Orktober!

 Just a quick one. It is, apparently, Orctober, which means it's time to paint an orc. I dug out this old model, which I made ages ago. 

It's not actually intended to be an ork: the main body was a Ramshackle Games cyborg bloke. I sculpted an ork head over the original one with green stuff and added some skulls from a lizardmen set.

I decided to give him a repaint and a bit more detail. He got a lot of weathering, including some weathering powder on his metal bits.

It'll probably turn out that we've stopped doing Orktober, and now it's Octogre. Oh well!

Another Eldar Venom (or maybe Viper)

While a lot of this blog is "thing of the week", I do have some models that I gradually chip away at, painting a bit here and there, until they clutter up my desk. One of these is the second Eldar venom conversion. I originally got two venoms from Ebay, and decided to make them into "nice Eldar" versions, largely by taking off the skulls and spikey bits (which might well have snapped off anyhow - how anyone stores a Dark Eldar army is beyond me).

I gave the second venom the same conversion as the first: I cut off a headlight-type thing between the two prongs at the front and put the barrel of a shuriken cannon in its place, to create a nose-mounted gun. This took some fiddly lining up, but other than cutting a hooked blade off the underside, it's the only converting I did.

I painted the second venom in much the same way as the first. The main body was blue, which I shaded up and down with lighter blues (this was quite tricky). In places, I blended in purple as a spot colour.

The model came with its canopy glued down and slightly misted up, so I decided to paint over the "glass". I attempted the same mirrored lens effect that I did with the pilot of the first venom. As with last time, I quickly felt that I'd bitten off more than I could chew, but I persisted and the result isn't bad.

 

I'm pleased with both of these. Shading isn't my strong point, and I'm glad that it's come out ok. I spent quite a long time on this ship, which probably helps, and did most of the blending in single sittings, so I wouldn't forget where I'd got to. 

Farseer

 Back to the Eldar! One of my favourite old metal Eldar models is the farseer. He's a sort of enhanced warlock, who has extremely powerful psychic powers (at least, in the background). As far as I know, only one sculpt of this chap was made back in the blue catalogue days. I think he's a Jes Goodwin model.

Like the warlocks, he's an excellent miniature with a good mixture of flat spaces and detail. He's less of an action sculpt than his minions, and he has a massive helmet that makes him seem rather little. I put my farseer on a slightly bigger, higher base than his warlocks, just to emphasise his importance.

I didn't make any conversions and I painted him to reflect the other Eldar. I tried to incorporate all the various colours I've used, so he has the dark red of the warlocks, and a bit of the blue-green I used on the dreadnoughts. His eyes were painted using the same Turbo Dork paint that I used on the Warp Spiders, to represent the magical energies reflected in the lenses (he's probably seen some sights).

I'd originally intended to paint his outer robe with a very swirly psychedelic pattern, but then I realised that this was beyond me, and so I went for blue with some little dots, like a fancy kimono. The rules on his scabbard were taken from an old Eldar codex: I feel that they could do with a bit "more", but I'm not sure what.

And here he is with his bodyguards.

Khorne Berserker Conversions (plus bonus elf with gun)

 It's been a long while - three months or so - since I painted anything that wasn't an Eldar. I happened to be looking at ebay, and saw a bunch of Warhammer chaos chaps going very cheaply, so I bought them, and well.. 

It's well-known that the models for Khorne berserkers are awful. They're extremely old, and probably looked pretty cool back in 2003, but now look very clunky and clumsy. New models are coming, but they're not actually as mental as I'd like berserkers to be.

For those who don't know, berserkers are entirely reasonable people who fight as elite assault troops for Khorne the Blood God, who is like a cross between the artwork on an 80s metal album and a child's drawing of the Balrog from the Lord of the Rings. The berserkers rampage around the galaxy, hacking and slaying and presumably regretting their poor life choices.

The models I had bought were all from Age of Sigmar, which meant I needed to convert them to wield more futuristic gear. They were, I think, "blood warriors" (all the AoS Khorne models have silly names). In some cases this was a standard weapon swap, but in others I had to replace entire arms with space marine ones. 

The end result was a bit of a weird mishmash, but I doubt that the frothing warriors of Khorne would much care. Incidentally, there is some bare skin on show, but that's the same with the official GW kits. GW has always been pretty lax with the idea of power armour making up a sealed suit, after all. That's why I didn't add any backpacks to these guys. I expect that the evil magic of the Warp protects them, or something.

Also, none of them has the standard "Khorne bunny ears" on his helmet. That's simply because I think they look a bit silly and over-large, so I just trimmed them down or used Chaos heads instead. Here are some WIP shots of 3 of them (I did the other 3 conversions earlier and just repainted them).

This guy has two new arms and a new head.

This chap got a new left arm, a new head and pistol, and a spike on his shoulder pad.

The champion of the unit was originally holding a massive banner. This snapped off, and I replaced it with a plasma pistol. I added a new head looking in a different direction to the original one, so he'd be pointing his men forward with his ridiculous axe.

And here they are painted. The first two:

The second two. Both of these are based off the same model. My conversion tip here is that the way that heads and weapons are pointing can really change the look and feel of a model.

And the third two. The guy on the left has a really fortunate lasgun that I had lying around. The big scale of these guys makes it easier to use old plastic fists and weapons, as a lot of the fists have sausage fingers that aren't obvious on hefty blokes like the berserkers.

Actually, if anyone's missing elves with guns, I did paint one such model. It's a Privateer Press Scyrah model, and it's made out of some kind of weird plastic-resin stuff. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn't hold detail all that well, and there were some nasty mold lines. I was able to scrape a lot of it off, but it doesn't have the crispness of metal or proper plastic.

Two More Warlocks

 Here are two more warlocks for the retro Eldar army. There's not much to say about them: they're Jes Goodwin sculpts, they're from the early-mid 90s, and they're really good miniatures. They're obviously based off the same basic model, but the detail is excellent and they stand apart well. I particularly like the fact that one chap has antlers.

Eldar Autarch Conversion

 Even more Eldar! After all this painting, I was missing doing conversions, so I thought I'd make a converted leader for my Eldar army. One of the characters you can have now is the autarch, who is a sort of super-warrior who can mix and match skills and gear from the various Eldar aspects. I thought this would give me the opportunity to build something suitably unusual.

I started with the plastic Dark Eldar archon model. It's got an interesting pose, as he's standing on a pile of rocks with his legs close together, presumably supervising his minions. I used the legs and the front of the body. The rocks had a skull and ribcage in front of them. I removed these to make the model look a bit more heroic and less sinister. 

The back of the body came from an old metal warp spider jump generator that (I think) originally came with a metal autarch model. In one of those weird "this was meant to happen" moments, it fitted perfectly with the front of the Dark Eldar body. Excellent!

The arms came from old Eldar bits. The right arm and weapon were from a Shining Spear conversion kit (they're an aspect who ride jetbikes and carry lances) and the left came from an extremely old Guardian part that was lying in the bits box. The pistol is from a Dark Eldar wytch, but looks quite like a standard Eldar fusion pistol. 

Her head was an old Wood Elf part. It's got an odd plate on the left side, presumably as armour, which I painted up to match her body armour.

Painting-wise, I tried to incorporate some of the colours I've used on other Eldar units, to suggest that she has studied all of them: she's got purple hair like a Warlock, a white Warp Spider backpack, blue Guardian armour and a green/blue fade on her rear insignia, like the heads of the dreadnoughts that I've made.

Now the army has a leader! I've got plans to do more warlocks and a farseer or two as well. Watch this space elf...