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

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

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: 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

Schools League Semi Finals - My Day!

So, yesterday our 40k and AoS teams took the train down to Nottingham for the 2016 Warhammer World Schools League Semi Finals. These were the teams -

40k
Me - Chaos Space Marines
Alex (Commissar Raphel) - Imperial Guard
Jake - Grey Knights
Johannes - Tyranids

AoS
Lucas - Order - Lizardmen/Fyreslayers
Andrew - Order - High Elves/Sylvaneth
Will - Chaos - Skaven
Tom - Death

My List - Black Legion CSM
ML1 Sorcerer
2x Cultists
1x Raptors
1 Chaos Knight

Game 1
My first game was against this really great guy called Ross who played Dark Eldar. Concidentially, he also runs a blog so go check him and his team from Wolverhampton Grammar out at: http://wargamer-hq.weebly.com/ The mission we played was the Relic. Considering, that I had never played Dark Eldar before this was a new experience for me, and Ross had some great models in his army, including some converted Grotesques. Unoftunately, I didn't manage to get a shot of Ross's models so here are some pictures from the game.

My Chaos Knight with the Relic takes on Ross's Talos

The scene at the end of the game!

 In the end, even with Ross taking First Blood and Slay the Warlord, I just managed to win 4-2! Great game!


Game 2
My next game was against  a guy called Will from Norwich. He played a seemingly nasty Imperial Guard tank list, which started the game taking everything out apart from one squad of Cultists and my Chaos Knight, The Knight then went on a rampage taking out every tank but one Leman Russ, and securing the victory!

Will's beautifully painted tank list!

The Knight leaves a trail of destruction behind it

All in all another great game - Norwich went on to win the Most Sporting Team - Congrats guys!

Game 3

My final game was against a guy called Jake from Cambridge. He also played Chaos Space Marines, and had a great strategy for holding up my Knight! He charged some fearless Bloodletters in and held up the Knight for a turn. However when the Knight got out of combat and the Possessed became terrified and ran away, it became a well fought victory for myself.

Jake's Khorne themed CSM List

AoS

Despite fighting hard against some extremely cheesy armies, the AoS team did unfortunately not go through to the national final. Better luck next time guys!

Here are some cool pictures I got of really nice AoS armies/models, take a look:

Awards

Well, I got nominated for best painted, and Alex (CR) won something rather large, but I think I will let him tell you about that. All in all, we got through to the NATIONAL FINAL! 

Thanks to all my opponents - you were great - , the Suitglasses squad and Mr Hopkins for taking us to Warhammer World. We have something pretty big planned for the final, which we may leak on here....

Chat: My Grey Tide Headache...

Story of my life...

Like most hobbyists, I have a grey tide. However, mine is increasingly becoming a bit of a problem as I hop from one idea to another leaving behind me a wave of half painted and built plastic (and resin) models. As a result, I have had to restrain myself from buying anything new until I have completely finished and painted every single model that I own, to a good standard.
I find it difficult sometimes to get motivated to paint. Usually my motivation stems from tournaments, and since the only thing I have coming up is the official GW Schools League National Semi Finals later this month, I'm finding it difficult to sit down and paint, as most of my army is complete for that. So lets go through what I have that needs work:

Painted, yes - but not to a standard I'm always happy with

Chaos Space Marines
Raptors (5)
Bikes (3)
Daemon Prince
Cultists (20)
Chosen (5)
Helbrute

Zombie Dragon with no wings...

Vampire Counts
Battalion Box-
20 Crypt Ghouls
10 Dire Wolves
20 Skeleton Warriors (Unbuilt)
Corpse Cart

Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragon
2 Morghast Archai
FW Wight King BSB
2 Necromancers

Dark Angels
The entirety of Dark Vengeance (DA Side) :(

Even the Deathwatch would struggle to chew through this lot!

40 Genestealers
Won these for coming 3rd place in a recent charity cup I played in. Need stripping and the plan is then to sell them on ebay.

So as you can see, I will not be buying anything for next 2 months at least, but no doubt I will be tempted when I'm at Warhammer World on the 26th.
Better get started!

Welcome to the Blog!

Welcome to Always Strikes Last, a new blog that covers wargaming and painting. We'll probably be focusing on Games Workshop miniatures however we'll probably expand and post about other systems from various companies too. The blog will mainly follow myself and a fellow hobbyist as we build and paint our way through various projects, and talk about many of the topics that tabletop wargaming has to offer. I will say now, don't coming looking to our blog for Golden Deamon winning paintjobs- both of us are nowhere near that level in terms of painting or modelling. We set this up to share our work and get feedback so that we can help improve our own work and, with any luck, give some inspiration to others.

Anyway, let us introduce ourselves:

I've been into wargaming since about Christmas 2014, so I'm a fairly new kid on the block. I'm currently working on the two armies I collect - Black Legion Chaos Space Marines and Vampire Counts, most of which aren't painted.

My fellow contributor and friend Commissar Raphel, who originally got me into the hobby, has been modelling and painting for the past 4 years and so is a great deal more experienced than I am. He currently is working on converting his Imperial Guard 666th Penal Legion to have an awesome zombie theme, and painting his Talabecland Empire army.

The plan is for at least one of us to update this at least once a week so we'll see how that goes.
Stay Tuned!
Daemon Colin