Vanguard veterans squad A final batch and group photos.

And this are the final two guys of the first squad of vanguard vets, a plasma pistol/chainsword guy and the relic weaponed, plasma pistol sarge.

I painted the whole unit in the scheme of the veteran depicted in the back of the Veterans Mk.I box.

The guy has a bionic arm, just to give more credit to his veterany (damn, I´m and awful photographer, this dudes looks pretty better than in the photos.
Here is the sarge, plasmagunning someone down.

Here is a close up of the helmet and the torso (I truly love that helm).

As I told you in the test mini post, the whites are a bit sandy cause I didn´t shake properly the GW white primer can and the paint came out pretty sandy...

Detail of the shoulderpad and the plasma pistol.
Detail of the relic weapon (one of the Sevrin Loth´s command squad´s relic weapons) and the chapter shoulderpad.

Here is a curious thing of my minis, almost everyone in this squad bears a tabard but only the sarge´s one is white, cause as I told you in the dreadnought post, I wanted my army to be a bit darker. And here is the squad as a whole.


What do you think about it?



.

Vanguard veterans squad A: second quartet.

Here there are another quartet of vanguar vets.

As you can see there is a mix of weaponery in them, that is just for coolness sake :) .

There are a pair of troopers, one with a chainsword and plasma pistol and the other with a pow fist and a bolt pistol.
And their backpacks, which are from the BA sprue but are completed with some etched brass.
Detail of the pow fist guy.
This is another trooper, I cannot put photos of the fourth one because the internet ate them.

This guy has his arm converted, just to put him in a more dynamic position.

From the other side.

Next: Another trooper, the sarge and the whole squad.

.

Terrain: city

What the hell is this?

That is the first sketch for a home-custom-made modular table for our 40k games.

The idea behind this table is that there is a totally overlooked rule of warhammer 40k and it is the roads rule.
Thing is that we´ve played in an urban environment lots of times, but in our table there weren´t any roads to move over, just sand and what truly makes a urban table are not the building, the key thing is the streets.

A street may have a building, a square, a park, a statue or whatever, but streets are the key feature of a city.

So the idea is to buy wooden tables 60 cm long x 60 cm wide, and put over them patches of rubber, about half a cm in height so we can cut them properly and easy.

After this, I will prime black the roads (if I cand find a textured black spray it will be perfect for the job) and handpaint the sidewalks in a light brown with grayeish tones, featuring a not so clean city.

Part of the idea of this table is to make it in the same measures as the GW´s modular table so we can combine both for more modular fun.

The other idea behind this table is that every square can be combined with each other, and that will be achieved by making a 12 cm road or road end in the center of each side of each square as you can see in the drawings.

And why 12 cm wide roads? Because that is a bit more than a land raider, which is one of the bigger tanks in 40k (apart from the necron monolith and the open legs of a defiler/soulgrinder, of course).

Apart from the obvious roads there will be squares without road, featuring parks and buildings and maybe a parking.



This is the final concept drawing of it:

What do you think about it, any ideas for more tiles??

.

Vanguard veterans squad A: first quartet.

Do you remember my Raven Guard Vanguard Veteran test mini?

I´ve finished some of the guys, and here they are.

Four guys for today´s post: A thunderhammer vet, a pow mace/plasma pistol one, a chainsword/plasma pistol dude and a pow sword/bolt pistol veteran.


Details for the first two.
The jumpacks: as you can see one is a blood angels jumpack with the symbols filed and the other is a standard one with some etched brass on it.
The other two guys, one is the test mini.
One more time one backpack is from the death company sprue and the other has etchedd brass on it.
Details of the chapter shoulderpad painting and the backpack brass (depiction of a raven skull).

Comment and criticism will be welcome.



.

Custom Vanguard Veteran

This is the test mini for what will be two full squads of vanguard veterans.

They are made from various kits and the Forgeworld Raven Guard upgrade kits.


In this mini the legs, the hammer, and the right shoulderpad come from the blood angels death company box while the jumpack come from the assault marines box.
The torso, left shoulderpad and head are from said forgeworld Raven Guard upgrade kit.

The jumpack is adorned with some forgeworld Raven Guard etched brass.

The legs have been slightly modified so they don´t resemble any blood angels iconography.

A detail of the head (in latter posts I will touch the theme of why the whites are a bit sandy).

More to come!!!!

.

Dreadnought.

As you can remember I´m a huge dreadnought fan.

Things are that I show a ex-workmate my blog and he liked the dreadnoughts, indeed he liked so badly that he bought me everyone except the forgeworld raven guard one so I´ve bought some new dreads and starter to paint them again (and I´m enjoying it as much as ever).

First of all there is the classical plastic standard dreadnought, with some add-on from the Raven Guard Etched Brass things.

Oh, that and the combat shield from the assault squad sprue.

This time, I´ve tried to paint de dreads in a blacker scheme, more akin to the whole Raven Guard fluff so no white shoulder armour.

Just a little raven there.

In this dread I´ve opted for a mortis pattern dread, with lascannon and a missile launcher, and that is just because I´ve seen the forgeworld new dreadnought close combat weapons and I´m not going to use the standard GW´s again!!!!

As you can see I´ve not highlighted the metals, just to give this dread a darker feeling, and it´s just this dread because the others I painted after this one got their metals highlighted.

The other thing you can see is that there is no golden paint on this model, that is because I´ve decided that the only guys that will have something painted gold are the captains, honor guards and the 1st company guys, being venerable dreads, vets, termies or whatever.

Here you got a close-up of the sarcophagus and the shield.

I´m still thinking the names of the dreads, because I want to give them some kind of theme in the names of each type of vehicle, one theme for the dreads, other for the land raiders preds and whirlwinds, other for razorbacks and rhinos...

What do you think about it??

.

WIP Raven Guard

Here they are a pair of hints of my future projects:


Gotta love the FW Raven Guard etched brass.

As strange as it sounds both bits are part of the same mini.

.

My first finecast experience (from when it was released)

Here we are from our vacation-driven hiatus back to warhammering and to blogging.

Today I´m going to talk about my first finecast experience.

Back then, when finecas start to appeared in the stores, I went to buy a pair of minis, so I went to a GW store and purchased three minis, the eldar autarch with wings, the space marine chaplain with jumpack and an eldar dark reaper box.

First of all, I have to say that I double, even triple checked the minis inside the blisters, cause even at that time we were hearing the whole failcast thing along the internet so caution was high in my mind.

After a triple chech the minis seemed to be in perfect shape, but when I opened them the surprise came...


This is the first mini as it came in the blister art:

And this is the wing-pack that came in my blister:

Now if you take a look to the wings you´ll notice that the wings are so damaged that it seems the winged autarch get into a fight with a path-of-the-hunting-cat autarch or something, but it gets even worse, that is the way the feathers are IF YOU DON´T TOUCH THEM, because when I barely touched it with my fingertip the feathers started to tear down.

The areas what tear down when you touch them are the ones outlined red.

So, the autarch went back to the store.

The other mini was the jumpacked chaplain:

In the finecast box-art you can´t notice it, but the mini stands atop of some rocks with a censer (inbuilt in the miniature).

There is the miniature the way I opened it:




First of all, when I took the mini to put it out of the blister, the hand fell down, and then I noticed the whole base dissappeared with no hint of where it was.
Bubbles... huge bubbles, I suppose.


And strange as finecast is... the rest of the mini was totally perfect in shape, with perfect details, perfect plain zones, the face was perfectly casted...

So this mini went back to the store too.

After this, I opened the dark reaper box, and as I looked the minis I noticed that the helmets were lacking the eldarish things that are at both sides of the head, so three minis out of three went back to the store.

After this, I went back to the store and the guy in it let me open the others and, if the mini inside the blister was ok I can pick it.

Things are the autarchs were wrongly casted and it was pretty noticeable from outside the blister so I went to the chaplains, open the first one and his face was unrecognisable and the jumpack has a huge bubble in both vents, and the second one (just three minis on each store, remember) was casted in a super-soft kind of resin, like bubble gum, you can twist it, even the legs (as the store was going to bring the mini back we played with it quite a bit, amazed at how much we can twist it without it being torn).

And there was no other box of dark reapers so I went out of the store with no minis and my money back to my wallet...

When we went out of the store we went to a store in the downtown of Madrid called Atlantica, and there I purchased the chaplain in perfect shape, a dark angels company master (converted to be a Raven Guard champion) in even more perfect shape and the box of dark reapers without bubbles or miscasts.

What I suppose, the GW stores went the first stores to receive the minis, just in case they were not enough miniatures for all the stores theirs were totally supported, but this backfired as the first minis were the ones with more errors, miscasts, twists and bad proportions in the mix of resin...

But there is still more:

After this, some weeks, even months after, I went back to the store and tried to purchase a termi librarian, which has a bubble in its leg so huge that a lot of its waist and kneepad dissappeared (and the other termi libs in the store weren´t better, and some weeks after the lib, tried to purchase a techmarine with its servitors, and I´ve said tried because his face was melted and somewhat it remembered sloth from the goonies.

What the hell is happening, is this store cursed or what?
Maybe it´s me when I enter this store... I don´t know, but I haven´t been able to purchase a good mini in this official store...


And apart from this... I love finecast, lighter, easier to convert, more resistant minis... YAY, count me in!!!!

I cannot wait till they release the masters of the chapter box and Pedro Kantor blister.



.

Eldar Avatar.

Here is the turn for the Avatar of Khaine, shard of a dead god, fighter and commander at the very same time.

I love the avatar fluff and everything albeit it isn´t the best of the best in the tabletop, but I´ve played it and killed Belial and other 3 termies (just cause the biggest part of the melee was being done by my pa, so it killed almost double the points I spend in buying him (great thing by the way).

I bought the finecast Avatar and it came almost in perfect shape, just some bubbles in the feet and right arm, but apart from this... perfect.

Thing is that I´ve going to paint the inner part of the avatar in a blueish energy way, but is too much complicated for my skills at the moment.

Being a demi-god I wanted him to be kind of a central point in my army, not only in the battlefield but visually too, so I´ve painted it grey with lots of white, which no one in my army has except for Eldrad Ulthran so I´ve achieved the effect in my opinion.

I´ve painted his gems in my army´s classical purple/red but as long as he is painted grey, I decided to paint some of them in the shadow grey colour of my army (adapted for the gems) to give it a more cohesive look in my army.

The mount of the gems is white, as if made of wraithbone.


Here you have a shot of his back to take a look at the grey tones and the back of the head.

A detail of the sword:

I´ve painted the sword gem-like, just to give and ancient-alien look.

The runes were painted with vallejo old gold, highlighted with Vallejo Gold and I´ve put a reflection white dot in each rune to give it a brilliant look.

Other thing: Don´t know why, but in the photos the sword seems to be bended, but in real world it is almost perfectly shaped... what means I´m a crappy photographer :D

I still have to paint the eyes and some eldar motifs in the tabard... but I´m still deciding what to do with those.

What do you think of it??

.

War walkers, third walker and group shots

Here, as promised, you got the pictures of my third War Walker and the group shots too.




Close view of the pilot: I´ve changed the main colour of the helmets of my army (white helmet with black faceplate) just cause I don´t want the pilot to take the attention out of the vehicle so I´ve painted the helmet in the main colour of the army and the faceplate white, to add a bit of colour.


Here they are, the full squad in all its glory.


And another shot of the full squad.

Comments and criticism will be welcome.

.