2,000 views!

What with all the excitement of it being Christmas, I forgot to say that this blog has now had over 2,000 views. Factoring in the presence of me, and of various bots, I reckon that at least 200 people have seen this blog who were neither writing it nor following their programming when they looked at it. That's not bad.

To celebrate this immense achievement, here is another picture of the Wolsung golem in a greater state of completion. I'm in two minds about doing anything further with the base. I've got some wild west casualty models that might look good lying in the wake of the robot's rampage, but I'd worry that they might distract from the main model.

I've also been busy painting the two scientists that I converted last week. They've come out fairly well.The smaller guy on the right is a juve, despite his grey hair. The bloke on the left is some kind of mad professor/supervillain. I've kept pretty much to the existing colour scheme, but not so closely as to make it look like a uniform.

So who are these people, and why are they dressed like that? Well...

Towards the edge of the underhive, just below ground level, there lies a dome of remarkable cleanliness and luxury. It is a cursed place, some say: its entrances are protected by sentry guns, and within its white halls are machines that speak like men. The locals claim that the White Dome was created as a base for one of the great houses from up-hive, or even that it is a hideout for the Adeptus Mechanicus.

The true story is much stranger. Hundreds of years ago, during one of its endless wars of conquest, the Imperium attacked an orbital colony of highly advanced humans, now believed to have been allied to the Tau. The scientists of the orbiter responded by evacuating to deep space. In the confusion, a large number of smaller spacecraft were lost. One of them crashed on Necromunda, ploughing deep into one of the hive cities. 

Years later, the ship's automated systems have animated the crew. Tentatively, the scientists have emerged from their stronghold to trade for equipment, take samples of local wildlife (and citizens) and search for parts with which to fix their ship. The only problem is that, once they finish their repairs and fire the engines up, there is a reasonable chance that the vibrations will shake the neighbouring domes to pieces. But when scholarship and learning are at stake, that's a small price to pay.

Anyhow, I'll see you in 2017, I hope. Happy New Year!

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!

On the Razzle with H.P. Lovecraft

So, it's nearly Christmas, and things are busy. I haven't been doing very much painting, although I finished off a model barman from Black Scorpion's Wild West range, Tombstone. All their models are really well sculpted and full of character. This guy looks rather like the 1920s horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft. I can imagine what ordering a drink in H.P. Lovecraft's bar would be like:

"I gazed in arcane terror at the strange liquor that the grave-silent barman slid across the eons-aged oak of the bar. From what abominable vats it had been blended, I knew not, and cannot say.

The barman, if he was truly such, spoke only one word in a dread, ponderous tone: 'Imbibe'. 

With tremulous fingers I raised the chalice to my parched lips, dreading the noxious touch of the ill-mixed, hybrid elixir within. Heaven protect me from the memory of that dread cocktail! It was... A MAN(hattan)!"

"If your name's not in the Necronomicon, you can't come in."

I've done a bit more work on the genestealer hybrids. I reckon that I might as well get my money's worth out of this kit, so I've done a couple of leg and body swaps. Here is a heavy weapons guy. I made him a lower half out of green stuff and the legs of an old eldar scout. It should work with the idea that the more inhuman genestealers wear robes to hide their strange, spindly legs.

And finally, I've partly assembled and undercoated a Wolsung Gigantic Golem. I bought this ages ago in an online sale. I intend to finish it off over the festive period. He's resin and fantastically sculpted. Almost all the joints are poseable, and he comes with loads of spare parts, so you can assemble him in tons of ways. It's like a steampunk version of an artist's mannequin, except less terrifying.

It looks like this, when assembled and painted by someone other than me.

And on that rather scrappy note, I am going to bid you Merry Christmas. Thank you for reading so far, and I hope Christmas brings you all the little model people you've ever wanted.

More Magus

So, at long last, here is the Magus (Magos? I can never remember) in all his disreputable glory, delivering a speech to his minions or threatening to sue someone for describing his entirely legitimate religion as a dodgy cult.

I found that the banner top kept snapping off, so I rigged up some pipes to run from a cannister on his waist to the top of the banner, in order to hold it in place. It's a bit crude, to be honest, but it will do and isn't too obvious. Unfortunate, but necessary.

I'm pleased with his face, which was worked up from a mixture of dark flesh and grey, with lighter flesh and bone colour added to the mix. It received several washes of thinned-down purple and strongtone around the eyes.

It could do with a bit of tidying up - I'm not convinced by the verdigris - but overall I think this has come out really well. Now we have both a magus and a patriarch! All I need now are about 10 tanks and 500 cultists and I've got a 40k army!

Magos in Progress

So I went away to paint some genestealers. And it worked!

I decided to make a scenic base for my magus conversion, so that he could tower over his minions as he delivers some kind of ranting speech to them. I found an old communications array from a 40k building, and used the base of it to make this:

I imagine that the three little prongs sticking up are models of the hive cities that the magus has conquered, so he will be literally looming over them when he is finished. I think it will be quite a cool base for him.

And here is the start of the magus. I'm posting him here because his robe is some of the best painting I've done in years, perhaps ever. Which might well say a lot about the quality of my work.

Let's hope I don't balls up the rest of him.

Up In The Air

Some projects you remember with particular affection. And some you don't. This one sticks in my mind because when I started it, a few years ago, I slipped while cutting some parts up to use, sliced my hand open and had to go to casualty to have seven stitches. I still bear the scars of the battlefields of the 41st millenium.

I happened to find this flying machine lying around in a battered and unfinished state, and realised that, in a true stroke of genius, not only had I mangled myself putting it together, but I'd stuck the engines on back to front. Some rather more careful cutting later, and here is the improved Zephyr, a small flyer used to transport light goods from one hive city to another.

The wings are actually the "petals" of a space marine drop pod. The engines and main body are from a Tau piranha, and the cockpit came off a children's Robogear toy. I think the canopy on the top of the fusillage is from a chaos walker of some kind.

Painting something like this is pretty much out of my experience, so thanks to James for his suggestions. It needs work, since I don't have some of the stuff he proposed that I used. I've got to that weird situation where you know that you need to something, but you're not quite sure what.

The answer is probably to make more genestealers.

The Hounds of Hell

Masalan Phallhounds are large, muscular predators thought to have developed during the fifty-year Spice War, during which Masala was isolated from the rest of the galaxy. These creatures are belived to be decended from guard dogs that became mutated after wallowing in a huge pit of food waste known as the Slurry of Curry. This, it is said, gave them their distinctive colour and their pungent odour. They are known for their fiery temprament. Despite being technically poisonous, their meat is regarded as a delicacy in the British Space Empire.

At Warfare, during my deep-diving session in the bargain bin, I acquired two random metal dog-like things. They cost £1, which seemed like a pretty good deal for - well, for whatever they are. Too bad I threw away the blister pack. They're pretty good sculpts, I think, and I really like the musculature on the models. They were quite easy to paint, in that I used red mixed with black and then multiple glazes of thinned down red.

Not bad for a quid!

This Week's Horrible Blob Monster

I have started to make a dent in the heap of random models that I got out of the bargain bucket at Warfare. The first is a medic from the Empire of the Blazing Sun for the (perhaps) defunct game Dystopian Legions. At least, I think it's Dystopian Legions. It might be Dystopian Wars, Armies, Empires or Kindergartens. I get them mixed up. So he's from a game which might be Dystopian and might still exist.

Anyhow, he was quite a large 32mm scale, so I chopped his legs down by cutting out a lot of bandages/puttees just below his knees. I think it hasn't made the model look too out-of-proportion. I could see him in a Necromunda/Blade Runner type setting. It's a shame there aren't rules for hired medics and the like. In the meantime, he'll look good manning a stall in the market.

The second model for this week was more involved. I'm not overly taken with the aberrant models for the genestealer cult, and so I decided to make my own. The head of this model was a genestealer hybrid. The upper body came from a Nurgle champion, and the arms were a Mantic power claw and a chopped-down GW Ogre Kingdoms arm.

The legs were from Ramshackle Games. I ordered three pairs of legs and was mysteriously sent 12, which came with integral bases (I don't like integral bases). As with much of Ramshackle's stuff, they're a bit crude, but cheap and reasonable. The cables used to tie the two halves of the monster together were part of the whip of the fat Khorne bloke that I made into Ned Killy a while ago.

Warfare and the Patriarch

I went to "Warfare" in Reading yesterday, which is a wargames event held in a sports centre on the edge of town. There were a lot of stalls, as per last year, and I met up with friends and spent a very pleasant couple of hours buying things.

These sorts of small fairs are pretty good, especially if you are looking for bits and pieces rather than squads or models from one particular manufacturer. As ever, there are an awful lot of good small companies out there. Anyway, everything was going fine until I noticed that one of the stalls had a large plastic box of end-of-sale items in front of it. My eyes lit up with crazed glee and I dived into the bargain bin with the discerning enthusiasm of a rat in a gourmet's dustbin.

The haul was impressive. I acquired:

2 Chinese army medics (from Dystopian Legions)
A troll/orc type bounty hunter (Hordes)
3 Wild West casualties (Dead Man's Hand)
2 random cyberpunk type people (Infinity)
Some kind of harlequin, who is missing a bit (Carnivale)
2 alien dog monsters
and
A Vallejo pigment. I have no idea what you do with this but it might be useful, somehow. Smear it on vehicles, maybe?

I have also been at work on the genestealer cult. I found someone selling the new patriarch model on ebay for £10, and bought it. In the old days, the patriarch resembled a cross between the Alien, Baron Harkonnen from Dune and Don Corleone. He wore a big chain, smoked cigars and rolled around in a limousine. These days, the patriarch sits on a pipe. The guy lives like a bum.

I didn't convert the model, except to shorten his mandibles and stretch out his right leg, so he seems to be moving. The original pose had him squatting on the pipe, which did make it look slightly as if he was using it as a latrine. The bio-stuff on the base was added with green stuff to fill up the space and blend the pipe into the square plate that it's standing on.

Overall, he's come out rather washed-out, because he lacks bright colour. But it's hard to know how to deal with this, given that any bright bits would probably draw attention from the main model. Anyhow, I need to tidy him up a bit, but overall, he will be a good leader for the cult.

But Secreted From What?

I made this about 10 years ago. It may look as if it grew out of the chair (hopefully) but it's actually a mouse, a toy robot and the front half of a toy gun, with a huge amount of green stuff and some tyranid bits.

 It could do with a bit of a repaint - for once, I wish I had an airbrush.

Toxicity

A couple of months ago, I picked up some craters from the Colours show at Newbury. They were very cheap and made of resin, and shaped like doughnuts so that models could be placed in the centre. I painted this crater up and used thin plasticard to fill in the middle. The plasticard was sealed with green stuff and then painted black.

After painting, I built up the toxic sludge with layers of Water Effects, putting objects into the sludge at different points so that they would "sink" to different levels. Each layer of Water Effects was allowed to dry before another was added. I stirred a small amount of paint and ink into each layer to give the impression of nasty chemicals half-mixed into the slime.

A few bits and pieces were added to finish the crater off: a sign, a barrel and a couple of bits of random scrap. Here is the finished model. This took ages!

I've also been working on the scientist gang. This is the painted version of the guy I converted a couple of posts back.

And last of all, I bought the genestealer cult neophyte boxed set (the more human-looking genestealer hybrids). The sculpting of the models is excellent, and GW have done a great job of modernising the genestealer hybrids while keeping to their original style. So far, I've converted the guy below out of hybrid parts and a fantasy sorceror. He will be a cult magus, whose crazed ravings drive his followers into a frenzy and propel him to the summits of power. How topical.

But That's Heresy 3: Thoughts on the Weird War

I have one simple, but large, problem with Weird War games, and it's this: one side gets all the good stuff.

If you were to make a Weird War game, you'd have to include certain things, or else people would feel cheated, the way every space game has it's not-quite-the-Alien creature. Those would include: gigantic tanks, zombies, vampires, "experimental" aircraft and armoured troops a bit like Space Marines. The problem is that, in the pulp fiction that Weird War stories draw from, most of these are stereotypically things that the Germans have, which our plucky heroes must destroy: Dead Snow, Captain America, Indiana Jones, Iron Sky and even Biggles Defies The Swastika (that classic of modern warfare) work like this.

You know what you're getting with a cover like this.

Now, the Germans did have the technological advantage on the Allies in a lot of areas for a lot of the war (Allied technical advantages tend to be harder to represent in a tabletop game, too). More importantly, the Germans had a lot sort of deranged, silly ideas that could only become "real" if you were to have rules allowing them: the occult nonsense they seem to have lapped up simply wouldn't work in a game that's supposed to simulate real life, like Bolt Action. But ultimately, a wargame has to be balanced, and it has to sell, which means that it has to have a range of forces that people will want to buy. Even Warhammer 40,000, which is essentially Space Marines vs Some Other Stuff, has viable sides that aren't Space Marines.

To an extent, The Lord of the Rings has the same problem. Excluding the Ents, almost all the exciting fun things belong to the villains: orcs, trolls, black orcs, siege weapons, mammoths, flying wyvern-type creatures and so on are all owned by the enemy. Against them, the good guys are basically medieval/dark age people and a few other people with pointy ears.

Fun with mammoths.

The Lord of the Rings and the pulp stories that inspire a lot of Weird War settings get around this by making their heroes extremely powerful. It doesn't matter that you've got a dragon when Eorwyn can chop its head off like someone cutting the end off a Swiss roll. Likewise, World War Two would have ended a lot sooner if Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood had just pointed their big red bus towards Berlin at the end of Where Eagles Dare, fuelled by lager, schnapps and fury.

So, while the German Weird War army list writes itself, you have to work harder to find things for the Allies. Of course, the Russians get something to do with bears, and a big lumbering thing. The Americans - well, the first thought would be superheroes, because they are quintissentially pulp and American. Maybe native shamans? Or heroes of the Old West? The British would presumably have some sort of souped-up SAS. Given their advantage in code-breaking, a primitive computer would make sense. So perhaps robots would work for the British (which seems to be the direction that Konflikt 47 has gone in). But then, doesn't everyone get some kind of robot? How about King Arthur, given that the stories end with him promising to return to protect the country?

This raises another problem: Superman and King Arthur are magical, whereas zombies can just about be explained with "science". But I think that's a matter of personal preference, and if I was making a Weird War game I'd just give the players the option to pick and choose.

Anyway, to conclude this rather rambling missive, I'm on the fence about Weird War games, Konflikt '47 included. If they can fill out the army lists with interesting units, fine. Alternatively, if they can come up with some good characters for the allies - or even better, a good character generation system - I'd be even more impressed. But at the moment, I'll wait and see.

In Which A Workman Blames His Tools

Part of the aim of this blog has been to make myself get better at painting and converting. I started out a bit better than average at conversions and very much average at painting (if that), and the aim has been to improve in both. Part of improving is not thinking "it'll do" when something could be made better. You have to be honest about it.

So, that in mind, I dismantled the flamer lady and took off her legs, which were much too bulky. I added new legs made from a Mantic orc, of all things, and did some tidying up of her gun and face. Here she is, standing next to the genestealer limo for contrast.

I'm still not totally happy. There are a few intrinsic problems with the model. For one thing, it's based on a very old miniature which, whilst having a lot of charm, is lumpier and less sophisticated than more recent sculpts. For another, I've used a lot of green stuff, which never seems to set entirely smooth and is a pig to paint. It always looks as if you haven't watered the paint down, even if you have. And of course neither white nor black is an easy colour to paint.

Oh, and there might be the tiniest element of human error involved as well.

Mild Disappointment

A rather short post, this. I painted up two of the Van Saar scientists over the last couple of days. Here is the leader of the gang:

I think he looks quite good, in a primary colours sort of way. It's not the subtlest paint job, but it does have quite a nice dramatic feel. His hair needs a bit of tidying up, but beyone that, I don't think there's much that I can do. The sludge on his base was made with Water Effects.

The second model was the flamer lady I assembled last time. I'm not going to put a picture up, because frankly, she looks godawful. Maybe it's my rubbish camera, or the rubbish lighting, or my rubbish painting, or a mixture of all three, but it looks very crudely done. I'll have another go, but it's going to be tricky.

Annoying.

But That's Heresy 2: A Surfeit of Skulls

It's always interesting to find out what influenced the things you like. It's telling how many science fiction films have music that sounds suspiciously similar to Mars from The Planets, and how many have plots that go straight back to 1950s movies about haunted houses and pincer-waving, damsel-abducting monsters from space. And you know what, that brings me to wargaming.

Quite a few of the painting blogs I read are heavily influenced by John Blanche's style, which is ornate, grimy and very medieval. In turn, Blanche's style probably owes a lot to the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel's Triumph of Death.

Lots to see and do during the end of the world.

Nowt wrong with that. There's a lot of the Blanche style in the picture above: brown earth, bits of complex detail, Renaissance-type clothing and of course hordes of the marching dead. Likewise, GW's original Chaos pictures owed a lot to Bosch's depictions of Hell, which were more than just big red dudes with horns.

A bird eats a man who farts crows, whilst wearing a chamber pot.

I assume that they cut the chamber pot from the original Tzeentch models. Similarly, you used to be able to get a Lord Of Change model which was clearly based on the statue of Pazuzu from The Exorcist, raising one hand in, er, greeting.

And of course there were others. The Imperial Guard are blatantly various sorts of historical soldiers with lasguns; the Brettonians borrow from King Arthur; the Escher gangers look somewhat like Tank Girl. That's a good thing: it's nice to be able to effectively have the people from films you like as characters in the game you're playing.

What bothers me slightly is that it's easy to run out of ideas. It's one thing to have a couple of skulls as trophies, and maybe to incorporate them into your outfit ("Are we the baddies?" as Mitchell and Webb would say) but there comes a point where it just starts to look too much.

This is the Khorgorath from the Age of Sigmar boxed set:

Among other things, why has it got skulls coming out of its kneecap? Okay, skulls are cool, I get it, but why its kneecap? Does it sweat skulls? Did it swallow a lot of heads and now they're working their way out like splinters? I think this is one of those moments where "it's a demon" just doesn't suffice. Look at the Bloodletters of Khorne. They look bloody evil. They're not even amazingly original, or detailed, or dynamic. They just look nasty: vicious and yet comparatively low-key.

Okay, this is a particularly extreme example, but I think this is what happens when you start to run out of visual cues. And that's what I wonder about 40k and quite a lot of other space models. You've got monks, knights in (powered) armour, muscley executioner types, catsuit assassin ladies, space Nazis in long coats and gasmasks, steampunk chaps in top hats and fancy armour - and sooner or later, you start to see the same themes too many times. The Dark Eldar, the Sisters of Battle, the Imperial Guard and, to an extent, the orks and Chaos all have bare-chested men with crude bionic bits and bags over their heads (and so, in the form of the Cephalix, do Warmachine). I suppose these all tap into the same sinister basic image, but isn't there something else that could be done?

That's the problem, really: because the same things that show that a model is definitely a space monk are the things that end up being overused. One person might groan at the sight of Yet More Zombie Nazis, and another might wonder how a game could call itself Weird War if they weren't there. And, as ever, they're your models, and if you want to closely follow another example, go ahead. Almost all Space Wolf armies have a very similar look, but that's not to say that there are some excellent examples of them (and that some are much better than others). Maybe there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps the difficult thing is to do something new with what you've got.

Sometimes, as they say, less is more. So I'll shut up now.

A Few Bad Men

I've not done a vast amount of painting and converting this week, mainly because the real world has got in the way. When I say "real world", I actually mean "playing Fallout 4 in the real world". Add to that the fact that the Alien Isolation game was going cheap on the PS4, and it all adds up to crawling through a lot of retro-looking tunnels.

Anyhow, I did manage to get some work done on the scientists. For their leader, I removed the weapons and added a bolter made out of odds and ends and the pointing robot arm from a Skitarri soldier.

It's not a 40k army unless someone is pointing at something.

The next soldier was a Privateer Press model. He was doing a wobbly-fingers magic-casting gesture with his left hand, which was raised up alongside his head, like this:

Not painted by me.

Fine if you're a wizard, but a bit odd in the underhive. I removed his arm, replaced the hand with the one I'd taken off the guy above, and sculpted him a new arm in green stuff. The remains of his shoulder got a random bit of 40k "tech" to cover up the mess.

The third conversion was a bit more drastic.I found an old conversion that I did about 15 years ago, giving an Eldar scout (for some reason) a space marine plasma gun. With a new head (from a wood elf) and new arms (Imperial Guard), and quite a lot of green stuff, the model now looks like a mixture of a doctor and some kind of chemical cleanup team. Which is pretty much what I want! Her rather stern expression, coupled with the metal plate on one side of her face, suggests that she means business.

Anyway, I've not painted much, although I made this little cooking station out of a textured base, some off-cuts of MDF and an ogre kingdoms pot (thanks Other James for this bit - I knew it would come in useful somehow!).

Tasty!

Getting the (War)band Together

Imagine that you are in charge of a boy band. There they are, bright-eyed and squeaky clean (except for the rugged one with designer stubble). Soon they will go on stage and sit on their stools. One will stick his finger in his ear and they will sing a ballad as sincere as it is forgettable. But what will they wear?

Obviously, you can't just put them on stage wearing any old thing. It would look weird. But you can't dress them all the same, because they'd look like cabin crew or part of a very unthreatening fascist movement. So you dress them similarly, but differently.


That's a lot like designing a Necromunda gang.

Stick with me here. One way or another I've ended up with quite a few models in long coats with odd bits of tech stuck to them. Some are GW, others Privateer. Some have goggles, others wavy hair. It occurred to me that it would be quite cool to make them into a Necromunda gang.

The goggles and coats suggest House Delaque. But to be honest I'd rather do a technology-based gang. So how about making them scientists (or at least people who dress like scientists) and using the rules for House Van Saar? Ok then, our guys are going to have white coats and lots of gadgets, which will be a change from the grimy, practical look of the Terror Bird Cavalry. There will have to be a few modifications, of course (I don't like that sword, for one thing). To make sure that they're something seperate, I'll avoid using Delaque and Adeptus Mechanicus models as much as possible, and give them a different colour scheme.

Also, why not include a few robots? They could work well as juves, because they start off pretty terribly in terms of stats, but rapidly advance - which could be represented by adding pieces to the models to reflect the skills (well, upgrades) that they've received from their makers.

I've started on the robots. These were built largely out of Mantic Dreadball parts (the Ro-Tec Brutes to be precise) and I added Chaos and Eldar 40k parts. At the moment they're a bit on the crude side, but that's what I want. If I end up playing any games with them, they'll be refitted as appropriate.

I think this idea has potential. I'll have to see what I can do with the human gangers now.

The Last Chancers

Well, I was going to write a lengthy post about 40k, ending in a proposed campaign setting onboard a massive spaceship. But now my camera is up and running (but still rubbish), I thought I'd post some pictures instead.

I have been painting Colonel Schaffer's Last Chancers, a unit of Imperial Guardsmen from the penal divisions. The concept of the unit is that they are a group of low and desperate criminals with a wide range of dubious skills, picked for the most dangerous missions. Unsurprisingly, there are a dozen of these dirty fighters in the unit.

I really like the models. They seem to have been scooped up from half a dozen times and places - including, it would appear, the Russian steppes, a Tiger tank, the American prairie and the Burmese jungle, from their outfits. I didn't paint them with quite as much detail as I would individual characters, but I spent a reasonable time on each one. And this is how they came out.

From left to right, here are: Animal, a loon who has a meltagun and a pair of trousers; Demolition man, who carries meltabombs and the like (as well as having a lasgun that looks remarkably like an AK47), and Grease Monkey, who seems to be a (not very successful) vehicle driver.

Next up we have Shiv (an assassin); Warrior Woman (a close combat fighter) and Hero, who holds up enemy units with his inevitable self-sacrifice. I gave Warrior Woman stripey leggings like Tank Girl, because she looked rather stupid dressed like a Roman cheerleader.

.
Here we have Brains, the radio operator; Ox, the heavy bolter man; and Scope, a sniper. Personally, I think that Scope is the best sniper I've seen from GW, and much better than the Vindicare model. According to the background, Brains and Ox are good friends. Perhaps they intend to buy a farm with some rabbits.

 Last of all, we have Fingers, who is apparently a skilled thief; the Colonel himself, together with plasma pistol and cigar; and the excitingly-named Rocket Girl, who is a girl with a rocket (actually, a girl hiding behind a rocket).

In painting them, I used a fairly limited selection of colours to tie them together despite their absence of a uniform. Needless to say, they look much better in real life. Not that they're really alive, you understand. Anyhow, it's been a nice change to paint a squad and not to be converting anything. I suppose I'll have to get back to the daily grind of making a Victorian on a jetbike riding a dragon made out of string, or something like that.

Inside the Filling Station

Here is the interior of the filling station at the moment, complete with workbench and power armour frame. There are a couple of posters on the wall, which are hard to make out here: one of a girl on a motorbike and the other a cutaway diagram of a 1950's car. Hopefully it looks enough like the Red Rocket station in Fallout 4.

I think I've finished with this bit of the set for now and will move on to the other areas, especially the rest of the building/shop and the petrol pumps (which probably pump atomic power, somehow, but anyway, that sort of thing).

In other news, I'm currently painting a set of Schaeffer's Last Chancers, an Imperial Guard penal regiment. They're coming along nicely, although I'd forgotten what a pain lead can be to paint. I've not done any conversion work on them, so I'll post pictures once they're finished.

Furniture of the Far Future

Work on the garage continues. Even in the future, there is still office furniture.

This is a WIP workbench with an integral drill, inspired by the ones in Fallout 4. The little chap in blue, converted from an Epic imperial guardsman, is supposed to be a Vault Boy bobblehead figure.

And this is probably the most boring picture that I have ever taken. It's two cabinets.

It will get more exciting, I promise!