Post-Christmas Bloat

It's always difficult doing much at Christmastime. Even if you're not seeing friends and relatives, you end up too full of booze and ham to do much except flop about like an elephant seal. But I have been able to do some work on the huge Wolsung robot. In fact, he looks rather festive, given the red and brass colour scheme I went for.

Obviously, there's quite a lot of work still to do. I like the model a lot: it's not over-detailed but there's plenty there if you want it. On the metals, I used washes of black, dark grey, brown and strongtone. The red is just successive thin coats over a black undercoat. It's difficult to know what else to do. Anyway, there's a lot of additional weathering and detail to add.

These are two small conversions. They'll be joining the gang of scientists for Necromunda. The guy on the left was an old 40k commissar model, which came missing a few bits in a job lot of damaged imperial guard. I hadn't realised how small these models were! I filed down his huge feet, gave him a new head from a dark eldar, and a pistol made from a Mantic ork's gun. His smallness will help him look like a new entrant to the gang.

The chap on the right is a Privateer Press model called Gorman DeWolfe. He was originally wearing a huge hat and a gasmask, so I removed his head (just in case I make the Zone Tripper from Hardware!). His left ankle was cut and repositioned to give him a more heroic pose. With a new head from the Genestealer hybrids, he looks like a 1940s superhero about to fight crime with Science.

The Privateer model cost me £5 in a model shop. This is one aspect of miniature painting that I really miss: the sense that you could go into the local shop, spend a few quid and come out with a single character or a few models that would be fun to make and paint. I've seen some amazing conversions over the past year, but the majority have used models from GW boxed sets of 10 or more troops. This is a bit costly unless you want to make 10 models or are willing to pool bits with friends. That said, the quality of GW plastics - and the plastics of some other companies - is so high now that it seems churlish to complain.

Oh, and how does the new blog colour look? For some reason, all the models seem slightly better painted to me now the background is no longer orange. Anyhow, Happy New Year!