Two Robots and a Stargrave Bloke

 Here are a few more random models that I painted for some kind of Stargrave/futuristic side.

I've had this robot in my bits box for ages. It came with a load of other stuff, and has always been missing its arms. Given the vaguely manga styling, I wondered if it was an Infinity model. Anyhow, I gave it some new arms from two leftover GW Taurox guns.

I tried to paint it as if light was shining down from above, catching on certain bits of the casing. I don't think that worked perfectly, but I quite like the effect. Unfortunately, I can't work out how to improve it. I also tried to do a bit of a glowing effect on the round bits on its guns, but that hasn't come out quite right. 

Here is a less slick robot that ended up looking a bit like WALL-E. It's mainly a tracked unit made by Ramshackle Games. The eyes and "ears" are from GW tank accessories. I like the shading on the sides.

And here's a bloke. I've no idea who made this model. He looks wholly under-equipped for the future, at least the future with robots and aliens. I painted a rip in his jeans for added battered-ness. He was a fun model to paint, although I can't see him surviving very long!

More Ugly Models

It's time for some more terrible models! I've been painting some more of the legendarily ropey plastic genestealer hybrids from the Space Hulk add-on Deathwing. After putting one together last week, it occurred to me that they looked quite like ork/genestealer hybrids, not stealers mixed with human DNA. The bulky bodies and hunched pose makes me think of orks rather than people.

Which led to me putting some ork arms on a stealer hybrid body, and finding that they fitted quite well.

I'm not going to pretend that this looks perfect, but it's a lot better than the alternative. I only used a little green stuff to get the arms to fit, and they at least look like they ought to be there. I used a drab green as the basis for the skin, highlighting up with pink after a purple ink wash (the same purple I used for the purestrains).

Emboldened by this, I had a go at another.

I've got to admit, I quite like this guy! Here are all three of the Ugly Brothers, about to let the side down.

Could be worse!

Random Model Time - Radio Lady and Plastic Genestealer Hybrid

This week, I fancied painting something a bit cyberpunk. For some reason, that meant sticking some Stargrave arms and head onto a Bolt Action British commando body. The Bolt Action models are quite slight compared to the Stargrave ones, so it made sense to make this person a woman. I gave her a bulky communications/hacking device made from some Games Workshop bits. 

She got some bright colours on her backpack, jacket and gun to stop her looking too much like a soldier. If anything, she's a freelancer with customised gear. I like the end result. Stargrave models are great.

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 I was tempted to give this next section some kind of stupid clickbait title like "The WORST mini EVER?" but I respect both of you who read this blog far too much for that. And it's not as if I'm suddenly going to get a horde of new visitors who are going to come here, buy my novels and make me incredibly rich... or is it?

Anyhow, some of the most despised models in GW's long and dubious history are the plastic genestealer hybrids from the old Space Hulk additions. Personally, I think there are worse (the Space Hulk terminators, for instance), but there's no doubt that these aren't really very good. Inspired by the old-school painting of a guy called vintage_warhammer on Instagram, I found one of these sorry things and had a go at painting it.

This was surprisingly enjoyable, and I'm happier with the end result than I'd expected. The sculpting isn't bad, in that the proportions make sense, but there are two main issues: first, the model doesn't look much like other genestealer hybrids (my first thought would be "shark-man?") and, second, it's a very basic model without much detail. In fact, it's hard to work out where the hybrid's skin ends and its clothes begin. Perhaps he's wearing blue clothes in honour of his purestrain mates. Or he's nude apart from a belt. Who knows?

I might do a couple more of these. If nothing else, they're very nostalgic.

More Space Marines!

 I was looking in the bits box recently and discovered that I've got a load of unpainted space marines, most of them metal. I really ought to paint more of the stuff I've got before I forget that I've got it.

Here are four marines - more accurately, three marines and one marine-shaped ork tinboy. The tinboys were primitive robots that the orks made as caricatures of their enemies, back in 2nd edition 40k (or possibly even earlier than that). I didn't have an ork army back then, and I suspect that I bought them just for sheer silliness value. 

This is Sir Vile the Minion and Sir Spicious the Questionable. Sir Vile was made from a range of plastic parts: he's got a Space Wolf gun, a Mordheim belt buckle and a head from a Bretonnian man at arms. I think it fits the concept quite well.

Sir Spicious is an unconverted ork tinboy model. His left shoulder pad bears his "personal heraldry".

These two are a bit more sensible: Sir Tanty the Absolute and Sir Plus de Requirements.

Sir Tanty was based on one of the "masters of the chapter" that I bought incomplete off ebay a while ago. I added his head and gun. He took quite a long time to paint, but I'm pleased with the way he's come out, especially his face (although he does look quite surprised to be having his picture taken).

Sir Plus was converted by someone else when I bought it. I tidied the conversion up and finished it off before painting it. It's a good conversion, and it took me ages to work out that the base model was an old metal Ultramarines Chaplain Cassius. I never much liked the Cassius model, with its weird skull head, and this is definitely an improvement. He does look slightly as if he's dancing, but maybe he's just acting up for the camera.

Lucky the Carnifex

 A couple of days ago, I counted up my harlequin collection and realised that, instead of 34, I only had 32. I hadn't collected the set after all! Crisis! I went onto ebay and, half an hour and £20 later, had ordered the missing couple. But my goal of painting all the old harlequins is no closer. Perhaps I am the Ancient Mariner of oldhammer, doomed to never quite reach my goal. Or not.

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Anyhow, I found a box of old ork stuff at my parents', and in it was an old conversion of a carnifex. The plastic carnifex was a big deal when it came out: for £25 you got a huge monster with a ton of customisation options. It's still not bad although, like a lot of big Tyranids, it's a bit lacking in detail.

This conversion represents a carnifex that was "pacified" and "enhanced" by the orks: its lower body was made from the engine of an ork trukk and two old sentinel legs. A new power claw was added to the left arm. 

I stripped down the original conversion, which was cool but a bit basic, and added a load of details. The big wires came from a skaven kit. It then got a repaint in the colours of my old-school hive fleet (I think it's a splinter fleet from Hive Fleet Behemoth). The metal was redone to look slightly rusty and just a bit old. (For what it's worth, there's a decent argument that ork machinery wouldn't be rusty so much as very greasy, but still.)

Lucky the Carnifex was first encountered by the orks at the battle of Bugstomp, where it destroyed the dreadnought Gitkilla before being sliced in half. The master-mech Lugnuts, impressed by its capacity for mayhem, fitted the injured carnifex with a new lower body and a super hydraulic claw. 

It now fights alongside Lugnuts and his minions. The mek has named his new pet "Lucky": not because it had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the orks, but because wherever Lugnuts goes, hordes of Tyranids mysteriously show up. The Hive Mind, on the other hand, is fine with this arrangement. Soon it will tire of picking at Lugnuts' horde and, following Lucky's psychic presence, will send a force against the orks big enough to wipe them out. Everyone wins.

Even More Harlequins

 The end is nigh: I've only got a few more standard harlequins (if that's a thing) to do, and then I'm on to a leader with two pistols and the high avatar of the lot. I expect that I'll tidy up some of the first models that I painted: after all, I began this two years ago and, even if my painting hasn't improved in that time, I've at least started using some smaller brushes since then.

Anyhow, here are some more loonies. The face of the chap on the right was slightly miscast, but that probably makes him look all the more alarming.

The bloke on the left here is holding a bizarre weapon/gardening implement, which looks like some kind of spraying device. I reckon it's a web-shooter, as the body of it looks a bit like the webbers used by the Genestealer Cult. Still, it's suitably wacky. Also, he's got a face on his groin, just in case the harlequins weren't bizarre enough.

I also painted some more plastic genestealers this week, but then I put them next to the previous batch and realised that they were completely identical. So the new ones have been lost among the rampaging horde of not-quite Aliens. Instead, here's all four harlequins.

Meanwhile, in Barovia...

I'm getting close to painting up all of the old metal Eldar harlequins. I've got all the miniatures now: I just need to finish them off. At last I have a project that combines the artistic aspect of painting and the middle-aged man aspect of collecting all of something pointless.

In the meantime, I've been working on a sort of side-project. For a while, I've been playing the most recent version of "The Curse of Strahd", a classic Dungeons and Dragons adventure set in a sort of gothic horror fantasy world called Barovia. I happened to find a bunch of models that reminded me of Strahd on ebay, going for a very low price. 

They're from a line called Vampire Wars, made by West Wind Miniatures. They look vaguely Napoleonic/Eastern European in style, the sort of people who crop up in Hammer films working for or against Dracula, perhaps in a gypsy caravan. Here are four of them.

They're not very detailed models and feel quite cartoony and "old school". When they first arrived, I felt a bit disappointed, but they've grown on me since.

The chap in the green coat had a very flimsy knife in his right hand, which I replaced with a sword from a Frostgrave soldier. It looked better and was much more robust. I considered painting some object source lighting coming from the torch he's holding up, but it was too difficult, and I just added a small effect. I suspect that he's outdoors, and there wouldn't be much light on his clothing.

I also painted two dogs from a Celt model from Warlord Games. They look a bit like Irish Wolfhounds and would be useful for chasing peasants, vampires and/or witches.

Last of all, I painted up a vampire model from North Star Miniatures, from their Napoleonic game The Silver Bayonet. I liked the model, but I wasn't that keen on her hands, which were raised in an odd, limp-wristed sort of way. I replaced them with hands holding a sword and a fancy knife, from plastic Frostgrave soldiers. I reckon she's broken into the family armoury in order to deal with some irritating vampire hunters.

I painted her up to have cold-looking, undead skin. It's grey shaded up with pink, with very thinned down purple glazes. I really like this miniature. North Star have some really cool models. 

Great Big Tyranid Bug (and bonus eggs)

 Hello again! I've been painting some more tyranids this week. It's interesting to paint a brand new tyranid model in my oldhammer colour scheme.

This is a psychophage, apparently. As one of the interchangeable idiots in Starship Troopers puts it, it's some kind of big smart bug. I reckon half the world must own one of these kits by now, as ebay is full of them going cheaply. 

It was a push-together GW kit, which is another way of saying that it didn't push together. It was also a right pain to paint, as simply getting at most of the model was really hard. I'm glad that I painted a lot of it on the sprue. 

The painting was fairly simple - Flesh Tearers Red contrast paint over a white undercoat, and a thin wash of Leviathan Purple in the recesses. Good as contrast paints can be, I don't think that's enough for the skin of a big monster, and so I added red and highlighted in the normal way as well.

I really like the way that he's got a severed arm in his tentacles. There are some really nice details on this chap, but they're not excessive.

I also dug out these eggs that I made from DAS clay and green stuff about 15 years ago. I gave them a repaint and put them on flatter bases. Goodness knows what function they'd have in a game, but they're nice enough.

I also painted some tyranid rippers, but for some reason I just can't get a decent photo of the damned things. So you'll just have to imagine them. Sorry!

Another Bunch of Harlequins

 I've been painting some more harlequins. I find that they take quite a lot of concentration, both to actually paint on the fiddly checks and to figure out the colour schemes. Obviously they're supposed to be chaotic and jarring, but choosing quite how to do that is interesting. It's standard process to try to draw the eye to a model's head, but I don't think you can do that with models like this. I reckon that their outfits are a kind of dazzle camouflage, too bewildering to focus on.

Anyhow, they're a lot of fun to paint, and the models have loads of nice details even before you start adding your own. 

This guy - actually, I think this harlequin is female, although it's always hard to tell - has a plasma pistol (unusually, for these models) and a harlequin's kiss, a sort of punch-dagger-meets-food-blender weapon. 

This chap has a shuriken pistol, a chainsword and an outfit that a 1990s raver might consider a little excessive. Blow your whistles, craftworld!

This model is a Death Jester, a heavy weapons specialist. He's the third of a team of three. It was quite difficult to give him bits of colour while keeping to the sinister Venetian carnevale/Baron Samedi look of the Death Jesters.

And here's a picture of a whole bunch of harlequins, being bewildering. They're moving faster than the eye can see, which is why the picture is so blurry.

Another Harlequin and a Genestealer Patriarch

 

This week, I painted another harlequin. I've not done one for a while, and it was a real pleasure to be painting checks and doing bright colours again.

It occurs to me that I've collected most of the old metal harlequins from the original metal boxed set. Perhaps I should try to get the whole lot. I think that would be quite cool, and they're all excellent models.

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I decided to have a go at bulk-painting some old plastic Space Hulk genestealers. I seem to have absolutely loads of these miniatures. Like the old plastic termagants, they're monopose models. They're really good sculpts, with lots of detail, even if they are sticking their tongues out like so many of the goofier tyranids.

I used contrast paint for the purple and blue, over a standard white undercoat. I found it quite annoying, as the damn stuff refused to cover properly. I ended up highlighting the armour and skin (somewhat roughly). I'm not sure that the contrast paint did much that a heavy wash wouldn't have done.

I also dug out a very old Genestealer Patriarch model. The patriarch is a weirdly-coloured, bloated monstrosity worshipped by deranged cultists and hell-bent on dictatorial power who, whilst foul, is merely the slave of a much greater threat to humanity. So purely a fictional creation.

While some might have made the leader of the genestealers into a bigger, meaner genestealer (as GW did later with the broodlord), the patriarch is a fat, saggy-looking creature wearing the sort of gold chain favoured by town mayors and 1980s rappers. I have no idea why, but it works in a bizarre way. To emphasise his size, I put him on a slightly raised base. 

Here's the patriarch with his identical spawn:

A few Mordheim loonies

Here are some more random people for Mordheim. 

Our first weirdo was made from part of a plastic skaven, which I got in a job lot of models. It was missing some bits, so I added some of my own.

He got a head from an Empire wizard and a right arm from an Empire pistolier. His bag was made from a kroot part, as were the grenades on his belt. I painted them to look like glass bombs, full of some noxious potion. I extended the strap on the belt and finished off the model's armour with green stuff.

I considered painting the model with a sooty face, as if his guns had backfired, but I didn't think that I could do this convincingly. He was painted to fit in with the Middenheimer unit that I've been making. 

This is Gustav, a former clockmaker who survives in the ruins of Mordheim with his customised guns.

 

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 I like beastmen: they look like something from a medieval picture of Hell, rather than the Doom-meets-Buffy feel of some of Warhammer's demons. They used to have their own army book, which contained a lot of different sorts of goat-people and even a reference to a centaur trying to roger a unicorn.

These models have taken a break from unicorn-bothering and are looking for someone to smash. They're converted from plastic Blackstone Fortress models, which largely involved removing their guns and chainswords and giving them swords and shields instead. The shields are old skeleton shields, and have a nice decrepit look. I also removed some grenades and holsters from their belts and covered them with armour and pouches.

I reckon these guys would be called something like Grutt Manbasher or Krub Meatbeater, and would spend a lot of time grunting and bellowing.

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I also painted a ghoul, who is an old metal model. He's much more cartoony than the other ghouls that I've made for Mordheim, but I like his nosferatu-type look. He's got purple pants, to fit in with the rest of the undead.

The Last Exodite Dragon Knight - And The Whole Squad

Having made four Eldar Exodite dragon knights, I decided to make their leader. While most of the squad are riding small dinosaurs, like Jurassic Park's velociraptors, this chap would have something weirder and larger, perhaps a bit like oviraptor and other strudithomimids.

Some models are a pleasure to make and paint, and others... aren't. For some reason, this miniature just seemed to go on and on. By the time that I was trying to get his torso to stick to his legs for the fourth bloody time, I began to suspect that I was cursed: doomed, like the Ancient Mariner or one of those guys, to assemble the same bloody miniature forever.

Anyhow, at long last the wretched thing got finished. And, actually, I'm really pleased with him (for now, before he falls apart again). 

As with all the dragon riders, this chap was based on bits - mainly metal - that I bought from GW Mail Order many years ago. I stripped it all, dismantled it, and started again. 

The dragon's body comes from a steed of Slaanesh. The head is from an old Dark Elf hydra. The arms are from plastic genestealers, with a lot of the tyranid detail sanded off. They were drilled into place and I sculpted shoulders and scales from green stuff. 

I'm not sure where the rider's upper legs came from - some kind of plastic knight, perhaps. I sculpted some thigh pads out of green stuff. His lower legs were cut from an old swooping hawk. The upper body is all new to this miniature. 

The head and chest come from an Eldar jetbike pilot. The right arm and rifle are from the first (and awful) plastic Dark Eldar, trimmed and green stuffed to look more like an Eldar weapon. The left arm is from a modern Dark Eldar wytch. I made his sabre from a filed-down Grey Knight sword, which looked surprisingly like some of the older Eldar swords.

A pistol on the rider's thigh was from (surprisingly) a 40k beastman that I turned into a Mordheim fighter. I added some little bags from the bits box to help hold his wobbly body together. The base was decorated with an old High Elf doodah and some steps made from plasticard and blended in with DAS clay. I don't know why these guys are riding around steps, but there you go - the Eldar are mysterious.

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Phew! I'd forgotten what a slog it is to convert metal models. All that hacking and pinning! Still, I'm pleased with the results. The Eldar project has been a challenge, and my painting has improved because of it. This particular unit has been one of the highlights for me: partly because I'm pleased with the results, partly because the dragon riders unit is so characteristic of 2nd Edition 40k, but mainly because elves riding dinosaurs in space is cool. 

Here's the finished leader.

And here is the entire unit.

Right then, what next?!