Christmas & Remembrance

Let me start this post off with a congratulations to my grandfather on moving on to the afterlife, one day I hope to join him there where he can again bring joy to my and everyone's afterlives. He will be badly missed by everyone, it was a rough few days after his passing and we are all now finally making peace.

With Christmas comes money to buy more warhammer stuff. Today I will go out and buy some paints and other assorted goodies that tickle my pickle. Currently I am painting a Librarian in tactical dreadnought armor. I've decided to go with the classic ultramarine blue, covered with 5 washes of [1 part skull white, 5 parts water, 1 part ogryn flesh, 1 part glue]. Turns out this gives a very nice looking highlight for photographing (yes, all those highlights are actually on the model, not from any external light source).




I also went with red on the shoulderpad since my SM are red, now SM and not blood angels, I'll wait for a new codex before I try to use them. As you can see the robe is in progress right now, what I want to do is what you see below, which I first learned to do on this Eldar Banshee



I forget how many layers that was, its about 5 I think. One day I'll finish a space marines force and do my sexy eldar.



Anyway, next wednesday I play my cousin chris in a 500-750 point match, my SM against his IG, I'll post many pics and a batrep here and on the Bolter & the Chainsword. Back to painting! Merry Christmas Season all!

bought aobr

Oh man, I bought assualt on black reach! So I dremel'd off all the silly ultra marine symbols and I'm sanding everything down and basing them all currently. I'll take pics tomorrow because I redid everything and make a detailed post about what I'm trying to do. Good news is, now I have 1750 points.

Eldar

One day I will complete an army, I swear I will. Until then I am going to have fun painting random things. The winter is upon us and that again means I will try my best to paint things. Currently I am working on an eldar farseer, the metal one with singing spear and shirken spear (I still can't spell it). The basic idea behind this army is that I'm aiming for something to contrast my blood angels, probably around the 500-750 point range. When I say contrast I mean shooty instead of 18" OCE charging.

Later I'm going to clean up a box of banshees and spray them white.

Mmmmm 17$ predator

So I ordered a predator online for 17$ which I'll convert to a baal pred eventually, but for now, assembly. I was drawn to the "drive me closer, I want to hit them with my sword" idea since a baal pred is a melee tank, for all intents and purposes. Here is my version of the classic.









Magnetized sponsons! =o

OMG Update

So, whats it been, 6 months? Should have been, thats when I stopped co-op. Anyway, here I am sitting at my desk with 26$ worth of free 1/8"x1/16" and 3/8"x1/16" magnets, some metal rod, and super glue.

What, you may ask, am I doing with these? Why I'm making sniper scouts from scratch to save 25$!

Anyway, attached are some pics of the magnets, magnet mods, and home made sniper rifle.. The sniper rifle is made from the butt of a shotgun, old tv antenna rod (I knew one day these things would come in handy), and pieces from the scout bolter handgun. I'm gonna magnetize the sniper rifle (with a magnet in the shoulder of the gun and one in the body, so this way I can swap out sniper rifles for regular bolters is I need to use scouts and want to save points).








Other ideas include

Almost done with the goblin archers

Anyway, interview went well today, now some more goblins!


Bows painted!! I used foundation Calthan Brown, gonna highlight with bubonic brown.




Then I decided to not be lazy, and painted the belts. Those will be inked to hide the over painting.



Next, the arrows & pouches get snake skin leather, the arrows will get bubonic brown highlights.

But first, gonna watch the end of the us open playoff.

Oh silly night goblins

Well I started doing up the night goblin archers today, and at the end of the day I have 20 night goblin archers sprayed black, and skin green'd. Got em all mounted





Sprayed chaos black after I took all the mold lines off





Lined those suckers up so I could assembly line paint them




And 3 hours later (I was distracted) I had 21 night goblins green skin'd and ready for their bows to be painted, after which I'll go back and tough everything up with chaos black again, then ink.

Well, access to funds has started

And with the access to funds, money is being spent. So Justin ordered the battle for skull pass, I have night goblins, 84 +3 to paint (minus 1 as of posting, since I'm posting to show the first NG fanatic I painted). Anyway, it took a little over an hour and a half, but I have one night goblin painted.



Glued!


Gesso'd! Because it was 83 degrees out at 2 in the morning with 80% humidity, I had to gesso rather than prime.


Finish Painting! Now I just have to read how to highlight, practice once, and highlight this little guy. Oh, and I want to paint his wristbands black, I painted them brown accidentally (because I didn't know any better).

Just putting together a few more assualt troops

With the rule changes coming and rumors they're changing the minis, I wanted to make sure I had at least 1 full squad of assault troops that looked the same. Drilling out plasmas tho has given me some questions, so tell me what you think of the wide bore please?







Oh, and I enjoyed some nice golfing yesterday, I'd like to title the first pic "ooooo sexy".

spring jam day

So yesterday, friday, I came home at 1:30pm, because I dropped the class I had at 2pm, I failed a midterm in, so I withdrew from it. Anyway, my girlfriend had work from 5-10 yesterday, so I decided, hey, my dad is home, lets go buy some death squad guys, and build them. So I go to the games workshop dealer in woodbridge mall, they have none. So I stand there, "how much do I want to spend, ooo this is nice." So I walked out of there 81.50$ poorer, but well stocked on glue, green stuff, those clippers that GW makes cause I really needed a pair and couldn't find a good equivalent anywhere else, and an attack bike squadron. Super fun happy time! (started drinking about half hour ago, finishing this now, mmm Navan cognac).

Paragraph return:
Anyway, point of this is, posting pics from ben folds and pics of my latest bikes, 1 ready for paint so far.

School is the biggest Hoover© I know...

So yeah, school (6 classes worth of college) is sucking the time right out of my day. I should be doing some Process Modeling right about now, but since I instead wanted to search for jobs last night (another very important thing that will make me either happy or sad in the future) I am not even done with my History readings yet.

Anyway, last night I did find time to glue my LeMartes to his base, and filed him down a little more. I figure I'll get the main body done by the end of May (along with several other tac marines, maybe even my assualt vet sgt) and then figure out what I want to do with adding some "Death Mask" features to him, along with his left shoulder pad, which I'm probably going to steal the design from someone on the Bolter and the Chainsword Blood Angels forum.

Anyway, time to go read history, lay out what I need for process modeling, and enjoy the rest of my day!

Oh, and good news, I finally finished that one assualt troop u see below, he looks pretty damn good.

One week later

So I started class again, so that means less time for painting... OR DOES IT!!!

No, it does, so I finally finished that assault troop, took forever, cause I didn't know what exactly I wanted. Anyway here are the pics

3 hours laters (production time)

Well, this bitch took 4 hours to paint, but i tried some new tricks, here are the results

Some 1hr at a time pics

Figured I'd show pics of how I get paint onto the guys.

1 hour

just a long post I made on my guild's website

Mal asked me a question that I answered with a ridiculously huge post, so I thought I'd add it here too.

Whats the blue putty it looks like your using for assembly? or is that just for test fitting?

hat painting style do you use? i prime/undercoat black, basecoat dark angels green, and give a 80/20 DA green/White mix for highlights on the armor(either edges, or overall, depending on how bright i want the model to be). Then its on to the other parts which generally get 2 coats, a base and highlight, and then its done.

http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=prod...1201&lpage=none

They call is bluestick, I call it funtac, or at least thats what we called in when I was in elementary school. Its reuseable sticky putty, cleans off real easy, its sitting in a little ball on my desk currently.

I use it to pose the guys, see what things look like together, hang wall posters in my dorm. I carry my spare pieces in a little tubberware box, and always keep the ball of bluestick in there. On the one pic of my atk bike, you can see I was just using it to hold everything together, just to make sure I had all the pieces the way I wanted them, then I took pics so I can try to put it back the way I had it in the first place. So far its working out very well.


Painting wise? Thank god I live with 2 art majors, they've been really helpful in giving me good ideas and showing me some nice ways of getting low build-up. I've been priming with delta ceramics white gesso (You can se the bottle in the backgorund of one of my pics). I add black ink (i'm using standard higgins waterproof, hah, waterproof my ass, it's not waterproof) to my gesso so I get a nice dark grey base on my models, a little darker than what they start as. I add a lot of water to it, and just slap it on, it dries and sticks to the surface nicely, doesn't leave any bumps.

You might have noticed, I superglue my guys to the base, then glue the base to a bottle cap, so I can paint easier and have a heavier base.

Basecoat I use a medum pigment standard acrylic paint, but now I'm spray painting with GW chaos black, god it's so much easier. I didn't prime my last 2 guys, and they came out fine, the other guys I primed I didn't lose any detail on, so I'm split on that decision.

For my red, I'm dry brushing a high gloss red, rinsing my nylon flat brush often in a water/brush cleaner mixture to keep build up from forming. I don't paint anything red I don't want to be red later, like the brown waist bags, or the chest peice (tho I'm not worrying about spill over so far, I just go back and black it). When I say dry burshing I'm really taking my time, like 2-3 hours per model (I can do 1 guy from sprues to finished in 5 hours, at least that what the first test blood angel was, probably shorter now that I'm spray painting 3 guys and their guns at a time). Side note, for the tac troops, I basecoat guns and backpacks off, my assualt troops I'm spraying with jump packs on, just so I dont have the difference paint strokes).

One note on the black I'm using, since it is a medium pigment black, I thin it with the black higgins ink, gives great cover, thins just like water http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.p...c=119231&st=100

Progress

Well here are some of my guys finally with the right color paint on them, progress is slow, but it's all coming together now that I'm at home and not working. Hopefully I have 3 more guys completed before I leave for school tomorrow.

Also, what do we think about this pose?

9pm - 3 months ago

First let me welcome whoever may stumble upon this blog for its purpose will be two-fold. First, I have created this to showcase my artwork (and my groups), in this case Warhammer 40,000 models. (Yes, I'll be trying to do this wiki style by default, detailing and referencing anything I can). Secondly, I will be using this as the main communication tool for all FSBS related activities I will be hosting in the coming years at Drexel.

Currently my group is 8 people, more importantly let me explain how this group came to be. 3 months ago my RA told me about fsbs, for students by students, a learning community program Drexel University was starting, and there would be free pizza, so I went! Then I found out we could apply for funding, not through safac (Drexel's money-hander-outters to groups), but through RLO, making getting money a lot easier since I wouldn't have to plan a year in advance. Also housing was first-come first-served this year, so halfway through the meeting, I ran upstairs and applied and told all my friends to apply and join my group.
It was at that moment I signed up that me and a few of my friends decided to try to get money to play Warhammer, later we'd pick 40k, since one of the guys was familiar with it and had pieces.
So one 4-page proposal and 2 weeks from now we'll see if I get the 1600$ I asked for.

Anyway, four of the 8 guys in my group for next year want to play 40k, and I know other people around campus play, so one day I'll be hosting tournaments in North Hall, which has a few nice big rooms with lots of tables. I'll post information for those tourneys here. Also, I'll be posting pictures of my army as it's being built, like later when I continue working on my space marine attack bike.