Crusade Armour testers and another Iron Armour Marine.

Just a couple of pics of a few marines to round out a Pre Heresy RAS squad. Heres a couple of Crusade Armour guys:

They are just basic assault marines and have blood angel arms because I didn't like the ones they came with and they would have been a pain to change to combat poses.

This is another Iron Armour guy, here with a melta, because you can never have too many meltas. On all the troops I did a bit of free hand and heavy weathering including fresh scratches, old chips and mud powder around the feet and shins. Hope you like them!

WIP Imperial Guard Armour Army Painter Spray Cammo

Finishing all of these with highlights weathering etc is taking awhile. But I thought the basic cammo looked so good I ought to get a picture up. It reminded me of the old steel legion cammo but a slightly lighter brown. I used Army Painter Leather Brown to basecoat and then Army Painter Skeleton Bone to put lines across them. It took a couple of coats to get the colour right for both processes. Make sure you leave a few mins for it to dry a little before re-applying and practice line thickness on some paper before you double up the cammo lines to avoid overspray! The cans allow a fair bit of control depending on how hard you press.

This really is the easiest and quickest way I could find to paint up cammo that ensures every tank is the same two colours (unlike some of my older tanks where I forgot the scheme or differing layers led to slightly different shades, lame I know but when trying to paint 4 armies at once you suddenly find its 12months since your last tank got painted). Oh and one can of leather brown comfortably covered all of these tanks with multiple coats and some over, it goes without saying the skeleton bone still had over half left.

WIP Middenland Greatswords on a budget.

In my recent empire aquisition I recieved a unit of 20 old metal greatswords. Great models. I'll show pics of them later before and after as I want to change details like hat/feather/scroll/skin colours/tones to bring them in line with my army a little more. (Its enough of a mish mash and needs all the tie-ins possible!) I wanted to up the unit to 30 as todays warhammer really rewards you for plonking for a chunkier sized regiment. Plus if I ever manage to play a 6k pts battle itd be nice to have a larger unit to look the part (okay units if you count the reiksguard I'm also doing!).

I imagine many like me were excited when I saw greatswords were coming out in plastic. Especially given the drop in prices on plastic cavalry and elites like black guard and black orcs when they went plastic. I was thus pretty miffed at finding the price of a plastic unit would be the same as an old metal one. Still loyal(/addicted) buyer that I am I decided to use the plastic to my advantage!

The boxed set oddly gives you four sets of spare arms and plenty of spare heads. This isn't quite enough guys for a rank of 5 so I added a couple of empire unit champion two handed swords too. these are compatable with the plastic swordsmen bodies (although you do need to do a little matching of peices before glueing, not every arm/head component set match up due to things like mimpressive beards. By picking out the more armoured bodies this can look quite effective even if you do have different legs. (If you have the really old empire sets these have some leg plate armour pieces you can pop on!) You could of course avoid painting up the legs in a completely different colour like me but I thought they looked better this way. I'll get some pics up to compare with real greatsword models once I've got them repainted (er...don't hold your breath on these I'm trying to paint up 7 chimera's at once atm!).

Reiksguard Knights on foot WIP

Many moons ago Knights seemed to be all over the shop in the Empire models range. Both different Knightly orders had their own mounted models and grand masters and also some featured on foot with a variety of equipment. Some may remember the old Reiksuard knights on foot they still show up on ebay fairly often if you don't mind shelling out a whole lot of money for them. I did mind and thought I might convert some of my own. I simply did a head swap with some of the reiksguard heads from the knightly orders box (obviously avoiding the knights panther and white wolf heads! (Tempted to do some knights panther on foot to lead my swordsmen)) and popped them on some great sword models I had sitting around from a couple of rash battle force purchases when the empire was last re-released. There are four suitable plumed helmets so to fill up the gap I used an unplumed helmet from the greatswords box. Some trimming of the torso collar and the bottom of the helmet head is required but this is as easy as converting gets:

Heres a shot of some classic perry reiksguard knights on foot models to compare:

Used without permission: http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3918843