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Aaaaages ago, in what seems like another lifetime, there was a great big thread all about my Guard army and all it's background (it's over here if you want a read).Given that this thread is now well and truly buried in the vaults and I have no real intention of restarting a full army again, I felt the switch to =I= scale warbands deserved it's own thread. I'll leave my other painting thread to more general things like Shadows of Brimstone or historicals. This one will (hopefully) be more concentrated.

After lots of umming and aahhing I ordered a selection of kits to have a play with as the AdMech releases have been soooooo pretty. Yesterday the postman finally turned up with a couple of the new AdMech kits as well as some obligatory Wytches, Scions and another chaos sorcerer. So far I'm loving all the bionics and weird weapons on the new kits.

First up is what I think will become a Seneschal for my Rogue Trader's crew. The body is a FW Mannan's Blades Empire state trooper. These are gorgeous models, it is just a shame they need to use the arms from the bad Empire Troops plastics to be used as it is an upgrade kit, not a complete unit. Still.. not playing Warhammer has it's benefits as they become excellent conversion fodder with all their frills and detailing.

The Seneschal has seen a lot of action, so has a fair few bionics, having lost his left foot and right arm. I do need to try and carefully remove the right hand from the rifle so I can attach a human hand before sticking the rifle on. The cloak/coat (not sure which it will be yet) is made up from the coat parts of a Skitarii carefully and brutally hacked off and pieced together. I need to greenstuff on the missing parts as it sort of floats on his back at the moment! I think further modifications to the rifle are also needed to make it look a little less like the standard equipment.



Next we have the start of an Inquisitorial assassin. There's still some work to do so that he looks a bit less like the standard torso/legs. I think he'll just get a loin cloth and some more purity seals. Using the standard pistol from this kit seems like a bit of a cop-out, but I love the look of it, so that stays. The other hand, however, is now some sort of electro-censor-flail-thingamy.

Brilliant any chance of some void suit miners to accompany one of these guys?

 Llamahead wrote:
Brilliant any chance of some void suit miners to accompany one of these guys?

That is something I'd like to do, yes. If I'm not worrying about making bits suitable to cast, like last time, I can try something more complicated than the Moles

Arise. Arise from the depths my beauty!

Shortly after I started this thread, I had a bit of a hobby break while sorting out house and work... when my painting mojo came back, GW wasn't even on my radar any more. Warhammer as I loved it was... elsewhere and I still had no friends to play 40k against (I have no friends... waaaa!). I was looking at my Guard recently and was (I still am to a certain extent) thinking of selling them off to fund other things as they are just sat in the attic gathering dust. It seems the jailers/dealers at GW HQ managed to sense another escape attempt though and locked onto something I thought long lost and very dear to me... almost like the junk lady in Labyrinth.

For those of you that remember the dim, distant past and the original back story of my army, it originated on a mining colony and consists of the remnants of the loyalist population that managed to escape the annihilation of their homeworld, let by an inquisitor and his bodyguard on a Rogue Trader's vessel. I originally had this disaster being a nurgle plague outbreak as I imagined GW would ever allow the cult to re-appear and I was reading the Dark Heresy fluff at the time where a nurgle zombie outbreak was taking place anyway, so it fitted.

Deathwatch and it's absolutely gorgeous Cult models has, unsurprisingly, reignited my interest in 40k and is making me actively think about how the survivor's equipment should echo that worn by the cults; they are both from mining colonies after all. I was never overly happy with the direction my forces went as, nice though they are, the Cadian hazardous atmosphere kits from FW weren't what I envisaged my loyalists to look like at all and the rest was just sort of thrown together to make a playable force. I think the plan is to go back and review everything in my case and strip it back to things that work within the theme and sell the rest to allow further expansion of some small warbands for skirmishes instead. If Necromunda gets rereleased, that will be a perfect scale for what I'm looking for.

So, with that in mind, I ordered one box of Deathwatch to start experimenting with. Imagine my surprise when I open the box and find it mis-packed!
Thankfully the mispack is in my favour for once as I now have a spare Cult character sprue

Hopefully tomorrow I can start piecing some of these things together as tonight is... Sword Club!

I'm not sure where the figures in the first post have actually gone.. I really need to tidy up my work spaces and consolidate everything into some proper containers when not working on something!

Anyhoo. With the arrival of Deathwatch, I started having a play with some of the plastics. The first ones to come off the sprue were the purestrains, along with all those Space Hulk ones from years ago that I never clipped. Doh! At least this means I now have a very large population of Purestrain, even if the Princelings are smaller than the Space Huk ones



Some of the Space Hulk figures are nice display pieces, but don't make sense on smaller bases, so I think I'll only be dealing with the running ones and maybe one or two perched ones. I used to think these were the pinacle of Purestraininess... but the new ones are so crisp and detailed; plus they follow the original aesthetic more.

I should be making up all of the hybrids as hybrids, but I thought I'd take the chance to try converting one or two of the 4th Gens into sample guard to see what they would look like with all of their gear in working order and Imperial issue equipment, rather than trashed, mismatched uniforms and mass produced sluggers



So far this is just had the cult pendant removed, a weapon swap and a new head. He's looking quite nice; though the head looks like every other Inq28 conversion that uses the same head, so I need to do some more work on that to make it into void suit/mining equipment. I also need to reconstruct the left sleeve of his suit as that wouldn't hold up to void work with all those holes! It works, but is still lacking something to differentiate it from a cultist with a head swap at the moment, but I can't quite work out what. Any suggestions?

This looks exciting!
*following*

Welcome aboard and feel free to poke for updates, or throw out ideas or criticism! Sometimes I need a prod to get a move on and stay focussed

Not a massive update today, but a little bit more work has gone into the cleanup as well as some of the 3rd/4th gen hybrids.

The hybrids have only had minor minor bits done to them with the addition of pouches, grenades and, in one case, a RT era las pistol that has been in my bitz box for nigh on 20 years!



The mining laser carrier has had his pack replaced with a modified version of the Cadian comms pack as I have loads of these and wanted to keep the nice new pack for something else. The speaker will be filled in to become a big spotlight and some cabling added between the pack and laser to make it have a purpose. One thing I have noticed while trying to do these is that my bitz box hasn't felt any love for quite some time and is looking a little one-tracked... it seems to be full of Cadian infantry accessories, or space marine torsos/arms/bolters and little else. I'm not sure where all my bare empire heads went... I need to investigate some of the bitz sellers and kits to stock up on human heads, hands and accessories.

As for the imperial-ification of a 4th gen, I sanded down the helmet a bit to make it less like the standard Skitarii helm, added a shoulderpad, some extra puches (not seen in the photo) and a shoulderpad to break up the silhouette a bit.



He still needs a butt adding to the lasgun and some greenstuff to tidy his sleeve up a bit, but I think he's ready for an undercoat unless someone can think of another improvement? Style-wise I want them to look pretty similar to the stock hybrids, but neater and better equipped. They do use the same equipment store after all.

Nearly time for the greenstuff to come out

The headswap on the cultist is very effective! I had been considering doing something similar so cool to see the concept works. How easy was fitting the lasgun to the hybrid arms?

Perhaps adding a small plate to the back of the hands would aid in the armoured void suit look? One of the hybrid models already has this, and it looks more reinforced that way. Plasticard would probably work, or greenstuff.

Some nice conversions. I have a few of those chain blades laying around, I may have to steal that idea!

Glad to see this continuing. How wedded are you to GW a lot of the historical kits have lovely spare heads and might work with another project?

Wow, lots of comments! The Lasgun swap was easy enough as there are not many connection points to cut through, especially if you have some of the loose ones. It does need a stock putting back in at some point as it looks a bit weird without.

For these I want to stick with gw bits... But I did get distracted by Betrayal at Axalta last week (see other thread), which has derailed this project. My sample purestrain fail didn't help matters as I just can't pick a colour scheme

Hmm, could you cut off the Cadian arms just below the shoulder pad and attach them to the cultist just below the shoulder, or are the bulky Cadian arms a bit too thick? It would solve both the issues of the sleeves looking ragged, and also of the stock being missing.
I suspect the lasgun with the folded stock would work best for converting these models, but that piece is relatively uncommon (Catachan command squad and old tank upgrades sprue has one each I think).

I found the arm to be a bit short on the cadian lasgun arms. Speaking of which, I remembered why i used the lasgun arm rather than the unattached lasgun... the hand underneath the lasgun matches up really nicely to the other arm on the hybrid, so you don't need to faff about trying to greenstuff hands onto things.

I keep looking at his feet and thinking he has toes... and it really bugs me. I'm going to have to fill those in before he gets painted

Hmm, fair enough. It sounds like using the Cadian arms would require a full armswap, with the Cadian shoulders too. The hand on the gun lining up with the arm sounds very helpful though!

I know what you mean, the stripey-ness of the armour does get to me a bit too with the Cult models. I've been thinking about conversions for the Primus model, but the stripes just make me think about Tyranid chitin a bit too much. Yet they should be the native equipment of the miners. The Blood Angels Chaplain with jumpack has similar design cues, and I have a similar... dissonance with the model, yet I still think it looks cool. Odd.

Recently I've been thinking of getting rid of my Guard army and just building/painting the bits of any 30/40k board games, but the timely arrival of the Cult codex (only 23 years since the last official update!) has changed those plans.

It seems that I was subconsciously building my guard force with the new Cult lists in mind, especially the homemade legs and torsos that I was putting together... as such, it looks like I already have a fairly chunky cult that, thanks to DW:O and 2 copies of Space Hulk, only needs a few more boxes of hybrids and purestrains to bulk it out a bit more.

Coming into work this morning, I was greeted by 2 boxes of Acolytes and 2 boxes of Neophytes, so I can start putting together the cult proper once I've worked out what the colour scheme should be for the hybrids so that it doesn't clash with the existing guard. The aim will be to try and blend them together so that the miners and the existing troops look like a ragtag army made up of miners, local defence force, local gangs and local security.

This means that the back story will have changed somewhat from refugees of a plague outbreak in the mining colony, to the rising cult (the Malific Claw) and the survivors. In addition to the cult models, the parcel also included Death Masque, the Deathwatch book and Kill Team so that I can also build a Deathwatch force to fight with the remaining Guard forces that are not subsumed into the Malific Claw.

I just need to finish off the figures currently on my painting table before I can get started on these properly.

First aim is to work out four army lists; two for Kill Team and two to scale up to with everything else that I own. I think I need to clear the dining room table and pull out everything to see what I have first :/

I know I said yesterday that I needed to finish off some other bits on the painting table first, but I couldn't resist a quick block colour test for the cult colours after I had a play with spreadsheets to work out roughly what size cult I have already...

Long time readers will remember my Guard army from many moons ago that was based around a mining colony disaster. Rather than get rid, it makes sense to keep the mining theme going and reuse them in the cult as more Neophytes, along with the collection of Chimera and sentinels already painted up. This gives a really nice, solid base of fast moving Neophytes to play with, especially when combined with two sets of Space Hulk and one copy of DW:O. As such, now I need to pick a colour scheme that compliments the existing paintwork.

Last night's play with colours took the ochre and applied that to the mining outfit, with the darker brown as the armoured pieces



What do you think? Too much ochre? The other option is to change the cloth sections into the lighter brown of the guard uniform and make something else the ochre colour so they aren't quite so bright... I can't quite decide

Good colour combo, looks great. Will be a striking force on the tabletop!

I hope so! We shall see when a few more are painted up

After lots of faffing with work and other projects, I've finally managed to get a bit more done on the genestealer cult, including some experiments with skin tones for the different generations. The bases for these guys are still drying, so I'll post some nicer pictures when the basing is finished.



For the skin tones I've tried to add more purple as you go back down the generations. 1st gen being nearly purple, with the 4th gen being pretty much human... with a little bit of purple thrown in. Here is a closeup on a 3rd gen

How did you paint the heads? They look really good with the mottled appearance.

The mottled appearance is some watered down purple washes spotted onto the skin.

Cool plog. Some really awesome conversions.

EDC

Thanks!

I managed to squeeze a bit more painting in today and *nearly* have some finished 1st and 2nd gen hybrids



The bases are still on the painting table and there is a bit more work to be done on the faces... but the group is slowly growing

Very interesting blog! I look forward to see the first two models you posted painted!

 endtransmission wrote:
The mottled appearance is some watered down purple washes spotted onto the skin.

It works really well!