To Dark Eldar or Not to Dark Eldar: Part One, Conception

So the new Dark Eldar Models are nice, but I alrady have half an Eldar Army Sitting the the cupboard unassembled that really deserve some attention. But I wanted to paint a few Hellions and some of the plastic Witches will be converted into smick Dark Elf Witches for my fanatasy army. It goes without saying that I already bought the new Lilith miniature, as it is the first GW miniature that has made my list of must have figures in nearly ten years.

Those who know me know I buy a lot of GW miniatures will be crying "Subby, how did it make your must have list, and what is your must have list anyways?"

Truth is I enjoy painting and modelling more than gaming. And occasionally I will see a model that I must own, not to game with, but to paint up to a really high standard for the display case.

Very few Games Workshop miniatures make the cut. Not because they aren't good miniatures, but it is not often these days I see one of their miniatures and go "Wow, that is beautifully executed and will be a challenge to paint well."

Similarly when I saw the new Hellions I immediately like the kit, for the execution of the design of the plastics. So I resolved to get some eventually. Looking closely at the sprues when they landed at my FLGS I could see they were well detailed and would assemble remarkably well/easy. But in the back of my mind I knew I had some Eldar miniatures, bought cheap at auction and hidden away on my to-do list.

The thing is I really am not that enthused with the colours presented by Craftworld Eldar, having first come in contact with Eldar in the heady days of Rogue Trader. Time for the waaaay-back machine....

Image shamelessly borrowed from GW, courtesy of Collegia Titanica

The lurid colours and mercenary nature of the Old Eldar was appealing but at the time Marines were firmly in my grasp and at a young age where pocket money and moving lawns was the fuel behind my income I could only afford one army. So Eldar never happened.

Now I have some minis laying around I was thinking the other day about painting a few Eldar, or maybe the starting on Lilith to take a break from all the Tiny German tanks I have been cleaning and doing test painting on (FoW has landed at the club so I dug out my 10mm stuff for paint scheme testing). On top of that I was sick all week with little else to do so with my mind wandering I came upon this post by Dave T over at FTW. In the comments there was discussion over adapting it to different colour schemes. I was thinking of doing a couple of test miniatures in various colours when a little light appeared over my head and it was on like Konkey Kong!

See I have some Harlequins from the same auction where I obtained the Eldar, and I thought back to the RT days where whole Eldar armies were given lurid colour patterns. The idea that was spawned is as follows.

What if a Harlequin troupe turned their backs upon tradition, collected a motley assortment of like minded Eldar (both Normal and Dark), and turned to raiding as they started a descent towards chaos.

I didn't know if it was original or not, but it was cohesive enough that I wouldn't get blank looks of mental failure when/if I ever took them to a tournament. I aimed for a 1750pts list, randomly selected to my taste, because winning games is not the foremost worry in my hobby life but rather painting cool stuff. The list remains unwritten however but at the moment I have yet to dig out the minis and write up what I have.

In the end I could take my time and paint lots of different colours across the army, with the bases linking them all together. Additionally if I used counts as units of Eldar minis with suitable small conversions then more than half my army is already in my hands. While largely long term the project should be fun, and will give me something to break up the monotony of the other painting projects on the bench (notably 38 Grey Space Wolves, the Remaining 10 Novamarines, 30 10mm Scale German tanks with about 150 infantry, and my 300+ Skitarii in all their black and red finery, not counting all the other stuff hiding in the cupboard).

I did want to fill out the army with some suitable Dark Eldar miniatures and thought the best place to start would be some of the new Hellions. This was for several reasons. First they are really nice miniatures. Second the sky-boards would provide a large enough canvass to test out a few of the patterns and freehand stuff I wanted to do. Third regardless of if I used the Eldar of Dark Eldar Codex they would have a use as it is not a serious stretch of the imagination that they could substitute for Swooping Hawks.

So to this end I rang my favourite local place to buy hobby stuff Ace Comics and Games at Annerly to find out if they had some on shelf (a solid yes), and thus added them to my list of destinations while doing the road-trip Saturday to various places that need visiting for work and hobby. I started the assembly/painting of them last night while waiting for some work stuff to arrive via the interwebs.

Coming soon

Part Two: Painting Tutorial => Hellion Sky-boards

Aka: Alternate Colours and Easy Dark Eldar highlighting methods.

Product Review: Wargames Factory Shock Troopers

Picture courtesy of Wargames Factory

So my order of the new Wargames Factory Shock Troopers plastic boxsets arrived the other day and I thought I would do a review of them.

For more information on the set, prices and updates on related products visit the makers' website

Big D over at Hogs of War did a neat pre-release promo post back in April that really piqued my interest and so, with a mate interested as well, we thought we would get a few each for a project we are doing.

Now I would have liked to have written this sooner but there were delays in the product actually getting to Tony and the Wargames Factory Team from their outsourced manufacturer. This is one of the perils of outsourcing. However I just want to congratulate the team for handling things very well. They kept in contact and were really good about the whole thing.

My initial impression of the miniatures is clouded by my many years of using GW miniatures so immediate comparisons to Imperial Guard, the Cadian Plastic Boxes in particular, were made. The castings of the sprues was really good and there is really very little work in preparing the parts for assembly. The contents of each box is six identical sprues with three bodies on each with enough extra parts to overload a pack mule. So in each box you get six of the following sprue.

Image courtesy of The Hogs of War

The mystery head being a tentacle-mouthed one similar to what you might expect from a Genestealer Cult Magos Hybrid or a Cthulu Cultist. The bodies themselves bear a resemblance to Death Corps of Krieg but quite a bit different to the Forgeworld versions. You get alot of extra heads, a mix of normal helmeted heads and mutant heads so you could in fact use them easily for a Traitor Guard list. While that faces aren't quite as detailed as the equivalent GW heads it doesn't really matter IMHO because they still look good and by the time you paint them you won't notice.

The primary guns to me at least, being ignorant of the story behing these minis, appear to be an over-under combo of pump-action shotgun and assault rifle. A little awkward for my taste but, on the whole, cleanly designed. While the number of body poses is limited it is still possible to get a lot of variation out of the kits.

Another thing that really impressed me is that the sprues will stack using the casting vents. So you can stack the large number of sprues in one interlocking pile.

The one let-down for me is the integral base that the bodies are cast with, while it is easy enough to clip off and file back I find it a nuisance. Maybe it is just me.

Price-wise if we compare the $41Au that you pay for a plastic set of Ten Cadians (equates to $4.10 per miniature), to the equivalent cost of around $18.40Au per box when you order the 7xDeal that has free shipping (equates to about $1 per miniature). Yes you have to order seven boxes in the bundle deal to get them this cheap but the other deals are really good (one box is only about $21.80 plus shipping). So already you are making a really big saving on getting that army off the ground.

The downside is that if your FLGS happens to be a GW store don't expect them to let you play with miniatures from another company.

All in all I would rate them 4/5.

They get my seal of approval and have also been passed around the club with a few interested members thinking about placing a group order for some.

Possible uses for these miniatures in gaming other than a substitute for IG include: Infantry models for Post Apocalypse RPGing, Secret Weapons of the Third Reich alternate troops, Maybe Warmachine infantry swaps (kinda hard to justify that last one, as it may confuse other regular Warmachine Players), and a whole lotta other 28mm games that need generic infantry including Alt. History and Steampunk (some of the heads would make neat Cylon Heads).

The 63 I got from splitting the 7 boxes with my mate are being added to my Skitarii Army with a few little parts swaps.

On that last note, Cadian arms will hot-swap with these without any chopping or filling (except on the Cadian Special weapons, which I could never get to fit properly on the Cadians anyway). Additionally the heads can be added to Cadian bodies with very little effort (you have to trim the neck shorter). I suspect the some of the Hasslefree Pulse Rifles or G36Cs would also look really beaut on these guys.

Oh yeah and some of the Flamers had an accident, they got sacrificed to my Storm-Trooper Equivalents for my Skitarii Legio as part of their power-plant backpacks.

Pics of the conversions soon.

Cheers

Subby

Warlord Titan Project Progress

Truth be told this has been a WIP draft for about a week and a half, it just never seemed to get finished. Here are a few of the reasons why:

I went to Supanova Brisbane and had my cousin stay over for a few days. This ate up a bit of time on things and as I was flat out all weekend i was ludicrously tired and only had a little time to do a few production sketches. Last weekend was the ANZAC Day weekend, so while I did spend some time painting and modelling on the Saturday and Monday, the lads and I went out to see "Beneath Hill 60" on the Sunday, which was a really great film to remember those who fought for us. I also raised more than a few drinks to their memories on the Friday night a 21st party. Lets just say the the painting on Saturday started slooowly.

Work is steadily progressing on the Titan. So far I have the toe design nailed and the first toe three parts done so I can cast the 24 I need (6 toes on each foot, 2 titans) and I refined the lower leg design. I also did the designs for the Gattling Blaster, Apacalypse Launcher, the Core cutouts of the torso, and started on the I have bought all the fittings and LEDs for the builds as well as the plastics and other bits I needed.

I have started posting WIP CAD layouts of the beast on my Deviant Art Account. I did this for two reasons; 1) I had been neglecting it a little. 2) I don't use a whole swag-load of my file limits on here or my website.

So if you want to see how things are going with that you can go here.

A sample of the Cad Stuff

I also bought some bases from Jeff Dragonforge, specifically some of his wonderful Lost Empires Bases, which I think would go perfectly with my lost-technology-hunting-Titan-escorting Skitarii. They arrived about a week and a half ago So far I have the whole lot ready to put miniatures onto. Below is my test mini mounted on his new permanent residence...

(for a larger pic you can visit my Deviant Art account)

This is after about ten years of actually owning guard miniatures (yes I have a bunch of metal Cadians, Stormtoopers, and some Steel Legion minis, plus the plastic Cadians that this mini is taken from), I have found a color scheme I actually like. I plan to doo the whole lot up like this. Plus most of the other minis in this lot will have re-breathers, goggles, bionics and other conversions to make them a fair but less like freshly recruited Skitarii.

I really wanted to get this out before I posted my contribution to the latest collaborative post for FTW. Just in case you were wondering why the two posts in a day...

Hive Tyrant W.I.P

So I have liked Nids for a long time, in fact I have had an army of them for every codex, plus a Genestealer Cult Army back in the far of mists of time. This time around I had planned to only do a small army, this was spurred on by the fact that I was given a couple of unassembled plastic Carnifexes in trade for some work, which I added some forgeworld Stonecrusher parts to for "the look." I already had one done up as a Screamer Killer which I added to a resin base. He came up so far I think.

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The biggest thing I wanted was a ridiculously cool Hive Tyrant. I know alot of people like the metal one, and the way things are going there will be a plastic one eventually. But to me there are two things wrong with it.

Firstly it is a serious pain to assemble, my buddy Luke almost cries tears of blood when you ask him how much fun it was to assemble his. I do not want that pain.

Second, beside the awesome that is the Carnifex kit and the sweet that is the plastic Trygon the meat Tyrant is like a wee baby man, in fact it reminds me of Napoleon with his little man syndrome.

So my solution was in the words of my mate Red "freakin insane!"

Behold the first snaps of the WIP of my Hive Tyrant.

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Yes it did start life as a Trygon kit, I modified the head and added a few spikes here and there, the head-spike and tail spike are the smallest digging claws in the arms set, I used the nowmal Trygon tongue with the T-Prime head and tail pieces. I used the ball socket part of the central torso where it joins the hips and bulked out around the hex attachment end this with cheap filler epoxy ribbon before pinning on the tail and some armour plates shaved off the upper tail section of the original kit. I then did the green stuff details. I also used green stuff to fill in the previously hollow tail sections and blend this smoothly into the hips.

The arms are all magnetised, with the scything talons stock standard, and the custom heavy venom cannon you can see half sculpted. I have built it around a piece of aluminium pipe I found in the local hobby shop that is kind of egg shaped in cross section.

Here I am using a new sculpting medium I hadn't tried before from Privateer Press' P3 range. It is quite smooth and holds detail well. My one gripe is that if it is wet with water it will not, unlike greenstuff, stick to another bit of itself that is still un-set. In fact it is difficult to get it to stick to anything when wet, but as soon as there is no surface moisture it will stick to everything. (you, its packaging, the sculpting tool, the table, the random sprue on the desk...)

Once you get used to it is is however quite good. A little tip is to keep it in the freezer so it will come out of its packaging, to which it is otherwise inseparably stuck.

I have also started on the legs, and with nothing large enough on hand I am slowly sculpting the individual sections, which I will double using resin castings as per the hoof that is already done. the thighs will have to be completely sculpted however as there is no way to mirror them. As you can see I have used my spare standard Trygon head pieces as the thigh carapace.

I am thinking of maybe extending the back vents/spore chimneys (what the hell are those things anyhow?), but I am not committed to it until I see how well the legs balance the rest of the figure.

What is the biggest tip I can give about sculpting Nids?

To get nice smooth organic curves use a burnishing tool, one of the ones with a little ball on the end of it, or as pictured use my preferred tool. A length of brass rod with the end rounded and polished. Using it you can more easily smooth off large areas of organic flesh, add the little muscle striations where flesh meets carapace, do the little round indents that there are on nids and lastly easily sculpt the rib detail.

Also do the cross ribs one way first and then when these have set do the perpendicular bone detail. As this will prevent the making of a real mess. Finally add you circular flesh indentations after you have smoothed out the flesh section you are doing them on but before the sculpting medium sets as they will be a part of the surface rather than an addition, making them look more natural/organic.

How do I rate the P3 sculpting epoxy?

About 7/10 as it is pretty good but is a pain to get out of that package unless you keep it in the freezer, you can overlook the other parts as it hold detail nicely.

How do I rate the new Trygon kit?

8/10 It has pretty limited poses, but with magnets and patience you can set it up so you can alternate between your beasties of choice. In the end I love it so much bought two!