Two More Marines

 Jut a quick one, this, as it's nearly Christmas day. I painted a couple more marines. The chap on the right is a Space Wolf miniature, but I thought that his helmet and outfit would work fine as a junior member of my own knightly chapter. It's not really possible to make out here, but he's got a cut in his helmet just above the left eye, as if someone's hit him with a big weapon. It's a nice sculpt.

The bloke on the left is another of the Masters of the Chapter models. I replaced the head with a Grey Knights helmet. The original left arm held a bolter, but was angled across the body and hid a lot of the detail, so I replaced it with a more standard arm holding a bolt pistol, which I think works much better. Two decent miniatures that I enjoyed painting a lot.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Space Marine Missile Launcher Squad

 After the slightly disappointing experience of painting the dinosaurs riding dinosaurs, I decided to finish the Forge World missile launcher marines. I went for a plain blue cowling for one of their guns, and a hazard-striped barrel on the other, in old-fashioned Necromunda style. Very sporting of the marines to paint warning stripes on their guns, in case the orks hadn't noticed that they were dangerous yet.

Here is the entire squad. I really like them: they're a bit of a riot of colour, but obviously the same colours carry across the unit, with a few variations. It's interesting how much a space marine squad is like a boy band: the same concepts carry across with minor variations. All ready to blast things in an old-school style!

Cold One Knights

 After the (comparative) success of the lizardmen salamander, I dug out some unfinished Cold One riders, which I think are currently called Saurus Knights. The models are at least 10 years and probably more like 15. I bought them to play Warhammer Fantasy Battle against a friend, and ended up with quite a large army - which I then forgot about. The knights came in a starter box, and weren't much good against my friend's High Elves, so I left them there, unfinished.

Dinosaurs are cool, and a small dinosaur riding a big dinosaur is a fundamentally excellent idea. Unfortunately, the more I painted the models, the less I liked them. For one thing, lizardmen Saurus are weirdly thin, and don't look tough or quick enough to take on chaos warriors and the like. For another, the models are detailed in a fiddly sort of way: you can paint the skin easily enough, but there are lots of bits and bobs that need to be finished and take ages. Also, the models are very "closed", in that the arms and shields cover a lot of the bodies, and the range of poses you can actually make (and still rank the models up) is pretty limited.

Anyhow, all that considered, I broke out the green, red and blue, and got to work. 

Here are some others:

And here's their boss:

I don't dislike them, but I'm not crazy about them, either. I reckon they'd make a decent enough unit, but I can't get terribly enthusiastic about these guys. Oh well - they'll be useful once Warhammer gets tired of this Sigmarine stuff and gets back to rectangular bases. 

Now then, more marines, I think.

Pigsty

 Just a quick post. A couple of weeks back I went to an event, where I picked up a few bits of 3D-printed scenery by Iron Gate Scenery. One of the bits was a nice little pigsty, together with fencing, which I thought would look good in the fantasy town. No medieval town is complete without a few farm animals wandering through the streets, probably chased by a filthy peasant.

I made a base for the fencing out of plasticard, partly to make it stronger and partly to allow me to add some mud to the ground for the pigs to root about in. The pigs themselves were purchased from Warlord Games in a farm animals set ages ago. I think their pinkness breaks up the other colours a bit.

Chaos Possessed Marines (and bonus dinosaur)

 The power of chaos is a curious thing, as Huey Lewis and The News nearly once said. It makes one man weep, it makes another man grow wings and three arms and go on a killing spree. Which, coincidentally, brings me onto this week's conversions: possessed Chaos space marines.

Possessed marines are great because so long as they look vicious and fairly mariney, they can be almost anything. I bought a set of possessed legs off ebay, and went to work with whatever I could find in the bits box.

As it happens, I decided to take to WIP pictures, but not only were they out of focus, but I then deleted two of them by mistake. Is it better to have three rubbish WIP pictures that none at all, or better to have three rubbish WIP pictures than five? Anyhow, enjoy:

This guy has a deamonette head, a big arm from an old chaos mutation sprue, and a left arm from some resin Necromunda Goliath arms I found on ebay.

This guy has bloodletter arms and sword, and a head from a fantasy Khorne bloodsecutor or something silly like that. A fat guy with a whip, anyhow.

This thing has a daemonette left arm, a right arm from some fantasy thing (it came with a load of other models, and it was broken even then!) and a head taken from the horn on the daemonette sprue.

Right then, paint.

On to the next two. The guy on the right, with the mallet, has a Goliath left arm (the one with the mallet) and a right arm made of two daemonette claws and half a chaos knight arm, which I'd chopped up sometime previously. His head is from a juggernaut rider, I think. A lot of these bits came in random bags.

And then there's their boss! This chap has an upper body from the chaos cultist flamer chap I cut up a few months back (I think he's called the firebrand). His arms are from a genestealer and his head is a cut down version of the same head I used on the guy with bloodletter arms. You can tell he's evil because he's about to play a massive chord on a church organ, hence his pose.

And here is a bonus dinosaur. Many years ago, I had a lizardmen army and often played against my friend's high elves. The only way of beating the elves was to buy huge amounts of skinks. Anyhow, I found a random box of skinks, and with them was this thing. I think it's a conversion of a very old Cold One. It looks like a fat velociraptor (Fat Raptor would be a good band name, I think). I seem to have added neck fans, rather like the Jurassic Park version of Dilophosaurus. Anyhow, I painted it. Here it is, bonus dinosaur:

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