Last night I finished a few new units for my Adeptus Mechanicus army. Above you can see some Knights Warden (more french chevaliers) that have been blocking my painting queue for far too long: the gun barrels on the arms were extremely fragile in resin, so I decided to replace them with new ones made from plastic tubing and brass rod. Because that was an awkward and fiddly job, they went straight into the "To Do" drawer, which has stopped me from painting any more Knights for probably a couple of years! So it's good to be able to finish them.
Below, you will also see another company of Stormblades, and a Heavy Artillery Company of Basilisks.
Here is my company of Assault infantry for my Epic Adeptus Mechanicus/Tech Guard army. Yes, they have jump packs! Imperial Guard Assault infantry were equipped with jump packs back in the days of Rogue Trader (they also had access to Rhinos, Land Raiders and other stuff that are nowadays reserved for Space Marines).
These troops will be deployed using either Gorgon assault carriers or Valkyries, depending on the mission. Those will be the subject of a future post.
Here is the Light Artillery Company for my Adeptus Mechanicus army. The NetEpic rules say that these units contain both Thudd Guns and Mole Mortars, but mine is just Thudd Guns. The artillery pieces themselves are from the now-defunct Exodus Wars range, the infantry models are forumware.
Here is my kitbashed Ordinatus Armageddon, which has been sitting in my to-do pile for several years. I rebased it (on three Flames of War bases glued together) to match the Orginatus Golgotha and the Capitol Imperialis.
The Capitol Imperialis is a monstrosity: old (more than a quarter of a century), heavy (at least half a kilo) and made of actual, proper lead, as in Pb-82, as in, it's actually poisonous.
Not only that, it dates from an era where assembly of such objects was left to Real Men Who Didn't Mind Losing A Finger Because The Bloody Thing Is So Blobby That You Need To Take A Dremel To It To Remove All The Excess Metal.
I make no claim to being such a man, but I was able to assemble my own Capitol Imperialis, to my own satisfaction at least, thanks at least in part to Mike "The Welsh Wizzard" Hobbs. And so for posterity, and the benefit of those who come after, here is how I did it.
Here is a small sample of the models from my next hobby project: infantry and armour support for my Imperial Knights. This has been on the To Do List for a couple of years, before I got distracted by Salamanders, the Reaver, and upgrades to my Necrons.
Back in January I mentioned that I was painting a company of Stormblades and said I'd post when I'd finished them. Somehow that post never materialised, but since I've just rebased these models onto Flames of War bases (which are perfect for Epic models) I thought I'd fulfil my promise.
These super-heavies will (along with the Ordinatus Golgotha) provide the backbone of armour for the Skitarii force which supports my knights and titans. I have a Leman Russ Tank Company and a Skitarii Mechanised Infantry Company also in the works, and the colour scheme on the Stormblades will be replicated on the Leman Russ tanks and Chimeras of the mechanised infantry company. These models will also be based on Flames of War bases.
Here's the Ordinatus Golgotha I previously mentioned as being part of the mechanised firepower that will support my knights. This is an old model of mine that I stripped and repainted.
The paint scheme is simple enough, but I had a real headache with the hazard stripes. There's just no way to do them neatly at this scale! Fortunately I was able to hide the more egregious examples with some weathering powder.
I am currently working on a trio of Stormblades, and will post photos when they're done. They are important because the colour scheme I choose for them will probably decide the colour scheme I use for the rest of the Skitarii: a Leman Russ company, and a load of infantry supported by APCs.
Earlier this month I took my Knights down to No Mans Land for a 6,000 game of Epic with @StegTheDinosaur, my gaming partner in crime, who used his Squats.
The battle was incredibly one-sided, as you can see from the live-tweet below. This was primarily due to the cheesy nature of my Adeptus Titanicus army, which included ten titans, combined with the relatively inflexible Squat army list which had been designed to deal with swarms of robots.
It occurred to me that I with a bit of work, I could probably get my knights into a state where I could submit them to this year's EpiComp.
For those of you who don't already know, EpiComp is the premiere (ok, probably only) annual Epic-scale painting competition. It regularly brings in some amazing work by the best painters and modellers working in the 6mm scale.
You can see my submission above. I took a load of photos, which, due to the limitations of the competition rules, I can't submit, so I'm posting them here.
This represents about one third of the models that are going to form the Knight army. I still have another squadron of French chevaliers, two squadrons of Castellans, and a load of Paladins still to paint, not to mention a Leman Russ Company, a Stormblade Company, two Ordinatii majoris, and some Skitarii. You'll be seeing more of them in 2013. In the meantime, these photos include everything I've painted (Epic-wise) in 2012. Enjoy!
In my last post I mentioned that my wife and I had put our house on the market, so I wasn't allowed to make any mess. Well, it's now been about three months since we started having viewings, and we've not made any progress. The place that we fell in love with has been lost to another buyer, so we're at the point of not really caring any more about the whole moving-house thing, and will probably taking the place off the market soon.
This is a bit disappointing, but it does mean that I've been able to break out the toy soldiers again!
While my wife took the kids to visit her sister, I've had a few days entirely to myself, and I've been making good use of them. Apart from making inroads into the 3rd edition of In the Emperor's Name (for which I'm the editor), I've also been working on some more knights.
Here's the first finished squadron of Castellans:
And here's some Errants, which just need a decal on the right shoulder and they're done:
Finally, here's a Reaver titan, the first I've painted since the mid-ninities:
Ordinati are leviathan sized warmachines created by the Adeptus Mechanicus. Every individual Ordinatus is a unique construction and named for the world on which it was first employed or built. Each Ordinatus is unique in that it was designed for specific purpose, for a particular battle.
The Ordinatus Armageddon mounts a giant plasma cannon that can fire using either all available energy for one devastating blast, or several smaller pulses. Its main weapons system is essentially a slightly smaller, vehicle mounted version of the Plasma Annihilator carried by Imperator titans.
I have an original Ordinatus Golgotha model which I love using, especially against Orks (any unit which suffers casualties from a Gologtha's Hellfire missiles must pass a morale test or go on Fall Back), but I wanted to expand my collection. Unfortunately I don't have £100 spare so I decided to kitbash one using some Neo-Soviet tanks from Brigade Models as the chassis.
I'm looking forward to getting it painted and on the table!
Here's the first of nine Knights Castellan. These are heavy-support knights which mount a Quake Cannon (normally carried by Titans) and autocannons. They're slow but heavily armoured.
The brass areas were painted using Vallejo brass rather than the Coat d'Arms that I've used on previous models (I seem to have picked several pots from a bad batch, so I'm waiting for them to be restocked). The Vallejo paint is much shinier so I toned it down with some Scab Red. The difference between the two colours is visible, but not so much as to ruin the consistency of the paint scheme between models.
I previously posted about Grimdarking the Kibri Goppingen Church, an N-gauge Model Railroad kit which has a mythical reputation among Epic gamers. If you saw my last post, you may have seen photos of the finished model in the middle of the battlefield.
Here are some photos of the cathedral itself. It was relatively simple to paint: I sprayed it black, then sprayed it with Army Painter Uniform Grey. The roof was washed with Gryphonne Sepia and Devlan Mud, then the whole thing was drybrushed with Coat d'Arms Mid Grey. Then I picked out details such as the shutters, doors and various spikey bits.
These photos were taken with a crap camera, I will update the post with decent pics later on. For now, I'm off to London for Salute!
This weekend I blitzed the robots and got them all painted. It was a pretty simple process once I'd decided on a paint scheme and set up a "factory line".
First, I undercoated all the models with black. Then, I base coated them with a mix of Scab Red and Deneb Stone: mixing a bit of Deneb Stone (which is a "foundation" paint) in with the red increases its opacity gives it better coverage.
One this was dry, I painted Coat d'arms Slate Grey onto the base, then I painted details in Boltgun Metal and Coat d'arms Brass. Then they were all given a coat of Devlan Mud - including the base. Once this was dry, I drybrushed the base Deneb Stone.
Here are some photos of the robots laid out on my city board: the bases are intended to match the boards. The robots have support from a few titans of the Legio Pantera.
This morning I've been painting a test model to see what my planned colour scheme looks like.
The first step was to spray the model with a black primer spray. Once this had dried I drybrushed boltgun metal onto the areas where I wanted the metal to show through.
Here are all the Knights I'm going to be painting. The old models were all stripped, reassembled and debased. There were a few breakages among the plastic Paladins but most could be repaired pretty easily.
I've also stripped and rebased all the robots. The next step is to add texture to the bases, and then they can be undercoated!
I spent some time yesterday stripping the paint off of the Knight models, which had spent the previous week soaking in Dettol.
This afternoon I've been reassembling and basing the models. The first model I dealt with was the Baron, the Knight HQ unit.
I've never been very keen on this model. The banner pole it had made it look very tall and gangly. But I'm really pleased with the new incarnation:
I've ditched the banner pole, gave the torso a twist (I used a razor saw to cut the torso away from the hip, then pinned and reattached) and altered the stance of the legs. This makes the model much more dynamic. It also worked really well for some Errants.
Rather than use Skitarii or Tech-Guard as the infantry support for my Epic Knights, I'm going to use the robots of the Legio Cybernetica. It's not clear whether robots (or indeed, Knights) are still around in M41, but that's not a big problem, as we know they both were during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy, so this army could very easily be a pre-Heresy or Heresy-era army.
Here's a picture of the assembled maniples just before they went into Dettol to be stripped. In OpenEpic they represent about 2,000 points, which should be enough to provide the Knights with a screen of ground pounders.
You can see a mix of all the different robot types (Crusader, Castellan, Cataphract, Conqueror and Colossus) in both metal and plastic.
My Firedrakes are now all assembled, pimped and ready to start painting. I just finished Nocturne, the final part of the awesome Tome of Fire series by Nick Kyme, so I'm totally stoked about painting my Firedrakes up and joining the ranks of the Fire-born.
However, I am temporarily putting that project on hold. I'm going to use the Army Painter camo green primer as the base coat, and as you may know, Army Painter have just announced a range of acrylic paints that match their primer sprays. Army Green is included but won't be out until the end of March, so I've decided to wait until I can get some before I start painting. That way I can correct mistakes without having to mix my own paint.
So in the meantime I'm making progress with one of my other 2012 objectives: getting my Epic knight army repainted. I've just taken an inventory of my old army, and thankfully it's survived a decade of neglect quite well:
What you see there is ten plastic Paladins (plus another three on sprues), three Errants, three Crusaders, six Castellans, one Baron, and three of the old Adeptus Titanicus era metal knights: one Paladin and two Wardens.
These are all going to take a bath in Dettol to strip the paint off. I don't think I'll be going with the old green and white quartered scheme this time: I'm currently thinking along the lines of a more AdMech combo of red and bronze.
As well as these models, I also have some of the amazing chevaliers by Thom from Epic-FR. The quality on these resin miniatures is absolutely awesome: I've never seen such impressive detail and design on "amateur" miniatures before.
Here is my company of Assault infantry for my Epic Adeptus Mechanicus/Tech Guard army. Yes, they have jump packs! Imperial Guard Assault infantry were equipped with jump packs back in the days of Rogue Trader (they also had access to Rhinos, Land Raiders and other stuff that are nowadays reserved for Space Marines).
