pictures then maybe I'll do a few whole army shots but here are a few more pictures of the models above.

The first of the two 5 man veteran infantry units.

Second infantry squad, this time with an LMG

First lieutenant and infantryman with an assault rifle

MMG team. I built this before realizing that there should be a third man

Hanomag half track with two MMGs