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This is an awesome project! I like it!

So, it's been awhile. 15 months, to be precise. In brief, this is why I haven't been working on this project over the last year.

Back then, I was getting a little burned out from my obliterator project, and I didn't have any other chaos models, so I just kind of stopped for a bit. Then, a few months later, rumors that 6th ed was about to be released immanently were swirling, and I was questioning if I should get back into 40k at all, or to try and find something else to apply myself to, you know, for my life to have direction, and all.

Eventually, I was convinced to give it another go, and, when 6th edition did come out, I decided to get back in with my guard army again, what with it being the only army I had, really. This, of course, meant putting CSM on hold while I had my first 6th ed guard adventure. Most of that year was spent working on guard stuff, including finally getting vehicles, and painting a bunch of stormtroopers among other things.

That all ended a couple of months ago. I felt like I had a good run with it, and I was about to have my first born child, so it felt like a good thing to wrap it all up. The question then remained, though, what to do? Obviously the new baby has been a time occupier, but now that I'm not working, that means I have more time than commitment, which meant 40k would be a great time-waster between changings and feedings (which it has been), and I don't even need to leave the house, except to play games.

It was then a question of what to work on. I've already got my guard army pretty much, well, finished. Furthermore, I'm going to take a break with them until their new codex comes out some months from now. That just left this project, or my orks, which I had also made an abortive start at. I figured that since I already had some CSM stuff, the time to finish a fully-painted army would be short enough to bother with it, especially in the time frame I'm looking at.

But there was a problem. I'd started a khorne army. 6th edition came out and took a steaming hot dump on assault armies and foot armies (and especially foot assault armies), and CSM got a new codex which specifically weakened khorne (+1A becoming rage? Thanks...) As such, well, that kind of defeated the point of what I was working on.

Over the next couple of months, I proceeded to agonize over everything. If not khorne, what faction? What color scheme? What army list? I spent a great deal of time in a masochistic torture of open-ended options thrust upon an autistic brain.

Very, VERY eventually, and after several new threads on dakka, a picture began to congeal. Even if I decided to play khorne after all, I was going to need a more generic color scheme. One that I could always switch to something else. After slowly and painfully weeding out non-god legions (like night lords and alpha legion) for various reasons, I eventually settled on the theme I wanted. I was going to go for a gold color. After all, most CSM armies have some sort of yellow metal, so gold-colored dudes could pretty well be plugged in with any other chaos faction if I eventually made a decision.

But that opened up an entire new set of problems. You see, when I started painting my guard army, my paint job was actually pretty decent. Tabletop +, I'd say. Over the years, however, GW has been producing lots of new stuff, foremost of which washes. Things that made everybody else blow by in skill level while I was plodding along with the old method.

As such, getting back into things, I really wanted to kick things up a notch. I wanted to have all the GS skills in there, but I also wanted to do something really nice for the paint job. Combined with the fact that I hadn't quite decided on a theme yet, this was torture on top of torture. Trying to come up with a design and a method that both showed off that I can do freehand (I do some non-minis minature painting), and to give me a chance to try out all of this new modelling stuff, while also still looking good. And not, you know, looking like I was painting something for nothing more than the sake of showing off.

After a lot of work, I finally got something that I think I'm going to stick with as the new direction for this project.









On the one hand, I've failed. There is nothing all that terribly challenging about this model. It's the same greenstuffing I was doing before, and the paint job is nothing more than some nicely painted brass and a bit of weathering. I feel like I should have stuck it out and aimed higher.

On the other hand, well... look at it. And there are still new things here, such as my use of washes on infantry models for the first time, and use of weathering on infantry models for the first time. And look at that, static grass. You'll just have to trust me when I say that that particular part looks a lot better in person. Plus, in any case, it's certainly a step up from my berzerkers.

The one thing too that I'll credit to this is that it does look pretty realistic. None of this bright, candy-coated nonsense, and this model doesn't look like he's wearing red pajamas like the berzerkers. Indeed, I've played a couple games of 40k with CSM with the berzerkers and the one thing I was shocked to find was that, though they look pretty sweet individually... I don't actually like how much they look like on the table...



I mean, they don't look bad, but they look... I don't know... cluttered. And like they're made of red plastic, rather than something real. They look sort of like toys.

Meanwhile, I'd note that I kept a set of old guitar strings nearby while painting this color, and the brass coloring is virtually identical to the worn phosphor bronze of the strings.

Anyways, I'll post again soon about the details of what's been going on with this project soon, but I just wanted to post that I'm back, so look for more goodies soon.

That brass dude rules, Ailaros. Don't be too hard on yourself. Painting doesn't come easy and you're progressing, which is important. It is great to see you back in the swing of things, even if you are second-guessing here and there. Glad you're back, we'll be watching your space barbarians.

Horray for this plog's return! Love the brass look, but I hope you still keep the skulls and furs and such.

Happy to see you return to this project - and to the eevil batreps I'm another fan of the brass termi, partially because it looks great and partially because simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing! That said, this dude does make me look forward all the more to the conversion work to come - like your take on Huron, for example

- Salvage

So, now that I've done the intro, to talk about the project itself and its renewal.

As mentioned, one of the reasons I chose to get back into CSM was because I had the models for it. Already I had the 16 berzerkers from before, and I also had another, unopened box that I had purchased while I was working on my obliterators. Also, I acquired a box of terminators.

The reason why I did this (and didn't, say, get something else for my guard army) was because I was in a league that was a joint venture between my FLGS and a FLGS 45 minutes away. The end-of-league tournament was held there. It was also where the prizes (gift certificates of the league fees pooled together and then divvied out among the winners) were given out. I'd won third in that league, so got $20 in store credit for the other store. Unfortunately, their selection of 40k miniatures was TERRIBLE. The only thing I even remotely wanted was a box of CSM termies. It was either that, or have them order something for me, and then drive all the way out there and back again. Forget it. I took the termies.

... where they sat for like a year, or at least several months, doing nothing. This, though, was one of my incentives to come back to CSM. Not only did I have two troops choices with an extra box of dudes, but I also had these termies I could build. With a bit of ingenuity, I could get up to 1,000 points with just what I had, and in not very much time as well.

It was just a question of how to model and paint them.

As mentioned in the previous post, I was turned way off Khorne, and wanted to have something that looked more neutral that I could apply to anything - including Khorne if I later so chose.

The problem was that I didn't know what I wanted. The sheer open-endedness of it was, frankly, paralytic. What would progress, then was a long chain of needing to do SOMETHING, and hoping that once I'd made one choice, it would help me make other choices.

The biggest thing I was having to figure out was if I wanted to do a traitor legion, or to make my own. My first inclination was towards alpha legion, as the paintscheme in the new codex looks awesome. I also liked parts of the fluff (being the only legitimate alternative to the imperium, etc.)... but then I cooled, because some of the fluff is just awful (twin primarchs? Not really traitors?), and the dragons-in-space thing... started to feel a little juvenile.

I was also seriously tempted by night lords, who had much stronger positives, but much stronger negatives in my mind. Very eventually, they lost out as well. As did iron warriors (which is currently the closest traitor legion I'd pick). Part of it was that I kind of don't like the idea of picking existing fluff, because then I'd have to know it, and accept it, and follow it. And that seemed both stifling, and a lot of work.

In the end, after a brief thought of just saying screw it, and going back to khorne, I eventually settled on a paint scheme - brass.

But while this was going on, (and on, and on...) I had minis that needed making. I started my terminators by doing the same truescaling I was doing on the berzerkers. Nothing big, just uncrouching the poses and bringing the hips up a little higher with an elevated torso.





The question was what to go with from there. For awhile, I was trying chain as the added detail, and was seriously thinking of just running with that.



But in the end, I was against it. After all, this is supposed to be my showpiece army. I decided that I wanted to have three things on the models that showed off my GS/conversion ability, and three things that showed off my painting abilities. With the latter, this was more to set a goal that was too high, so that I'd work on painting stuff and get better.

Eventually, I caved, and went back to my old ways. The models got fur, and then they got skull masks, if in a somewhat less over the top way that my berzerkers did. Throwing those two together and adding the fact that I was doing the truescaling and dynamic posing, and I considered that good enough.

Which just left the painting, which gets us back to where we were before. I was trying really hard to figure out just how I could do better painting, but I also had this other force pulling on my from the other side - a desire to make things look realistic.

My quest for realism, it turned out, was at complete odds with my desire to do some interesting things with painting. Not only was it a problem with execution, but it was mostly a problem with design. I could play night lords and freehand the lightning squiggles... but who on earth would run around in armor with lightning squiggles painted on it? That's just dumb. Likewise, most of the bold colors just looked like they were... well... toys. Like they were made out of colored plastic.

And this thwarted me at every attempt. Glowing effects for the power weapons, and an attempt at adding OSL coolness, the more that I looked at it... the more it looked just plain unrealistic. Like they had just painted their weapons that color. Plus, OSL, however you do it, doesn't actually look like LIGHT outside of a photo studio.

Eventually, when I had settled on brass, this caused no end of problems in other ways. The metallic is both light and dark colored simultaneously, which meant that dark accent colors got lost in the recesses, and light colors got washed out by the glare on the metal. With such complicated (texturewise) models, virtually anything I did just made them more cluttered. The only way around this was to give the model a strong secondary color, but then we'd be back in unrealistic territory. Plus, I was starting to like the idea of brass, rather than brass-and-color.

In the end, several interesting freehand designs on the shoulderpad (including an interesting checkered motif) fell through, along with the OSL. This meant that the only interesting painting thing I'd done was having a nice brass color on everything.

... but that wasn't enough. After all of my brain-wracking, my desire to improve and show off my painting skill was ruined by a dogged insistence that I also have models that look nice, rather than as a mere means to display painting skills.

In the end, I feel like I let myself down, but as I narrowed down my options from too-many-to-do-anything I started culling away the options required to meet some of my goals.

The only measure of salvation came when someone suggested that I try weathering the models. I used the same black-stiple method I'd used on my guard vehicles, and, surprisingly, it came out really well.

Then it just came down to basing. Basic sand, but this time I painted it. I also used static grass for the first time, which wound up looking really cool, if being somewhat messy to apply.

Also, I'd note, that for this terminator my gloss coat for the gem went completely berzerk. I painted the eye on three times, only to have the gloss puff up into an opaque goo, rather than setting as a clear hard coat. It may have something to do with the fact that I may have oversprayed the regular clear coat (for the whole model) and on a day that was a bit too humid. Eventually, on my 4th try, I sort of got it to work, but the gloss is still pretty dull, and it did smear around (read: wrecked) some of the gradient, but by then I was too frustrated to care.

The end result, then, was my second completed terminator:









And so I can't be too disappointed in it, of course. It's got the dynamic pose. It's got the brass and fur and skull masks. I also like that it looks like he's actually getting ready to swing his chainsaw-sword-gun. Like you're about to get poked with spinning blades. I don't like the idea of them sort of being just... there... like they are on most terminator models.

And it gets across the idea of a shambling, hulking monster, a "predatory hulk, searching for its next meal", as the codex says.

Also, I did give myself one last parting gift with this model. Right before I sprayed it all, I rummaged through my bitz collection. The idea that this terminator would have been doing so much killing over so many hundreds of years, and yet have a half-empty trophy wrack simply wouldn't do. From the bitz bin, I pulled out a catachan head.

I clipped the end off one of the broken-off trophy rack sticks, did just a tiny bit of knifework on the head (cleaning off the bandana and hair, GSing some neck skin flaps, boring a hole in the eye, etc.), and then glued it down, and glued back in the bit of the trophy wrack I had clipped off.

A touch of paint, and this model's party piece was done:



... finally, an appropriate look for those slack-jawed catachan heads...

Hahahaha your post is hilarious hahaha keep up the good work you absolute weapon of a human

Keep it up. It looks fantastic, very menacing.

beautiful!

Thanks!

So over the past couple of weeks, I've been distracted from this project by an attempt to make a hellbrute look non-hideous, but while I was doing that, I also managed to finish the last of the three initial terminators I was working on.

Though I had assembled the five originally, only three of them got paint on them right away. I would have just used a single model to test and hash out the color scheme, but I didn't want to wreck a single model too badly under a million coats of paint. Plus, I also wanted to have a model with all three of the main weapon types I'd be using on the terminators. There was the fist and mace already - this one was the guy holding the axe.

In the last of these introduction termies, I came to the final conclusion to the final problem of the way I was going to paint these. Namely, that glowey power weapons only look good on power swords. On everything else, they look stunted and silly, and you can't quite tell what's going on. This verdict put the final nail in the coffin of "make the models look cool" and instead leave them squarely in the "make the models look realistic" scheme.

In any case, this went together pretty quickly (well, few hours of actual work over several weeks), otherwise, especially as most of the haranguing was done.

I suppose I should actually make a note now about how I do the brass, it being central to the theme.

I had spent a great deal of time looking at metallic themes, from the old orangey-gold of the St. Celestine model in the 5th ed rulebook, to the kind of gold with silver highlights of the current codex. I thought about what kind of paints to buy and how I wanted to do it when I remembered something that I had read a long time ago on dakka in a thread where people were asking what the best way to paint gold was.

With only the tiniest bit of experimentation, it all came together quite smoothly. The old-school way of painting brass that I've figured out goes something like...

1.) basecoat warplock bronze (tin bitz)

2.) paint over most of the model with a half and half of this and leadbelcher (in my case, it's actually a mix with boltgun, as I still have a lot of that left), leaving the recesses bronze.

3.) generously highlight the model with leadbelcher.

4.) carefully highlight with runefang steel.

5.) generously wash with agrax earthshade.

What this gets you is a nice burnished steel color with the wash forming a nice gradiant between the bronze and half bronze, half-boltgun.

And then, here's the clever trick.

6.) wash twice with seraphim sepia.

In this case, you're dying the grey-colored metal yellow. If you do this once, you get a very light brass color, that still looks a bit too steel-colored. Three times (like on this model) gets you a color that's a bit too gold. Twice is the magic number of washes to get the perfect brass or light bronze.

7.) highlight with Auric Armor (light gold).

It's a heavy highlight, encompassing most of the places where you put the boltgun down originally. The point is to get a gold color that releases into the yellow color of the sepia wash. Don't go too heavy, though, or it will become a gold-colored model.

8.) highlight with a mix of Auric Armor and Runefang steel, 1:1.

Sparingly.

Then, in my case, between steps 7 and 8, (and a bit after 8), I'll dab on my black color for weathering.

Anyways, this is the result:



Take that, blood angels! Picking on guardsmen is easy, let's see you handle some terminators.



I didn't think so.

Anyways, with this long and tortuous episode over, the remaining two terminators should come along shortly.

With everything finally set up, I could start working on these terminators a bit more quickly. Of my original five, I only have the two left.

This one I put together as a dude with a chainfist, in part because I like the model, but also in part because it's one of those neat little things that CSM termies can get, so I thought I should take advantage of that.

This model would actually have a bit more conversion work done than usual. Firstly, I wanted him to have a multimelta, but had already used the bit on the previous model. Looking carefully, it became obvious that they had used the exact same bit for the combi-flamer and combi-melta, except with a few minor alterations. That meant that it was a few minor alterations back. I chopped off the fuel tank and "borrowed" an ammo box from the combi-bolter that had two ammo boxes. I then made myself a new melta head out of GS and aluminum tubing, and I got rid of the annoying power bayonet. I didn't have anything to put in its place though, nothing that matched... except.. I went to my guard bitz box wherein were a dozen chainswords that had been hacked off to make power weapons for my power blobs. This gave the combi-weapon a chain-bayonet of appropriate size, except I kept most of the length, so it's sort of a stretch-chain-bayonet.

Also, the chainfist has that very curious little knob... thing sticking off of the bottom of the front. It looked like it was supposed to be the mounting for another hose, so I broke out some guitar wire, and added it in.

Of course, there was the usual fur and skull mask, and bit of truescaling. On top of that, my desire to actually fill those trophy racks would focus on DA with this model. I broke out a pendant that I had laying around, and used a GK terminator shield with the sword on it to go in that direction.

Then it was painting. All rather easy, actually. The only problem was that the model did break off its base a few times (you'll see why in a moment), which meant, after a few repositionings, the model isn't QUITE set properly on the base (it's a little too far to one side), but that's not exactly the greatest sin. Especially when you consider that the rest of the model looks like this:











... which is beautiful. It gets across everything that I could want, a baroque monster, a thick, slavering brass beast. A ten thousand year old warrior who exists to murder you with chainsaws. A class-act bad guy. Everything a chaos terminator should be.

I think I can say with little reservation that this is the new favorite model of all the ones I've put together.

And, just as a treat, here's a close-up of the DA stuff on the rack.



The shield converted over to DA from GK with nothing more than a bit of freehand. Out of respect for DA players, I made sure to rough it up to make it look like the chaos terminator didn't just walk up and take it without a fight.

Anyways, I hope you like this one as much as I do. Only one left for the set to be complete!

What a beast! DA bits really help set him off! Loving the pose on him.

These termies are great, and you've brought a ton of dynamism and action into what I've always considered a rather static kit. Awesome stuff.

Mmmm they're good. The last one is especially well posed and painted

I'm loving these termies. stop making me wana get chaos stuff.

Wow, can't believe I missed this blog, those 'zerkers and terminators are amazing. Good to know that some space marines really can be taller than guardsmen

I'll have to keep an eye on this one, really neat stuff!

Very nice! really nice work with the termys