A Thousand Sons

Anyone visiting this Blog will, at the very least know about the epic Horus Heresy series, and I'm guessing many of you will be following it. The most recent release, Graham McNeill's
A Thousand Sons charts the fate of the eponymous Legion, familar in their 40k incarnation as sorcerous Chaos Space Marines the story goes a long way to explaining the downfall of these once noble warriors while thankfully avoiding many of the potential traps and cliches already plundered in lesser Black Library piblications.

With the Horus Heresy now numbering a dozen books, including an excellent anthology of short stories edited by the head honcho himself- Rick Priestley. The quality has been a bit patchy to say the least. As far as genre literature goes the overall quality has been good, and having my first exposure to the great Heresy aged a measly ten years of age I have found my expectations probably unfairly high. Fans, while loving their adopted material can also be the most partisan of critics and I'm sure the Black Library are more than aware of this. Personally I found the series got off to a good start, with truly epic scenes depicting the rise of Horus and the prosecution of the Emperors great bloody work- The Great Crusade, becoming Homeresque in their recounting. The low point so far I would have to say would be Mechanicum, McNeill's last outing in the series and, to be fair a difficult subject (making the reader sympathise with mechanical characters seems pretty difficult) made me approach A Thousand Sons with some trepidation.

So it is satisfying indeed that the Author has trumped the series by writing a novel that makes the reader love the main characters, undoubtedly the most human Astartes we have met yet, before plunging them into a wicked tragedy that takes the reader into a downward spiral as if a brother of the Thousand Sons legion himself. Magnus the Red, arguably the most powerful and potent of the Primarchs is a flawed gem of a character. His humility and philosophical outlook enamour the reader, while his veiled ambition and pride shows portent of his downfall, his love of knowledge and outlook for humanity leave you in no doubt that he is good. So all the more tragic the outcome, we know the fate of the legion- their transformation is skillfully written. Be it known the Emperor makes mistakes, and this book encompasses that very hubris in a skillfully written account that could be no further from the black and white good versus evil version of the 'current' 40k background, here instead find the multitude of greys that colour the human condition.

Good science fiction tells you about humanity, and Graham McNeill has put the Black Library back on track with this latest installment- top marks.

Black Reach Ork

Just a quick post today, having nearly got my Crimson Fists done I have decided to make a start on the Orks that came with Assault on Black Reach. I'm going for Evil Sunz as they have the potential for a nice paint scheme without being too gaudy, it also gives me the chance to make lots of crazy orkish vehicles :o)
Since Orks are a horde army, the criterium for painting is to be fairly simple. I'm using the citadel wash range to full effect, it saves time and they look good. The ork flesh is Goblin Green, two Thraka washes then highlight Goblin Green. The other base colours I used for the clothing, straps and boots are Codex Grey, Graveyard Earth and Vomit Brown. They all get the same treatment of a Badab Black wash followed by a highlight in the original colour. The teef and claws are Scorched Brown followed by Bleached Bone, and a minimal White highlight. The metal surfaces start as Boltgun metal, and get a wash of Badab and Devlan Mud, then highlighted with Chainmail. The red Bitz are simply metal areas daubed with Mechrite and Blood Red in a haphazard 'orkish' style.

The citadel washes are a godsend for painting large volumes of troops quickly, they have halved the amount of shading and highlighting I do.

Crimson Fists Dreadnought- Weathered.

Hello everyone. Sorry for the lack of posts recently, looking for a new job and other multitudinous 'life administration' tasks have been getting in the way of my beloved wargaming. My recent painting activity has centered around trying to finish my Crimson Fists, and they would have been finished by now if i hadn't decided to start experimenting with weathering techniques.

My thinking is that, as the galaxies elite warriors, Space Marines would 'honour their wargear' and would look pretty immaculate at all times, until that is, they contact the enemy. It is said that the best battle plan will not survive contact with the enemy, and the same could be said of immaculately buffed power armour! As my Crimson Fists force is set just after the Rynns World disaster it is meant to depict a band of desperate warriors who have just had their Fortress Monastery destroyed and are fighting a valiant guerilla war behind enemy lines in order to link up with their allies in New Rynn City. That's where the weathering comes in. I wanted the Dreadnought to look as if having slogged hundreds of miles across the grassy plains, through skirmishes and plain bad luck.

The painting technique is the same as outlined below for the Tactical Marines, with the addition of paint chips done by adding Codex Grey areas with spots and scratches of Boltgun Metal in the middle. The grey is meant to represent undercoat/ primer that is exposed by bashes and repeated contact and the metal represent the metal underneath (of course). I also brushed on ochre and grey pastels, you can get these from any art shop and scrape a small amount onto a palette then use an old brush to sweep the 'muck' into corners and recesses, especially on the lower parts of the model. I'm fairly pleased with the results but with weathering part of the trick is to know when to stop- overcook it and your model can end up looking like a spawn of nurgle.

Scenery with Sketchup

I downloaded this free application from Google a few hours ago and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. Sketchup is a free CAD type program with a bias toward architecture that Google have made available so people can add buildings to Google Earth. Seeing this opportunity I decided to have a go, except the buildings I intend to design have no real life prototype as they exist 40,000 years in the future ;o)

I'm a keen scenery maker and I even sell some of my cast pieces on eBay from time to time, so having a tool that enables me to plan on a screen means less time wasting mistakes and printing out scale plans makes life a lot easier (I could print the plan straight onto card if I wanted to). The example below is an Epic scale Censorium, the sort of building that would be common in a city of the Imperium, if I decide to make a master model for casting, the plans will make life a lot easier.

When trying CAD before I found it confusing and returned to pen and paper pretty quick, this application however is really easy to use and i recommend it as total novice to this sort of thing.

Hope you all had a nice Christmas, next week I'll be back with some more conventional painting type stuff...

Crimson Fist Terminators

This weeks bout of frantic daubing has delivered a squad of six Crimson Fist Terminators (the Black Reach termis plus an assault cannon from the plastic set for added flexibility). All in I think spent about six hours on painting these boys. I followed the same reduced scheme as for the Tactical squad outlined below, with the addition that the Crux Terminatus markings are a simple wash of Devlan Mud over Bleached Bone. Keeping the colour palette to a minimum means that I should have no problems in fielding a 1000 points soon after Christmas, a welcome antidote to my slow progress on my other projects!


You will notice that few of the minis I post up on here are actually based, well for me that is the very last thing I do on an army, it's a kind of ritual that clears my bench off and allows me to start thinking of the next project. Bearing that in mind though I am preparing a backdrop for photos on this blog that will make things a bit more aesthetically pleasing than a paint spattered cutting mat.

So next up to tackle is the dreadnought, and a metal tactical squad is waiting for some custom shoulder pads from GW....

Crimson Fists

This week GW have released some cool detailing kits for the Crimson Fists chapter, an unexpected boon for me since I only decided to do Crimson Fists a few weeks ago myself! The first ever 'official' space marine chapter to be described by GW was unarguably the Crimson Fists, adorning the cover of the Rogue Trader manual all those years ago. The 'battle at the farm' scenario inside the book also introduced one of 40k's first ever special characters- Chapter Master Pedro Kantor, named jokingly after Pete Cantor who was one of the original developers.

Back then, although I admired the cool colour scheme of the 'Fists I wanted to do something a bit different and opted to paint my marines in Blood Angels colours, and carried on collecting as the Blood Angels evolved into the blood sucking close assault nutters they are today. All that time though the seed has been there and upon getting the Black Reach boxed set i decided it was time to daub blue and crimson on these 'marines.

My aim is to get a small army up and running pretty quickly, while my Knights of Atreus are a longer term project i want to get the Crimson Fists up and running asap. It also gives me a break from putting three levels of highlights on RTB01 plastics and lets me paint something from this millenium.

The paint scheme is a quick and simplified version of the one currently up on the GW website. Starting with a black undercoat the armour is painted in Regal Blue, followed by a Badab Black wash, then when completely dry drybrush the mini with Enchanted Blue. This provides enough depth for a simple gaming standard but I then added a single line highlight of 50:50 Enchanted Blue/Spacewolf Grey. The red bits... Mechrite red, wash Devlan Mud, Blood Red, Blazing Orange highlight. The metals are simply Bolt Gun Metal washed Badab Black then a minor highlight with Boltgun Metal again.

That sergeant looks a bit peeved, must be because someone nuked his fortress monastery.

Once the rest, and Pedro are painted I'll be doing a mini campaign detailing the escape and subsequent reinforcement of New Rynn city following the destruction of the fortress monastery. Of course that will have to include the 'battle at the farm' from the RT book....

Land Raider renovation

I have had this MK1 Landraider sitting around for some time, and as the Knights are coming together (2 RTB01 tac squads fully painted, devastators on the way and Assault squad with jump packs awaiting paint) I'll be needing a ride for the Command Squad or Terminators pretty soon. The problem is, this Landy has several coats of paint and glue splodges, generally it's looking shoddy and it's totally the wrong colour!

A full recondition is in order, firstly I have removed the sponsons as they were totally clogged with glue after decades of repairs (the old Land Raiders almost always lost their las-cannons at some point) these will be reattached using brass wire so that they articulate they way they're meant to.

As for removing the paint- early experiments with oven cleaner (Mr Muscle) on the heavy bolter are promising, leaving pristine 1980's plastic underneath. The oven cleaner needed 2 days to munch through the thick paint but has the benefit of not attacking the plastic. A word of warning to anyone who wishes to use this method- use gloves and a mask!! And clean up thoroughly afterwards, the concentrated Sodium Hydroxide in these products is very nasty. This method has the virtue of washing down the sink with warm water, other stripping methods can be more polluting. Always try your stripping chemicals on a test area like i have with the Heavy Bolter before commiting to the full model, especially if it's an antique.

Once the Land Raider is stripped I'll post up pictures.