Meanwhile, in Khornwall

I have returned from holiday in Cornwall and, in a truly awkward attempt at a segue back into model painting, I have been working on some Khornish miniatures.

These were the Blood Warriors from the Storm of Sigmar boxed set. Like the other Khorne soldiers, I thought it would be good to convert them into post-apocalyptic types. A basic Blood Warrior looks like this:

The rabbit ears would have to go. I was slightly nervous about this, but simply hacking them off and filing down the result left the warriors with interesting plates over the sides of their heads, like a neckbrace. At any rate, it looked solid and a darn sight less silly than the original outfits.

I removed the slightly weird shield-things and replaced some of the axes with less medieval-looking weapons, including a couple of guns. Likewise, the strange stomach-mouth on one of the models was filled in. In the model shown above, I cut off the silly beard, which even ZZ Top would regard as excessive, and replaced it with a roll of cloth (that probably looks like some kind of mutation, now I think about it). So here we are:

This guy is in charge, as much as anyone could be.

This one is my favourite.

It's actually a ball and chain.

The painting looks a bit rough and ready, largely because it is, but I think it suits the miniatures. I went for a rusty, daubed look. Presumably these guys smear red paint on their armour or, failing that, Chicken Tikka Masala. In fact, painting things with curry is beginning to look like a theme of this blog.

In other news, it's exciting to see that a new version of Necromunda is being released. The models look pretty good, although I've never been very keen on House Goliath, and high heels on models is (are?) a pet hate of mine. My only concern is that they might be a bit big. Everything from GW seems to be getting larger, and it would be nice if they scaled against the original models.

Old Lead

In my continuing efforts to work through the vast heap of stripped lead that I've acquired - I've got a whole Cadbury's Roses box full of metal models, which weights about a ton and reeks of Dettol - I had a look at two of the oldest models I own and tried to make them look at least presentable.

The first one is an ancient metal termagant. Termagants are the lowly footsoldiers (hoofsoldiers, technically) of the Tyranid hive mind, and have gone through several iterations over the years. Personally, I think that the old metal models capture them best: small, fast, vicious and nasty, scuttling down pipes and through the underhive, looking for things to shoot and jab.

In keeping with this image, I based the termagant on a cast-off piece of plastic and painted the base to look like a metal walkway rusted by the toxic sludge below it. The termagant itself was not converted, and was painted an unhealthy fleshy colour, like a mixture of the facehugger from Alien and the last chicken in the rotisserie section of a large supermarket, spinning sadly on a long-neglected spike, avoided by all but the very drunkest customers.

Not for human consumption, but good at consuming humans

The next model was a Squat "living ancestor". Apparently, this guy used to sit in a sidecar, and was propelled into battle by his biker-dwarf brethren. I have no memory of buying him and I certainly don't have his bike and sidecar. I gave him a pair of Ramshackle Games robot legs and the engine/exhausts from a tractor.

Since I couldn't cut him off his resin base (as I quickly discovered), I broke the edges of the base off to make it look like rock. He then got a red paint job.

I like this guy: I could see him as some sort of guildmaster or other important, but physically feeble, type. Perhaps he represents a merchant guild. I could see him having a Dickensian name like Jedediah Clench. He's probably really good on the local football team, assuming that he doesn't die of old age mid-game.

A shotgun and a bottle of beer

About 25 years ago, I bought a few gangers for a game called Confrontation, which was the forerunner to Necromunda. I never played it (it looked incredibly complex) but I did paint the models - badly. I stripped one of them down, and started again.

He reminded me slightly of the bartender Ratz in William Gibson's hard-to-follow cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, who is described as having a mechanical arm and keeps a riot gun behind the bar. I gave my guy a bionic arm made out of plasticard, sprues and bits of spear, and a shotgun from the excellent genestealer cultists set. His beer bottle came from a set of bottles made by a company called Meng, who I think do bits for historical dioramas. I stuck him on a base from the Sedition Wars game.

And then time for painting. He got a fairly standard jeans-and-apron look. Neuromancer mentions Ratz's bionic arm as being made of "grubby pink plastic" and I tried to reflect that in the paint job, which I'm not sure comes across very well here. I also added some warning stripes to his shotgun. It's a popular look on Necromunda and reminds potential enemies that shotguns can be dangerous.

I'm pleased with the painting, and I like the variety of fairly bright colours. In particular, the shading on the apron and the jeans has come out well. I can imagine him being a suitably disreputable addition to the post-apocalyptic drinking scene.

Lady with a banner

At the moment, I am ill. I have some sort of virus and, to quote Kris Kristofferson in one of the Blade films, I feel like hammered shit. Concentrating on much more than shooting aliens on a screen is proving tricky. Anyway, I've got one model done this time, and I think it's come out quite well.

It's the Sisters of Battle imagifer that I built last time. The paint scheme was pretty obvious, really. Amusingly, this model is about a head taller than the rest of the Sisters. Perhaps the main qualification for carrying the relic is that you can hold it up really high. After all, prowess is generally measured in the 40k universe by (1) hat size, (2) proliferation of skulls and (3) sheer physical bulk. Not wearing a helmet also seems to help.

Have I ever explained my theory that skulls grow in the ground in 40k, a bit like turnips on Earth?

The Dogs of Squark

It's not been a very productive week, for no particular reason, but I've been able to get a bit of model-making done.

First, I've started work on an Imagifer (basically, a relic-bearer) for my Sisters of Battle. The standard model is slightly dated and a bit of a lump. The model below was converted from a Seraphim (flying sister) that was missing its jetpack when I bought it second hand. I cut the arms, lowered the left hand and replaced the right with a gauntlet from the Tempestus Scions box.

I thought it would be cooler to give her a banner rather than the sheet of parchment that the GW version is holding up. This banner came from a Gamezone model. It had already broken off, and looked really appropriate. The head had been removed by the previous owner, so I gave her a Statuesque Miniatures head.

Secondly, I finally got around to finishing off two kroot hounds that I bought ages ago. The models were each missing a leg, so I sculpted new ones out of green stuff. The one on the left has a new front leg, and the one on the right was missing his back left leg.

Squarkoids are strange hybrids of vulture and dog that hunt in the badlands surrounding Tin City. They can be domesticated, and are used in a number of roles. However they are less valued for hunting, where their mixture of dog and bird DNA often causes them to try to retrieve one another. They are not to be confused with Flyenas.

I've realised that I really enjoy painting aliens and random space monsters, as opposed to armies of humans and very human-like things. Science fiction games need more monsters.

UPDATE!

I added a parchment/banner to the sister of battle, to help cover up the joins and stabilise the model.

Also, a while ago I made a shanty-town type house. I was slightly dissatisfied with it, and so I added a rough metal roof to it, made from off-cuts of plasticard. I think it's greatly improved the model.