Progress Report #10 Choppas... The Arnie kind

I've been able to put in a good couple hours of work a night for the past couple of weeks. Not alot of projects on the go, but alot of progress is being made!

Also of note I helped start up a local gaming group. A couple of old friends got dragged back into the hobby willingly. (I would have also accepted kicking and screaming) and are putting together new armies as well as dusting ancient ones off. :D

We have only a few simple rules. We play once a month which is more than reasonable even for guys like us with lives and jobs. We have to try to get at least 1 new unit done and painted per session. Proxies are cool since we are there to play test. But most importantly of all, no painting or modeling at the session. We are there to play!

We had a meeting last Sunday and I have to admit it was a nice feeling to PLAY again. To Quote a friend "I didn't realize you actually played games of 40k!" to give you an idea how long its been since I played casually. I just enjoy the modelling and painting too much. It eats up all my free time and I inevitably end up complaining while at a tournament that I don't play test enough ;)

My battlewagon is coming along nicely. I added the engines recently, and worked alot on the rotors.
Got the krew "installed", added landing gear and alot of the armor plating is done. Still alot of work to go sadly and I haven't even armed it yet!
But if I power through, I think I can have it all ready for paint in another 2 weeks.

This is a better profile shot. The rotors are more complete than this now, this pic is a week old.
They also sit about 3/4" higher than the transmission towers, I hadn't finished building the collectives yet in this picture.

These are the rotors as they sit today. They still need to be filed down, more putty work and some detail gubbins but they already look better than I had hoped.
Something as eye catching as the rotors on a chopper can really make or break a model so I'm happy they turned out.

This is the start of one of my secret projects. I've started building crashed trukk bases. In addition to being nice pieces (and being very fun to put together) they're very practical.
Since my trukks are so tall by design, when they get wrecked they become a real nuisance on the table. Maneuvering around them with infantry, especially in assaults is very difficult. So now when they get wrecked I can replace it with a convenient marker. I did this with the previous rendition of the army and I never regretted it.

This one is a little more complete. You can see the electric tea candle in the background adding the glow effect. I wish I could take credit for the idea but it's stolen from a couple locals who made up flame and smoke markers with them at my con. I loved the idea so much that I ran with it and came up with these bases.
This base needs a bit more putty work, and I'm going to make a taller smoke plume . This one was just for the proof of concept.

After my games on Sunday I realized the Hueys rotors looked a little... plain? compared the Battlewagons so I brought them back to the painting bench and hacked them up to add the blade bitz like you see here. I'll add a few more detail gubbins too.
The Chinork is just being used for display.




 I finished building my lootas and meks a couple weeks ago. I had alot of fun with these guys. Which is good because I expected them to be a disaster since I had no idea what they were going to end up looking like when I was done.
The guy in the middle didn't quite turn out at first, but I ended up adding a bunch of misc cabling and a shoulder pad that rounded him out nicely.

As you can see they're alot further along this week. They're at the point where they just need a bunch of small detail stuff. Mostly to breakup the huge amount of metal on them. I actually broke one of my own rules with this squad and used black spray instead of my usual grey primer. I'm glad I did, I was able to do the metal work in less than 10 minutes. My usual method would have taken a couple of hours on these guys

Now what's this?
Loose bitz for another insane project?
I've been thinking about building a third chopper for some time, a clone of the Huey actually but that felt a little redundant.
I got some inspiration this weekend from some russian army pictures, a few sketches later I went and ordered $50 worth of bitz...
I'll post up more details when they get here.
But as a hint the project code name is Havork.

Monday Night Quickie

 A couple quick pictures of what I've been working on for the past couple nights.
First of all the Rotors for my Chinork. There's a stupid number of man hours in them already believe it or not, but at least I'm making progress. Another week and they'll be ready to attach to the choppa, if I'm lucky.

Here's some Meks I built tonight. I just felt my army needed more meks! There's never enough around when I need one!

New Projects

Got some new projects on the go today. Which is good since this past week I've been too tired to put in serious effort. So I've been working on 1 fig a day just to say I was making some limited progress.
I've put my BFG fleet in dry-dock today to repair some long term storage related damage. BFG This weekend at my local gaming store woo!
Seriously BFG is IMO the best game GW makes. Great figs, excellent well written rules. All the rulebooks are free to download on GW.com.
It has alot going for it, shame few people actually play. :(

I've added some detail work to the Chinork. Aside from an armor plate here and there I'm pretty much stuck until the engines and rotor parts get here. Which is hopefully next week.

Bitz arrived today! This is all for a crazy new project based on something I saw at my con last month. Hopefully it will come together quickly.

Back in Da Game

Alright, my office is done being renovated, my con is over, I'm not in the hospital anymore and work isn't being stupid busy. I don't have excuses anymore so back to painting as usual!
I finished of that squad of boyz that was irritating me. With that done I decided to take a break from painting infantry and try my luck with some more conversion projects. I've had a bunch of ideas on how to finish some old projects so now is the time to get back into it.
I ordered $50 of bitz today for random projects. Just some stuff to finish up a few things, and to fulfill some crazy ideas I've had. I also need to order those forgeworld grot riggers *sigh* Everytime I go to forgeworlds site I spend at least $100. Really need to stop that.

Stuff on the go:
- Chinork Battlewagon
- Crashed trukks (had a sweet idea how to do it at my con, will show it off when I have more together)
- Lootas/meks (on sprue)


Stuff I'll get to eventually
- 16 man squad of boyz (to paint)
- 12 man squad of boyz (to finish assembly)
- Warboss (To finishing painting)

- Huey #2 from scratch (hahahahaha, I hate myself :p)
- Tank Bustas (clean up hasty painting)
- Wartrukks
- Warbuggies
 

 I thought I'd show you my China Cabinet first. It's an idea I got from a friend. That way I can display my figs in my living room without being a total nerd ;) Also it keeps my cat from chewing on them ;P

This is my lovely new painting desk. Already covered in random supplies and projects.
My goal is to keep it neater than the last one, we'll see how long that lasts.

Chinork is starting to come along nicely. I got stalled a few months ago with how to do the rotors and engines. Now that I figured that out (in a flash of insite) It's back to business as usual. And now for my favorite of conversion tasks armor plates and rivets! /sarcasm. At least it gives really good results for the labor.
I ordered some engine bitz off ebay today, hopefully they'll be the right scale when they arrive a few weeks from now.

Random assortment of bitz reserved for the Chinork. Good on you if you can make out what they are, and what they're for.

This is the tub of ongoing projects. I've been hiding stuff in here that I don't want to be working on right now. I find it helps me concentrate if I don't have too much on my painting desk at any one time.
As stuff gets finished, I can dive in here and grab the next thing to be on the go.

I'm back!... kinda

Running a Warhammer tournament + Renovating your painting room != progress.

But I managed to get a squad complete this week. 2 Squads completely done!

Hopefully I'll be back to painting with a vengeance next week.

But for now all you get is a blurry picture.

Progress Report #9: Mad Doks

Once again I feel disappointed at my lack of recent progress but once again real life gets in the way. Right after I got back from my vacation I had a visit from the Mad Doks AKA I went to the hospital for a week.
That kinda screws with any plans you might have and getting painting done hasn't been on my list of priorities as of late.
I won't bore you with any of the grizzly details but I will say I'm disappointed I didn't get to keep my kidney stone as it would have made an incredible bit for a Dark Eldar torture device...

I've decided to throw out all my current zeppelin balloons. I haven't been happy with the results from the start so I'm starting over. I had some inspiration from a movie trailer, although the name escapes me at the moment, there's a scene where there is a blimp in the background for 3 secs and it looks exactly like what I wanted to accomplish. Screen shots were taken, google and ebay were researched and now I just need to find the appropriate pre-formed polystyrene parts. I'm close, but the only source I found so far doesn't ship to NA ARRGGG!! but soon SOON!

 I've almost got squad B completed. I'm now in the stare at a fig and ask "Why aren't you done!?" phase which involves touch ups and small detail work.
A couple more hours and they'll be added to the case with squad A for a whopping 170/1500 completely painted lol. (Why do I hate myself?)

Squad C is also on the go. Although I don't usually like to work on more than one squad at once (because it looks like I'm not making any progress) I started these guys because I had alot of downtime on my vacation. By the time Squad A is done I should have most of the busy work (metal, base coating etc) done on this squad.

My Warboss had a bit of an accident during transport. Luckily I had his arm and banner pole pinned in place. But I decided rather than try to straighten them I'd break them off and re-glue them. If I was going to ruin the paint anyway I might as well fix it correctly. Luckily it's only few minutes of work.

I've found myself staring at my vehicles alot more lately. Mainly because I feel like I've abandoned them because progress has been so slow.
The issue of course is that I didn't like the early results for the paint and as I discussed before how the conversion for the choppers roof turned out.
I finally realized my issue with the chopper was the lack of colour depth on the hull so I slathered it in blue ink for the heck of it and sure enough it solved the problem. Now I just need to put some detail on there.

Brief vacation update

Vacation woo!

So what does one do while on vacation, 2000 km away from home and bored?

Paint of course!

I took a small painting kit with me just for the sake of having it in case I had the urge to paint and its paid off.

I gotten most a new squad of boyz basecoated (16 boyz) and done some detail work on my tan berets.

I don't know if I'll get much more done the rest of this week but I'm already happy with the results.