Painting Death Shroud Terminators

After assembling 60 MK3 marines I decided I wanted to actually paint something.  Airbrush worked much better than I had anticipated.  I am spraying a GW base paint and I expected to deal with clogs.  I did a few things to mitigate this.  I did some extra "cutting".

• 40% paint
• 50% water
• 10% flow-aid

If you haven't used flow-aid before, it's a Liquitex product and its amazing.  I use it to make washes flow even better into spaces and I use it when cutting my airbrush paint to help get the paint through the nozzle.

I also went through one additional step and used an automotive disposable paint filter to run the paint through.  I'm not sure it did anything though I can say with the above two steps I had zero problems spraying ten models and zero problems cleaning up the brush.  We'll see how the above method holds up when I paint the first batch of 20 Mk3 marines.  That will be a bigger test. 

Filter I used. 

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Starting a Death Guard Horus Horus Heresy Legion

So after almost two years I'm back at it again.  No need to go into the reasons, though my hobby malaise has finally lifted, I think, and now I'm back in the saddle again.

What brought me back? Horus Heresy, in my absence, became much more affordable.   While I have zero interest in hopping back into the 40k scene, the 30k story and models have gotten a lot better and more affordable in the last few years.  Other than being really confused about which books to pick up I'm really excited about the new plastics.  For not much more than a 40k army you can do a 30k one.   I had really wanted to get into the 30k scene a few years ago, by collecting the Forgeworld books for Horus Heresy though I never quite pulled the trigger on the models as what I wanted to do, a large infantry death guard army of MKII and MKIII marines was just more money than I wanted to spend.

So, what am I doing?

Well, I'm collecting the way I used to, when I was much younger.  I'm buying what's cool to me and I'm going to make a list later.  Part of it is I'm not being competitive about it.  The 40k scene in the Bay Area is mostly folks wanting to compete and I'm more into the hobby, collecting, and narrative game play.  I really just want to meet some cool people, ogle great models, and roll some dice.  

So far I've collected two of the Battle of Calth sets and two of the Burning of Prospero sets on order.  I'm planning on doing a ton of infantry and terminators. I'm also planning on ordering some vehicles from Forgeworld soon, especially with that nice exchange rate, and seeing where I go from there.

My plan for painting is to try the Forgeworld guide, though I'm using Krylon white and I'll pick up an alternative medium.

Seattle Seahawk themed Imperial Knight for Celesticon 2014

Being a football fan and a war gamer are two hobbies that don't often collide.  While trying to pick a color scheme for an Imperial Knight I was painting up for an event at Celesticon 2014 I realized I could use a certain team I am somewhat of a supporter of and take a rare opportunity for my two favorite hobbies to meet in an unholy union.

While most of my gamer friends may not realize this, being a fan of an out of market team can either be frustrating or fun.  My wife, who is a a Saints fan, another out of market team, tends to get upset at all of the ribbing she gets from local fans.  I, on the other hand, go a different route and tend to have a lot of fan displaying my fandom for the Seattle Seahawks to those that might not be the biggest fans of my favorite team.   The Seahawks being rivals to the local team can be fun at times.

First off, the final result.

My first task was to do some color matching.  I'm not a huge fan of mixing my own colors so I picked up a bunch of different blues and greens to match to my favorite Jersey.  After some test swatches, I got the colors I wanted.  One from the Citadel paint line and one from the P3 line.  The green still didn't "pop" as much as I wanted it too though it was pretty close.  The Blue was pretty spot on.

After settling on colors I started the build and paint job.  For the body I mostly followed the Games Workshop painting tutorial posted on YouTube.

Most of the way through.  I decided to try out the crackle paint that GW is making, mostly because I didn't have enough time to do anything more detailed.  This was the day before the convention so I needed to wrap it up pretty quickly.  I also decided to add some details to the base painting in a certain local team's colors. 

 The night before the event I spent a few hours in my hotel room adding decals.  

On with some finished photos.

As a side note, this was actually the second Knight I had painted up in this scheme.  I had a horrible problem with some matte spray, that I was later to find out was because the can had been left in a cold garage, that sprayed texture all over the model and ruined it.  The green knight/brown in the pictures is actually this knight having be repainted.

Here is a picture of the first version of the Knight, that had to be repainted because it was ruined.

Imperial Knight Grand Melee - A Warhammer 40k Knight Event at Celesticon

On Sunday, my last event of Celesticon, was an large Imperial Knight only event.  The event was billed as a Grand Melee where Knights would face off in joust like style events.   Having played both regular 40k and non-traditional games I can easily say this was one of the most fun games I've played in a long time.

We started by dueling in some one on one matches, and then ended up battling in a team game to decide the victor.  I ended up losing my first match, and then winning my second two, putting me as captain of the B squad.  The large team game was a blast, with it going to the wire with me finishing off the last knight on the opposing team only to have it detonate and take out my knight as well.  Our team still one, even if my knight bit the bullet.