The Old Guard!

The other day I was looking through some pics of my old miniature cabinet and realized that I actually quite like my old Imperial Guard army! It's still far from a "finished" army but still, there are 60 models in it. More than most complete Space Marine armies. Hehe!

Anyway I took some time to photograph the little rascals earlier today and here's the result. 

What's painted so far: Company command squad, a platoon with four squads and a stormtrooper squad.

 Command Squad.

Company commander with power sword. I wanted to give him a kind samurai look so I put him in a pose similar to hassō-no-kamae and bent his sword a bit backwards, making it slightly katanaish.

Company commissar with stormbolter and power sword. 

Company Missionary.

I especially like the overloaded backpack this guy carries! Makes for a nice lived-in feel.

Veteran sergeant armed with a shotty! I felt I just had to make one.

Company Standard. 

Platoon command squad with lascannon and flamethrower.

Had to convert myself a few flamethrower equipped troopers.

Looking at it now I think I should have done the hose in a different way. He looks awfully close to tripping on it!

      Lascannon taking position behind some urban rubble...

All the bricks was from some 1:35 scale model kit.

Alpha squad with attached preacher and veteran sergeant.

Preacher with bad teeth and a cudgel. Fear him!

Alpha squad support weapon. A heavy bolter.

Beta squad with distinguished veteran sergeant!

Veteran sergeant Holtz! He used to be a lowly trooper, but in the one and only game I've played with these guys so far he managed to down a Hive Tyrant (or was it a Carnifex?) with his modest lasgun so I decided to make him into a special modelling project for my next squad. :)

Beta squad heavy weapon, a missile launcher.

Gamma squad with lascannon, meltagun and veteran sergeant.

Gamma squad heavy weapon.

Delta squad with heavy bolter and grenade launcher.

Delta squad support weapon.

Stormtrooper squad Omega with veteran sergeant, a plasma gun and a meltagun. Even though the newer Kasrkin stormtroopers are better models, I think these minis have a much cooler design. The sculpts aren't up to GW's usual high standard, but I like how they look kind if sinister in their hi-tech gear. 

 Close up of a stormtrooper. Much better design! The Kasrkins are a bit too... plain, as it were.

Squad support weapon!

 The sarge...

I still have more models lying around for this army. I think it's about one more squad, two heavy weapon squads, another stormtrooper squad and one or two platoon command squads. Definetly enough to more or less "finish" the infantry part of the army. What I really need is some armour. Oh, and some sexy, sexy air support!

I've more or less stopped playing GW's big games, but looking at this army again now after five years I kind of get the itch to finish it. Or at least make it playable. Hmm...

 So, that's it! Sorry for the long post. Hope you enjoyed the pictures.

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Put your trust in the Assault Cannon!

Today I tried FFG's new game Space Hulk: Death Angel for the first time, and in spite of doing it solo I had a blast! It's quick, tense and very thematic. This is what the game looked like in the beginning:

Three teams of two terminator space marines each. The game is structured around the column formation where the position and facing (left or right) determines what you can do and where you can attack. There are also different terrain cards (corridor, vent, prometheum tank, door etc) that determines where genestealers may spawn.

I managed to hold off the nasty aliens pretty well in the beginning and I was almost starting to get a bit cocky, but things went very wrong when I reached the Hibernation Cluster and I was quickly down to only three men!

Surrounded by genestealers and having lost both Sergeant Lorenzo and Librarian Calistarius, things were looking dire. Luckily for me though brother Valenco was still alive and this kind of target rich environment is what the assault cannon was made for...

When I finally arrived at our objective, a toxin pumping station brother Scipio was lost to some kind of alien psychic attack and only Red Team was left.

The last two marines were fighting back to back to stave off the hordes and activated the toxin pumps to kill the unseen aliens still lurking in tunnels and airvents. Thanks to the gas no more alien reinforcements arrived and brother Valenco used his assault cannon with great skill, decimating his enemies. It looked like the two brothers would pull through when the last genestealer suddenly flanked brother Leon and ripped him to pieces! Brother Valenco avenged him with his assault cannon and as the spinning barrels slowly wound down he realized that he was alone. All his brothers were dead. 

But so were all the genestealers...

Yepp, with quite a bit of beginners luck I actually managed to win this first game of Death Angel! The whole Attack, Move or Support mechanic is great and I can imagine the tactical discussions when playing it with a group of friends.

Great little game!

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Carrier done!

I sat down today at about 21:00 and thought I'd finish the carrier. It wouldn't take too long I said to myself, and here I am at 01:00 - just finished. These Firestorm: Armada models are quite big and take longer to paint than you think. I'm almost dreading painting the battleship.

Anyway, here she is:

I love all the great pipes going into the engine! 

Tried to get a shot of the hangar doors (and the supposed light) but again it gets kind of washed out because of my bad photography setup. You can actually see it better at the two rear doors.

A group shot of what's done so far. 

"We break for no one!"

So there we go! My current goal is to paint the starter fleet (battleship, three cruisers and six frigates) plus one  carrier, so I'm almost there. Hehe! I'm now pondering whether to tackle the BB next or the cruisers. Hmm...

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Carrier WIP, part II

Last time I said that I'd given up on trying to paint the open hangar doors, but looking at the boring black rhombi I decided to give it another go. I'm still not sure about it, but at least it's better than just flat black. However, does it actually look like light spilling out or just... weird?

Not the best pictures as the ambient light is a bit too strong kind of washing out the interesting areas, but better than nothing I hope.

Haven't got around to starting on the brown parts yet... next time. :)

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Don't forget to wave hello to Jupiter!

Since I made a post about when Mars was close to Earth (and ni opposition) back in January I suppose I'd be a bad astronomy enthusiast if I didn't do the same for our Solar system's big boy Jupiter.

Today and tomorrow are the best two days to see Jupiter as it's approaching Earth for the closest encounter until 2022. These two days it is also in opposition meaning only the moon itself will be brighter.  Definitely something worth watching! So if there's a clear sky where you live go outside, turn your face outwards and experience the miracle that is our Solar system...

Read more about it over here!

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Carrier WIP

Today it was election day in Sweden and while watching the vote tally I decided to start working on my Hive class carrier. It comes in three pieces; the large main hull and two side pieces covering the 12 hangar doors. Since I wanted some detail on the doors I chose to paint these separetaly so currently it looks like this:

Of course, it will look like this:

My original idea was to paint the open hangar doors in a yellow colour and use it to highlight nearby areas, but after some experimenting with it I couldn't get it to look good. I'm not very experienced with painting reflected lights, so I think I'll save it for another time. Hehe!

So, that's the grey areas more or less done, next up: brown.

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Pair of finished frigs

I decided to finish a couple of the frigates to make sure I was satisfied with the colours I'd chosen, and here's the result:

Contrary to the cruiser I'm quite happy with these! I think it's a combination of the model being smaller and me using a different (and faster! Yay!) technique. So I'll redo the cruiser in the same way and see what happens.

My original inspiration was actually the Shroud Mages from Spartan Games' other naval game Uncharted Seas. That's to say, brown, metal and brass. I early on realized that I couldn't use metal quite as extensively as on the shroud mages so went with dark grey instead, but I kept the brass details for a slightly steampunk look. Since the engines are quite hi-tech looking though I went with a blue/white sheen that I think makes a good contrast next to the retro feel of the rest of the ship.

So, feeling good about my Relthoza now. I'm considering skipping the cruisers again and go straight for the carrier. Hmm...

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Frigates WIP

I decided to try painting some frigates to see what they'd look like with my brown/grey colour scheme. This time I did a few things differently and they look more like how I imagined them.

They're far from finished, but here's a work in progress shot:

After highlighting the last two it'll be time for some washes and inks and then we'll see what happens. Hehe!

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Troublesome Arachnids...

As I've mentioned earlier I started painting one of my Relthoza cruisers a couple of weeks ago to test out a colour sceme. The Relthoza ships are kind of tricky as there's no particular colour that jumps at you when you see them (at least not for me), but I decided to try a dark brown and grey combo. I didn't really like how it turned out so I put it away for a while pondering on how to proceed.

However I brought it out again today and continued experimenting with it. My biggest problem is with the big flat  "wings" as they're kind of hard to highlight. In the end I did it kind of slap-dash just to get a general idea of the final look.

I still didn't like it and had more or less settled on respraying and trying another configuration when I decided to try and use a grey wash on the brown areas. This worked pretty well, giving the miniature the more indistinct grey/brown colour that I'd wanted from the beginning. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I've at least decided to postpone repainting. This is what it looks like at the moment:

The highlights and detailing are a bit hap hazardous, but you get the idea.

So, I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to this colour scheme and I'd love to hear any input or ideas about how it could be made better. Is it a scheme that can be salvaged or should I start again from scratch?


Oh, and it finally hit me why the Relthoza cruisers always have felt kind of familiar to me; they look very similar to the Minmataar Rupture cruiser from EVE online! Just look at this:

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