Chaos Terminator Captain

 This week, we're back in the Eye of Terror, that hellish place where Chaos rules, the laws of nature are strictly optional, and most conversations end with someone shouting "or suffer the consequences!". 

I won an ebay auction for some random terminator guns and arms, so it seemed time to make some more terminator marines. I didn't have all the bits, but I could always improvise. The parts I had from ebay were from Nurgle terminators, but that wasn't going to put me off. 

I started with a standard Chaos terminator body, and added the lower legs from a Tau stealth suit. They were the right scale and had a suitable hooved, bestial look. Then I draped some green stuff around the legs to make a sort of skirt. That looked impressive, and bulked the legs out a bit so they didn't look too spindly.

The right arm went on as standard. It's a really nice sculpt, with a great piece of cloth hanging off the shoulder-plate. The left arm is cool too, with its row of weird quills, but the Nurgley sword looked too decrepit for my tastes. I cut it off and replaced it with the top of a chaos knight spear that I'd had lying around for ages. Much more choppy.

The model got a couple of chains hanging down from its waist, which I took from Empire flagellant bits. They just looked like the sort of junk that a chaos champion might carry. I found an odd piece in the bits box that looked like a crown made from tusks tied together. I think it might have been from a savage orc. Anyhow, it was stuck to the model's backpack. One of the best thing about terminator models - which I've never been that sold on, especially the chaos variety - is that you can pile random stuff onto their backs. 

And finally, the head. This was a wood elf dryad's head, cut to fit and green-stuffed into place. Maybe it was once human, but it certainly isn't now.

Now for paint. It - actually, I'm starting to think that this creature might be a she - got the standard chaos paint scheme. I've been watching a few painting videos on Youtube, and one suggested highlighting models slightly further than you normally would. I decided to give this a go, and so took the colours a bit further than usual. I also shaded the deepest folds of the red cloth with dark green, which works quite well.

I painted the flesh a weird "maybe it was once human" colour, and did the eyes and the sword blue to provide contrast to the red and black.

And here we are with the entire terminator squad. I recently discovered that two of them have resin legs that are incredibly fragile. If an opportunity arrives to give them different legs, I'll probably take it.

Sternguard Veterans

This week, I took a bit of a break from the mean streets of Mordheim to paint some space marines. This is a metal squad of veterans that I got from ebay a few months ago. They were going for a very decent price and looked like the kind of vaguely-knightly guys I wanted in my little army. I think they're sternguard veterans - ie old blokes who hang around at the back.

 While I often make fun of the ridiculous Space Marine fluff and GW's obsession with making them bigger and bigger, I do think that some very good models have been released for the non-Primaris marines over the years, and these are some of them. The sculpting is excellent and they're covered in odd details that don't obscure the basic look of the models. I did wonder about de-skulling them a bit, but then I realise that it would be too much effort and the chances of me doing more harm than good were very high. At the end, the only conversions I did were to replace two gun barrels that had been squashed out of shape with bits of plastic rod.

Here are the first two:

Here's the second pair:

And this is the leader (I think):

Here's the whole squad together:

A pirate captain and a lowly Skaven

Once again, I've been digging in the box of random stuff that I never got around to painting. This time, I found a Black Scorpion model called Esmerelda. She's a pirate captain, as her attire suggests. 

I enjoyed painting this model, although it was very detailed and some of the stuff around her waist - a pistol, as it happens - was actually quite hard to make out. I tried to paint the coat in a mock-leather technique, to make it look old and battered. She seems to be wearing a tabard of some kind, maybe made out of a slit dress, which I painted red. That tended to draw the eye away from her face, so I painted her hat and feather in suitably ostentatious colours.

This being a Black Scorpion model, the sculpting is excellent. However, I had trouble getting the colours to look really bright, which has happened to me with their stuff before. Still, I'm happy with the results.

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Time for another skaven. This chap was in with a group of models I bought a while back. I think he's an old metal Blood Bowl model, but someone had drilled out his right hand, presumably to put a weapon in it. In the process, they'd taken some of the detail off his hand and arm, so I added some green stuff and tried to resculpt it.

The knife came from the excellent Frostgrave Female Wizards set: it was one of the few small enough to fit this guy. He looks suitably nasty and underhanded. I painted him to fit the other members of the warband: I reckon he's pretty junior and disposable, even by skaven standards.

 Incidentally, this week I loaded up the old computer game Mordheim: City of the Damned on my PC. I really wanted to like it (I've greatly enjoyed bashing skaven in Vermintide in the past). Unfortunately, it was unintuitive and extremely difficult. After the computer arbitrarily wiped out half my squad in one turn, I deleted it. Life's too short for that. There's a moral here: you're better off with miniatures!

Skaven With Knives and Slings

 It's sometimes said that you can never have enough skaven, although probably only by skaven. Here are two more nasty little rat-men, up to no good.

The one on the left is an unconverted metal miniature. He's a gutter runner from the early 1990s, and compared to the other models he's rather chunky. Not that that's a problem: he probably just ate a few of his comrades. The position of his knives is a bit strange, to me, but I'm not a ninja rat, so what do I know?

The guy on the right is the finished version of the model I started last week. His upper body is a plastic night runner, from the boxed set. The lower body is sculpted from green stuff, because I ran out of bits. This was fairly easy, as sculpting goes, because filthy draped cloth covers a lot of sins.

To make this, I first cut a piece of sprue about the right height, and glued it to the base. I actually used a bit that was too short, which compelled me to make him with bent legs. Then I made some flat sheets of green stuff and draped them around the sprue post to make the skirt-type thing he's wearing. I added a tail made of rolled green stuff and some claws sticking out the bottom. His belt was another rolled tube that I flattened into a strip.

The main thing about this is that all the shapes involved were pretty simple, and little actual sculpting was involved. I pressed a sculpting tool into the green stuff to make some folds in his robe, and added two balls of green stuff to the base to represent metal balls that he's about to hurl with his sling. Then it was just a matter of sticking the model together and painting it. There's not much to say about the painting except that I put stripes on the slinger's tail to imitate the segments that GW sculpts on the skaven tails.

No idea what I'll paint next!

Mordheim Skaven

 Time for some more Mordheim models. I found a metal skaven with fighting claws in the bits box, as well as a plastic gutter runner swinging a flail. The metal model is really good, full of cool details like the little rat perched on the skaven's shoulder. The gutter runner is nice too, once you get used to the slightly odd proportions of the model. It's from an old plastic multi-pose set.

I also dug out the metal Ikit Claw model (without backpack) which I painted up a while ago as the leader of the skaven warband. I put a bit more detail on him and tidied him up.

Finally, I started work on a skaven sling-wielder. I'd run out of lower legs, so I sculpted some filthy robes out of green stuff. I've got a few heads and sets of arms left over, so I've ordered a few plague monk bodies (they were cheap) from ebay to finish them off.

I'm currently cleaning my little town, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get a picture of the skaven in action.