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

Averland Detachment

Hers the smallest part of the empire army I picked up, I'll drop a few more posts of them from time to time but Averland has always struck me as one of the best flavour states, being at one end of blackfire pass its hardened troops defend the route taken by many orc WAAAGHs for generations. Also its exciting elector count Marius Leitdorf, infamous as the Mad Lord of Averland; the genius, pompous, rage prone swordmaster is packed with character to lead an army.

They're a very nice tabletop standard. I suppose one day I might do a little work on the faces but I'm really enjoying throwing down with a fully painted army! I got in a game earlier today and was soundly beaten by orcs.

I bought these along with a whole lot more for a bargin price from a Ben Couzens, cool-kid-on-the-block on warseer (I'll link to his beastmen stuff there if warseer sorts its problems out and comes back up soon). He sells on ebay as Komick-Kid. Hes got a few bargain lots up, for a great 40k mordian army, a vast 40k orc horde and a couple of converted giants, check them out!:
http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/komick_kid/?_trksid=p4340.l2559

Knights Panther

My 40k mojo has worn a little, I've too many things on the go that seem to becoming a struggle to finish so I thought I'd do something in completely different colours for a change. I picked up a vast (almost)fully painted Empire army (actually it seems big enough to be three armies and was labeled as such on the cases it arrived in) for an absolute bargin price. I'm waiting on a reply from the chap/chapette to see if i can link to them or some such, hopefully he won't mind this going up now! While most of it is a good enough standard I wouldn't dream of touching it in my normal way I couldn't help but meddle a bit:

These had been neatly base coated and had some shading with very nicely painted flesh on the faces that were visible. As a result they were a dream to paint! I washed down the blue with thinned down badab black and then asurmen blue then added scratched weathering to all the blue armour sections. I washed down the silver armour with badab black. I washed down the gold armour with Baal red (to contrast its warmth with the cool blue) and built back up with burnished gold. I added some extra colour to the flaming meteor banner (which had been blocked before, the 'Panther' Penants had been painted before). Finally I rebased them to be more inkeeping with my army and (future) realm of battleboard. I'm not sure if I want to change the colour of the plume to blue and yellow or if this will then get lost in the model. What are your thoughts?

Oh I also meant to say a huge thank you to all those who have been dropping by recently and especially to those who've recently joined the blog. Really appreciate it, followers are up to 56, a number i never dreamed of when I first started out! Cheers all!

Valkryie WIP How To: Simple Weathering

I wanted to do something different from my desert camo for this, I decided on a light grey for the navy and picked up an army painter spray: Uniform Grey. Its final colour is nice and it sprays on uniformly, smoothly and thinly so no detail is lost. I set to line highlighting and it was frankly very boring looking. Not wanting to do striped camo's etc. I went for something that would keep the overall look while giving you something to look at close up. HEAVY weathering.

Here I'll talk about three methods I used to weather this up:

1st: (Gryphonne Sepia)Wash rust/oil stains:

This is about the easiest way you can add a bit more detail to your units so long as they have a light colour. If theyre darker dry devlan mud or a thinned down snakebite leather/mechrite red mix.

The idea here is to take just a little of the wash colour on your brush and then create dripping stains from areas that might rust or be heavily oiled: bolts, bolted panels, underhanging ledges, etc. Just take a little time to think about where this should be used and I'd generally suggest its a less is more technique. If you wanted to get serious you could use one colour for rust and another for oil in different areas. You can't get easier than this!

2nd Aged Chips:

The idea here is to give the look of small chips where the metal has aged and discoloured. This is underhighlighted to give the impression of light bouncing off the paint under the chip. (Sadly I only worked that out after a bit and my wings have upside down highlights. Still hopefully no-one will look close eh :D)

Above is a rear wing. I'm going to take you through the steps I used to build up these three weathering techniques to give a beaten/used/poorly maintained look. Its got a tiny bit of gryphonne sepia under its flaps' joints. I decided not to use much here as I've got lots elsewhere.

First up is the lower highlights: Take your highlight colour (for me astronomican grey) and draw smiley faces all over your armour plates avoiding the edges (they're for the next technique). Don't worry if theyre a little thick when you paint your next colour you'll paint over them a little.

Paint scorched brown lines using the smiley faces as a guide. Try and cover the thicker highlights so you are left with a very thin constant thickeness line highlight.

For the larger chips go in with a 50/50 scorched brown/chaos black mix to add a darker centre to your corroded patch. You can add a little boltgun metal to some of the very large chips to give the impression they're semi aged or perhaps recently re-chipped.

3 Edge chips and scratches:

Here you want to scratch up your edges, perfect for covering up where your line highlights have got a bit thick! These represent recent damage and continuously worn areas that don't have time to corrode before being re-scratched.

Using a thin or spread out beat up brush feather some of the armour edges with charadon granite. (I moved to the tip because the pic of this step didn't come out right!) I'd recommend not coving all of every edge I went for some of all the forward edges of my plane. If you were doing something orky you could perhaps go overboard and use this instead of edge highlighting your stuff.

Using the same technique feather boltgun metal inside the charadon granite leaving a rim of this left. If you wanted to further this technique you could try line highlighting outside this similar to the technique above but given I was trying to be quick I didn't bother! You can also do some of this on your panels where they're likely to be weathered from use around door handles, where feet will have walked or just occasional random scratches but I'd reconmmend not going overboard with these.

I'll leave you with my wing sections to give you an idea of what an area targeted with lots of all of these techniques ends up looking like. The aim is to try to build up lots of different weathering and colours to break up an otherwise dull and uniform scheme and add a touch of stylized realisim rather than everything looking factory fresh. I hope these help/give you some ideas, they're just how I like to do things!