Scratch built tau allied detatchment and chaos conversions

I am so tired of my flip flopping between armies in 40k and my buying and selling armies and half painted armies. It almost made me swear off GW for life, it is expensive enough without rebuying things because of idiot decision making. Anyway, due to this bad habit of mine I am not re buying tau for a third time so am sculpting my allied detachment of one crisis suit commander and 6 man firewarrior squad from scratch(wire armatures from modelling wire bulking with miliput and greenstuff for everything else) It is ambitious and I'm a little nervous but going beyond your abilities always seems to improve them... so don't be faint hearted all of you out there sculpt your hearts out it's fun and alot easier than it looks( not to be taken to GW store or Warhammer world, they might not like that)

Here are my tau allies so far 

These were my designs for the tau sculpts. Hopefully how they will look if I pull it off but with more dimensions

 I also have been sculpting a Second Hq for my cultist heavy chaos force he is about half way to completion I started with a marine torso and then greenstuffed arms legs feed and torso detail I need to go over alot of it to add detail finish off the lightning claws as they look crap as they are in their first stage of sculpting and the face.... I'm looking forward to sculpting a really crazy face but the jump pack is going to be hard, things with proper circles or straight lines are very hard to get right.

 Just for a bit of fun I converted this guy....he is a slaneeshi cultist with heavy stubber I made him from a guards man's legs and torso and one arm the rest is greenstuff except the gasmask head is from maxi mini.

I love the thought of him shuffling about around the hive in dark corners or whatever before the chaos insurrection took place hiding his monstrous mutation under his ragged cloak until the time came to strike when he joined his fellow cultists and picked up a heavy stubber with his hideous tentacled limb and gunned down the pdf or local enforcers or whatever lol. 

Not sure if anyone reads the blog anymore as I let it decay for a while but hope if anyone is they got something out of it hopefully the idea that greenstuff is awesome :)

Star wars 3.5 cm Female Jedi green stuff sculpture

Hi, I've been trying my hand at sculpting my own miniatures recently using Star Wars as my inspiration. I recently designed my own rule set for a tabletop skirmish game set in feudal japan which we called 'Steel and Honour' I had been doing lots of green stuff conversion work on the Perry Miniature Samurai for fun and this gave me the confidence to try scratch building my own minis.

This boba fett inspired mandalorian was my first sculpt attempt.

I felt encouraged after this first attempt to continue as after one attempt I already felt that I was more talented at sculpting minis than painting them, which is something I've been doing for a while now without much success, as I can achieve a good enough tabletop quality but the finer points of miniature painting seem to elude my understanding.

After this sculpt I felt it was time to try something more ambitious so I started to sculpt this Jedi Knight, they are a black female jedi with dual lightsabres. I'm very much more pleased with this as it is an improvement and also the face came out okay which was a pleasant suprise and a relief as it is based on S and I didn't want her to get upset :)....

Apologies for the poor photography it's not my strong point that's for sure. The lighting was poor so I had to use flash, I should really learn how to use light boxes and so on.

All that is left to do with her is to file off some of her hands as I botched these badly and then paint her up ! I started on sculpting Darth Savage from clone wars and copied the pose from one of my favourite Dark Horse Star wars comics 'Darth Maul Death Sentence'

I loved this frame so much when I read this comic that I knew I had to sculpt it ..here is the mini so far it is little more than a wire frame and a tiny bit of bulking right now.

 half of the face done lol!

Darth Savage is over 7 feet tall so I worked it out that he is 4.5 cm tall when converted to the scale I am using.

The idea was to create a rule set for a Starwars skirmish type tabletop game to use these miniatures in of which these three will be the first batch of many I will sculpt. However true to my usual flip flopping ways I've just gone and purchased the dark vengance starter set box and some extra cultists and tactical marines on ebay and a chaos marines codex for 6th........ Can you guess who is going to lead my band of merry, trigger happy and completely degenerate chaos space marines.....? clue...... it's not fabius bile ;)

Tau ethereal conversion

I am in the process of building a 'farsight bomb' list for tau so lots of crisis suits are being purchased and converted into body guard crisis suits as farsight can have up to 7 body guards ! The norm is 1-2 to protect a commander lol admitedly their is alot less heavy support in a farsight army and no outflanking kroot to help out but I just love the fluff for him and the model i built and painted to represent him on the table is kinda cool in my opinion.

However it is always fun to have more than one list so I am building a second list with even less ability but I couldn't resist the urge to make my own ethereal with fire warrior veteran bodyguards ( ten of them all with one higher than normal BS making them BS 4!) This would bubble wrap the ethereal who has no armour save but the honour blade he weilds adds plus 2 strength and he has ws4 and 4 attacks on the charge. This is still a very poor unit for close combat thou but a fearless unit now with the etheral in it and lots of accurate strenght five pulse shots will do lots of damage.

This higher balistic skill means they won't need to rely so much on marker lights so these can be used to reduce cover instead or be used for other units to benefit from instead.

100 percent finished farsight paintjob/conversion

I have now completely finished farsight ... I dry brushed the base and washed the scroll but went futher and tidied up the white as it wasn't very smooth or clean (which is very important when painting white I have found out)

I also felt I went over board with the object source lighting and battle damage chips. I tuned both of these things down a few notches for a more subtle effect in both cases. It doesnt show much in the pictures but it is a big improvement on the 90 percent finished model I feel. Here are some more pictures.

 I plan to buy some more tau soon, a hammerhead, a skyray and some crisis suits. Then I can finally build a proper far sight list and do a bat rep for all of you good people. Also we are going to do a give away soon I wont say what or why, but hey everyone loves a good free stuff thing dont you? I never win give aways but at least I can give stuff away to our followers and live vicariously through you lol !

Forge world Tau commander battle suit finished

Hi there fd minis back with another post (we are on fire!) This time just a little miniatures showcase for you I painted my commander as you can see here is a video from our youtube showing the model and some talking stuff about it and some pics at the end. It starts with the eldar model you have already seen and very badly focused.

So skip to about the 44 second mark to avoid bluriness cheers!

Eldar harlequin troupe master and forge world tau commander

Hey all,
This Harlequin dude is for my mate george who plays eldar ... now this is the first Eldar i have ever painted and let me tell you it may look so so but it was an absoloute joy to paint I didnt even get round to finnishing all the gems there are that many I kinda gave up but there is also loads of oppurtunity to go nuts with freehand stuff.

The diamond black and white diamonds was freehand as is the yellow heart/cross thing on his chest most of the stuff i stole from the GW website pics anyways I hope he likes it because it took ages lol here are some more pics of the dude ...

In other news I have got full on into collecting tau again with a major purchase of a forge world XV9 battle suit which i hodge podgedly converted to a different load out from two twin linked burst cannons it came with to a more legal missile pod and fusion blaster with shield generator load out.

I've almost finnished painting my cities of death tau kill team which i will post pictures of tommorow happy blogging/hobbying thanks for readin... :)

Necromunda Spyrers, Nomads and Platformer set review

Hello all, Happy Thursday, S here and i'm on holidaaaay. A few things to show in today's post that may be of some interest. Not sure if I mentioned before but I bought this terrain set called Platformer construction set and I've been busy putting it together but more on that later.

First, Allan's projects. I decided to paint these Spyrers I have, to introduce into campaigns that i'm playing with S and George. With the background of the Spyrers being from the upper levels of the Hive and completely alien to the underhive and its inhabitants, I felt they should be painted to reflect the difference in wealth and status. At one end of the spectrum you have the Nomads who live outside of the hive, scavanging, robbing convoys and looking very grungy. I felt the natural way to go with the Spyrers was to be bold coloured, affluent looking and shiney.


This guy is a Malcadon as is the blue guy. They both have claws and webspinners and can move at a alarming speed. In a campaign the Spyrers can choose different winning conditions, one of which is that they have to kill as many people as there are members of their own gang before they can return to the lofty luxury of the Spyre. Sounds kind of easy but with so few members the odds are evened, maybe even against them and death of a Spyrer can not be compensated by buying other members.

 The guy below is a Orrus equipt with bolt launchers and powerful fists.

I know I have blogged to death about the Nomads but I find them so interesting. I found a cheap way of making them because as you all know they have been discontinued for quite some time. With a box of Cadian guardsmen, I chop off the head and replace it with the Maximini resin gas mask head I bought in Ebay and then make a hooded cloak out of green stuff. Here is a freshly converted and base coated guy.

Here is another fully painted one. He is holding an Imperial Guard Lasgun which some may find a bit unconventional but I believe my Nomads rob enough PDF convoys to have aquired some lol

Platformer review
S here again :) I'm going to post a little review of this construction set I bought online. I found a lot of images of really cool looking terrain made using this set, so many that it had me phoning up every gaming shop I could find to see if they had any. Due to some stupid issues between manufacturers there are not many around. I bought the last 3 boxes from one shop somewhere in Northern England and to be honest they have been sitting under my bed for sometime after a shocking surprise at the level of work that goes into constructing them. Conquering this constuction set makes me feel ridiculously accomplished like I should be getting some minor award in engineering or construction......I feel like I could add this to my CV haha anyways a few Ps and Cs

Cons:
-Comes in a LOT of bits.
-Requires a lot of patience.
-Requires a lot of mundane tidying with plastic cutters once taken off of sprue.
-You WILL need the instruction manual (which I hate).
-The plastic is a bit brittle you will need to be more slightly gentle than with GW terrain.
-generally fiddly

Pros:
-Is to 28mm model scale.
-Once you figure out how to use the different connectors, the possibilities of shape and size are only limited to the bits you have.What I mean is that you can make multi level sturctures with as much or little cover, with as many nooks and crannies and corners to hide around as you want.
-Most (like 90%) of the pieces click together to provide very sturdy hold without glue, you will occasionally find a piece that will click together but not as firmly as others.
- It's Cheap as chips, each box cost me 6.95.
-Unlike some terrain sets that are made to build one stucture unless you have the imagination and skills to convert,  the platformer set has no boundries you could use 50 boxes to make enough terrain for a whole gaming board

Here is a little preview, this piece I am making is nooooo where near complete. Do you like my organisation of the bits?