Not sure if there were any 40k armies named after episodes of Space: 1999 already, but there's one now; although 'army' is perhaps overstating things a bit, this is currently purely a hobby project, I haven't even looked at an army list to see how much of this is legal (although the Terminator with jump packs is a definite 'no', I know that much). Also it's been 20 years since I painted anything, so we're not talking Golden Demon here - but anyway, may I present the denizens of Daemonworld Eden (so far), old, new, and in one case from inside a chocolate egg:

I love 'em! I admit that I've never seen space 1999 but the colors are wild and fun.

 krijthebold wrote:
I love 'em! I admit that I've never seen space 1999 but the colors are wild and fun.

Thanks! Yeah I wanted to avoid the 'black with pastel trim' that GW keeps using for Slaaneshi renegades - ended up remembering an old Eavy Metal feature where several artists had taken a crack at the same miniature and one had done the armour as if it was marble, which is a bit too fancy for me, but got me on the path to that smoky white base as something I liked and wouldn't get annoyed having to do again and again (it's basically just grey, blue ink, then escalating layers of drybrushing to white, minimum effort). As you can see several of them have got random bits of coloured trim on them (just because chaos shouldn't be big on uniformity IMO) but the overall white and gold scheme reflects these lunatics' lore, that they genuinely think they're the pure-of-heart holy paladins. That's actually where the name came from, on a tangent, as well, I went looking for something that'd sound like an old testament description of angels - it was just coincidence that 'Bringers of Wonder' popped into my head, but it had the right sound.

(Space: 1999's a fun show, if you're in the mood for some pretty eccentric 70s sci-fi - amazing model work, supremely haphazard writing, threadbare-if-any connection to actual science; it's the one where they're riding around the galaxy on the moon, having accidentally blown it out of orbit. Inspired the 'pre-cap' sequences in the main titles of the Battlestar reboot, and the Millennium Falcon, in a roundabout way.)

The music and pageantry update: the proceeds of one of those Noise Marine upgrade sets. First one I did is on the right, all Noise Marine aside from the legs (because the upgrade pack doesn't have legs), which came from the Possessed set because they still have the old ball joint waist that the NM torso fits onto. I wasn't really feeling the paint job until - pretty much at random - the idea of painting his sonic gun as a Van Halen guitar popped into my head, and then it all came together. On the left, Noise Marine #2, just the head and arms/gun on a regular CSM body, but I feel like the paint job sells it just fine - since I'm getting a little bit more comfortable with fine brushwork (what I think of as 'fine', anyway) I did patterns on a few of his larger flat surfaces, just to set him apart from his comrade; it's kind of a personal goal with this warband that nobody's just 'same as the last one', they all have something unique going on, whether it's a conversion or trying something new with paint or whatever.

In the middle, I had some parts left over, so he's got a Noise Marine head and left arm - I'm not intending him to be a NM, they're just representing random Chaos embellishments - on top of the legs from goat boy from the Dread Pageant set. What with the hacking job I did removing those from their torso his gentleman's area was a bit messy (not in the way Slaaneshi troops like messing up their genitals, probably, best not to think about it), but luckily I'd recently cut a Sister Novitiate in half (not fatally, she's just snake from the waist down now) so I covered up the mess with the bottom of her skirt cloth.

Didn't expect to have more finished this weekend, but there wasn't much else to do while watching election coverage, so yet more nostalgia for the Bringers of Wonder - this time an original 2nd edition marine. Not an eBay pickup, he's been sitting all these years in the big colourful game box that was my introduction to the Warhammer 40,000 world as anything other than 'where Space Hulk happens', formerly in the red and black of my first army, the Furies, as modelled by his former comrade beside him who I pulled out just for the photo. Didn't bother removing the paint, I just swapped his backpack for a period-appropriate Chaos Berzerker pack, hit him with the spraycan, and got to work - dark gods only know what mix of acrylics and enamels I was using back then anyway.

(Since I was getting out old miniatures anyway, I thought I'd prove that I did, at least, learn to paint a little better back then than the old marine would suggest, so that's the commander of the Furies chapter on the left. Look I was young and impressionable and Xena had just started, of course female marines.)

Those mounted troops make my tail wag. So good. Thanks for posting.

 Shrapnelsmile wrote:
Those mounted troops make my tail wag. So good. Thanks for posting.

Thanks! I've got a third cavalry mini basecoated at the moment, where I jammed a chaos marine onto a Steed to recreate (somewhat awkwardly) an actual Steed-riding CSM I used to have back in the old Realm of Chaos days. Given how much chunkier chaos marines are now, the poor Steed looks pretty overburdened - hopefully 'having a bad back' doesn't infringe on Nurgle's territory.

Okay so, GW minis are fine and all, but the daemonettes have always bothered me - and not in the way daemonettes try to bother people (much), they've just never seemed like they really had much on the 'alluring' side of 'disturbingly alluring'. I know I know, they have to sell these to kids - still, while I'm happy to have the GWmonettes in my warband, I wanted something a little more, well, Slaanesh, so I hit up etsy and got some similar-but-legally-distinctmonettes to serve as the elite (which incidentally is why I've been painting all the regular daemonettes with all their clothing and adornments and spikes just a uniform gold, so these with their more varied colour schemes would stand out a bit), so may I present the Six Daughters. Slightly NSFW, on the basis that they've got their tops off, and some of them have just regular boobs rather than horrific mutations, which is apparently scarier.



I'm breaking my 'no named characters because they all die routinely' rule, since these are specific daemonettes rather than interchangeable army builders, and Syl keeps them around out of maternal affection. Don't think about that too much. From left to right: Humility, Innocence, Charity, Tranquility, Temperance, and Clemency - not ironic, that's how Sylelle genuinely thinks of them. (While also being fully aware that they, like their mum, are horrific crimes against sapience - she goes out of her way to cultivate cognitive dissonance, since to her mind with Chaos it's a feature, not a bug.)

Along with more Sororitas who may not have taken their vows to the Emperor as seriously as they should have (or maybe they just found their armour a bit stuffy), I got around to another of my old timers this week, a 1988 Chaos Warrior. When I was first trawling through the 40k 2nd edition box that at some point in the distant past became my 'dump everything I'm not using here' box for retro miniatures, I thought maybe I could add a few techno whatsits to him to make him look like he belonged in a 40k army and maybe just had a bit of an old school fashion sense - but then I decided to be much nerdier, and decide that he is a 1988 Chaos Warrior, from the Warhammer Fantasy Battle world that's actually a lost colony planet in 40k on the edge of the Eye of Terror, which I know has been written out of the lore long ago, but it's the Eye of Terror, a non-canonical planet's hardly the strangest thing you'd find there. So this guy was wandering the Chaos Wastes one day when he stumbled through a portal and now, well, he doesn't understand most of what his new comrades are talking about with their 'bolters' and 'dropships', but they march under the banner of Slaanesh and that's good enough for him.

Noticed a funny thing while I was painting him (which, since step one was stripping off the old paint job, is the first time in decades he hasn't been caked in a thick layer of paint obscuring all detail) - is it just me, or is his hammer the one used in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition logo? The way it mounts on the handle is slightly different, but the head looks just like it, so I painted it as if it is, and now consider this anachronistic idiot to be the most canonical miniature in the army (besides Sylelle, or course), since he's wielding THE Warhammer.

(I don't know where the hex base came from - based on an old catalogue page I googled he'd have originally come with a square base, but as long as I've had this guy he's been on that hex base, so I let him keep it, and just built it up a bit so he's not literally shorter than the marine I shortened to kitbash a Chaos Squat.)

...and while I was on etsy looking for daemonettes to make the servants of the Emperor uncomfortable, I found this other set (originally called 'Spider Maidens'), who aren't quite as disturbingly Slaaneshi as the previous lot, but they are huge - pictured with a normal daemonette for scale, insofar as any daemonette could be called 'normal' - and you know what they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Besides when She-Hulk is both your superhero crush and gym goal, how could you not? (Spoilered because, again, boobies - and these ones don't even have the decency to have horrific mutations instead of regular nipples half the time.)



They weren't supplied with bases, so I had to improvise for the one with her foot up on something invisible - luckily all those Chaos Sisters have left plenty of holy relics and whatnot on their sprues, since they don't want them; then that turned out to be a bit too tall, so I had to build the other side of the base up as well. You'll probably have noticed for their skin I just slapped on the contrast paint and called it a day - I like them, but since they're all basically the same thing just with variations in armour I didn't want to go to town painting them and get bored, so I took the fast and easy route. Still, it gave me enough time for my imagination to get going, which is always a worry, so these are now known as The Emperor's Granddaughters, because what Sylelle did was round up a bunch of Emperor's Children from her followers and implant daemonic embryos in them - she didn't bother giving them birth canals as well, but if they didn't enjoy their 'babies' tearing their way out of their stomachs they obviously weren't devoted to Slaanesh enough, so they deserved to suffer - and this is the result. Lest she seem like some kind of Fabius Bile mad science understudy, I should clarify Syl wasn't trying to breed super-daemonettes or anything, she just thought it'd be fun.

Finished my sixth Terminator, making a proper Slaaneshi squad (is there still a bonus for using holy numbers in army lists?). Left to right: heavy weapon Terminator (with an Obliterator head, since I didn't use it on the Obliterator) being guided by daemonic forces in a very literal sense; Syl's old armour, which misses its wearer so it prowls around capturing victims to 'wear' it until they burn out; a Space Hulk Terminator taking 'the long war' very literally (but unlike every other v1 Space Hulk Terminator he's still got his banner pole); a plastic Librarian from Genestealer, who didn't even need any chaos spiky decoration painted on because he's already got spikes and skulls all over his armour (but that's Librarians for you, can't trust them); the squad leader who doesn't care what the rules say, she wants to fly; and the most recent one who's a big fan of John Woo movies. All the trophy helmets are drawn from Rogue Trader - a Space Shark on the v1 Space Hulk Terminator, a Marine Errant on the Librarian, and double-combi-bolter gal has managed to find (and decapitate) a member of the Space Marine Field Police.

Okay so these aren't chaos marines, but they're part of the Bringers of Wonder's story, both in the lore sense, and in the sense that I was running out of room in my little painting corner for already completed miniatures, so I got a cheap display case from Ikea, and relocated all the old minis I still have into spare shelves; also it seemed a waste to make a new thread just for some ancient armies I'll likely never add any more to anyway. But for posterity's sake, and just because I like typing, here's everything.

First image, my original 40k army, the Furies - red because I played Space Hulk before 40k so in my mind Space Marines wore red armour (I was quite young). I started collecting during 2nd edition, but the vast majority of what you see is 3rd edition, primarily those outstanding poseable plastic marines GW did for the boxed set, which I've seen made fun of nowadays for having 'hundreds of ways to make basically the same pose over and over again' but their modularity and the ease of modifying plastic parts made every marine feel like my own work, and I'm still very fond of them. Fun fact, the one in the black Sororitas armour in the front row is Inquisitor Vail - no relation to the Ciaphas Cain one, just a coincidence.

Second image, everything else; I did used to have a whole Dark Eldar force (I know, 'Drukhari', whatever - the guy at the GW shop tried to argue that they wouldn't call themselves 'dark' eldar, but my feeling is that, have you ever met the Dark Eldar, of course they would), but most of them were just those plastic infantry which, well the marines got the better end of the deal in the 3rd edition box, so they were eventually discarded, leaving just the named characters (of which I had more than I ever needed, but inventing Dark Eldar personalities seemed very fun after all those stolid marines), the Wyches, and oh yeah, their colossal death engine; I recall there was a conversion in White Dwarf based on combining a Dark Eldar Raider with the frame of a Falcon, and I thought cool, but let's make one bigger, so if memory serves it's made from a Falcon, two Vipers, and two Raiders, one of them the heavy weapons version whatever that was called. More enthusiasm than common sense. Scattered about, my other odds and ends: Eschers repainted as the officers of the Imperial Guard army I never got around to collecting, Sisters of Battle (Order of Our Lady of the Rose), a bunch of random non-GW miniatures that I can't even remember where they came from, the Spice Marines (not a typo, it's the Spice Girls in power armour, shut up it was the 90s), Xena and Gabrielle, and my Craftworld army, which I never really got around to doing more than one of each type because I just wanted to see what their colours would look like; back then Ulthwé were still wearing bright yellow helmets, so the bone helmets weren't copying anyone. They're technically on-topic for the thread, since Syl has a mad crush on their leader; if you ever thought you'd had an awkward date, imagine explaining to the Council of Seers why a chaos sorceress keeps trying to chat you up mid-battle.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
... so may I present the Six Daughters.

Awesome troupe of daemons, really enjoy seeing your paint scheme applied to so many different sculpts. Shout out to your converted daemonettes (?) earlier, using Escher as the base, those are rad as well. And is that a pregnant daemon?? *golf clap*

Lots to love here, looking forward to more white armored chaos weirdness.

EDIT: Added props to that Oldhammer mini on the hex base, nice touch with the white fur!

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Awesome troupe of daemons, really enjoy seeing your paint scheme applied to so many different sculpts. Shout out to your converted daemonettes (?) earlier, using Escher as the base, those are rad as well. And is that a pregnant daemon?? *golf clap*

Lots to love here, looking forward to more white armored chaos weirdness.

EDIT: Added props to that Oldhammer mini on the hex base, nice touch with the white fur!

Thanks! It has been a lot of fun working with so much variety - as you saw my prior armies of any size were loyalist marines, for whom it's really only the scouts who are 'different' (I mean Terminators are honestly just a different shape of the same power armour), and I used to have quite the horde of Dark Eldar but they were all just the same purple armour or skimpy purple armour (Wyches), it's been a new experience bringing together such a wide-ranging bunch of weirdos with the shared colour scheme.

That is indeed a pregnant daemon - I forget where the idea came from, it just kind of popped into my head one day. Very rudimentary 'sculpting' of the milliput (I really didn't achieve much in terms of smoothing out the sides, and wound up positioning her arms to hide the join lines) but I'm fine with it. You'd think she shouldn't be going into battle like that, but one has to imagine that daemons make pretty bad parents in any case. The Eschers have been a lot of fun to work on - I actually bought the box before I decided to work on a chaos army, just out of nostalgia for my old Necromunda v1 gang, but they've turned out to be a good source of cultists (I do have some boys in the pipeline for the cultist flock, including a couple of oldhammer types - I'm not deliberately trying to do an all-girl army, it's just kind of where my head goes first).

As I like saying to Gandalf I was there three thousand years ago, and I have a lot of sentimentality for the old minis, so I was very pleased to recently spot a trio of 1994 metal daemonettes for quite a reasonable price on ebay. Honestly I didn't mean for the claws to be that red, I was going for more just adding a reddish tinge to the purple contrast paint I'd slathered them in overall, but I'm a bit absent-minded on which paint does what and instead of using a nice gentle ink I reached for the Flesh Tearer Red, forgetting it has all the subtlely of, well, something that'd call itself 'flesh tearer' - but I don't regret it, they turned out very striking. I'll say this, I know a lot of folks (myself included) have a chuckle at the goofy old sculpts of the metal era, but I had so much fun painting these, discovering all the details of their bodies and costumes, so respect to the Marauder Miniatures days, the Lobster Trio can be my modern daemonettes' wingmen any time.

Also, may as well add them here, the improvised totally-not-Necrons Chaos Androids I whipped up for this month's painting contest.

Boxes full of high-detail modern chaos marines sitting around my workspace, and all the effort's going into a monopose Berzerker - but the dark red (heavy red contrast paint followed by heavy crimson ink) and brass colour scheme was a nice break from all that cloudy white and gold, Syl can seduce anything, and enough time has passed that I kind of like having these basic old guys around just as a reminder of where the hobby was back then. And you know what, he doesn't look bad - sure a whole squad standing around identically was less than impressive back in the day, but just this one guy mixed in with the rest of the army today, I like him. If you're wondering what's on his mouth, my (poorly-formed) attempt at a ball gag - should've figured out some way to add straps, it looks more like he's developed a bubblegum habit, but that works too. I didn't intend to give him a legion icon but his shoulder looked a bit plain when I'd finished the rest of the painting, so I did the best I could with my smallest paintbrush to turn out a corrupted World Eater logo, where instead of chomping the planet it's sucking on it like a lollipop. Not that Khorne and Slaanesh are friends anyway, but this sort of thing probably doesn't help.

I don't feel like I really need to do any other ex-Khornate troops - I've got an old Kharn, but he's intact and painted, and it seems like a shame to lose some of my old work just for one more random trooper now - but I think I will look into rounding out the set with a corrupted-to-Slaanesh Plague Marine and Thousand Son one of these days. Maybe start tossing in little hints that other troops have been co-opted from other warbands, like part of a leg or gauntlet still showing the colours of a Night Lord or Word Bearer or whatever under their 'new' paint job.

So I got the current Callidus recently, without any specific plans, just out of fondness for the original, and as it happened the day I went to collect her from the store they also had their stock of Leliths on the FOMO 'while stocks last' shelf, so I got her too, also out of fondness for the original (moreso actually, since despite the bulk of the metal mini I kind of prefer the feel it's going for to the current one). Naturally she got decapitated and kitted out with daemonette parts, and helpfully that left an angry lady head with a swooshy ponytail lying around when I came to wonder how I was going to chaosify the Callidus, along with replacing her weapons with leftover daemonette parts - a tail on the left arm (and another tail on her butt), and the right is actually a daemonette leg for a couple of extra joints, tipped with the lash from that chariot thing in the Start Collecting Sex Daemons box; that took a lot of careful work to get glued on without falling off again (you can see the join's not that tidy, but never mind).

(And my original, just for fun - who's also not actually Lelith in-universe, poor girl never gets to be herself.)

Finally got me some Juan Diaz daemonettes. Funny thing, I wasn't that impressed by these gals back in the day - felt their dancing poses looked kinda awkward - but looking back now, I think maybe that was because I was always seeing them ranked up in WFB regiment blocks. Or maybe just now that I'm doing my oh-so-very-overdue chaos force I'm more into the weirdness than I used to be back then. Whatever the case, I totally get what everyone was always going on about now - don't think I really need to go scrounge up more of them from ebay, but I'm delighted to have this trio in the warband.

(And as luck would have it I recently bought one of the very first daemonettes - the ones who had individual names - going cheap enough, so that'll be the entire lineage of sexy lobsters once she arrives.)

Following on from the above, I like how their toe claws turned out (same contrast pink as the claws, pre-drybrushing), and I haven't really been loving my regular daemonettes having gold claws as well as gold outfits - limiting their colour palette was a choice I made back when I was starting the warband, so the Six Daughters would stand out more from the 'normal' daemonettes, but since I've now got the muscle daemonettes and the second and third gen ones and have been painting all of them just however the sculpts seemed to dictate, there's so much variety it doesn't matter anyway - so I hauled the gals (or wherever they want to come down on the gender spectrum) into the nail salon to get matching pink put on. Since I had them all off the shelf anyway, I also got the ones who already had bone-coloured claws by virtue of still being roughly 50% human and got them all to smile for a class photo.

Back when I started putting them together I figured there were daemonettes and there were Escher-based cultists who had some mutations, now I don't even know which is which anymore. Possibly they don't either, and any given 'daemonette' may or may not be an actual daemon or a mutated mortal, but their minds are too frazzled to keep track.

Without really meaning to I realised I've developed a theme of wetware-assisted Havocs, so that's a thing now.

On the left, I was recently reminded that the naked ladies I've got lying around the bits box are from the Ral Partha Slave Auction set, although I don't recall ever having any guards or auctioneers or anything like that, so presumably one of them got parted out at some point and I got the Ral Partha Nude Bondage Enthusiast set, which honestly I can live with that. That said they're not great sculpts, but I do keep an eye out for opportunities to use them to add an extra touch of Slaanesh - initially I was thinking, what if one of the Havocs had a naked cultist holding up the barrel of the cannon, like you used to have on those old Skaven jezzails, but the slave girls being metal nixed the idea of moving their limbs about enough for that, so... I don't want to say 'impaled by lascannon' is an idea that just comes naturally to me, but that's where we ended up (although conversion-wise she's in one piece, I cut the cannon in half and glued it to her front and back). Look on the bright side, she's a Slaaneshi cultist, so maybe it was consensual.

And on the right, I found a conversion beamer - had a look at the wiki for the current lore and discovered these things are perishingly rare now, but genestealer hybrids used to be able to get their hands (or claws) on them, so I separated the weapon from the plastic hybrid (from the first edition Space Hulk 'Genestealer' expansion, the same one that did plastic Librarian/Grey Knight Terminators) and got to work. Since apparently they need a Master of the Forge (whatever that is) to keep them operational, and I don't have one of those - this was before I got the Warpsmith - I made use of a spare old servitor, leaving off his right-shoulder-mounted heavy weapon (that's supposed to be just uncontrolled flesh mutating out of his shoulder due to all the chaos sorcery rocketing around inside him; it's actually a Sigmar murder elf ponytail) so that 100% of his brainpower could be slaved to stabilising the beamer. Allegedly also nobody but the Adeptus Mechanicus can calm the machine spirits of these things, but come on, you telling me Slaanesh can't seduce a machine spirit? Please.

(Since the weapons-to-people ratio of this Havoc squad is kind of getting out of whack, I promise the next heavy weapon marine I'm working on will skew way off in the other direction.)

Finally got my first generation daemonette, so that's the lot of them (unless I've forgotten an incarnation) - 1988 original (she's called Fiendthrob, that's not me that's canonical, this was back when even rank-and-file miniatures got individual names), 1994 claws-for-days, Juan Diaz, the current plastic gals, and a couple of daemonette-adjacent versions I picked up off etsy.

(Spoilered because boobies, as usual.)



I really need to go back and repaint that plastic one - she was the second mini I painted in this current delve into 40k, after decades of not picking up a paintbrush (apart from that time I painted a Siege Thundercracker black and lilac because Amazon can go to hell with its exclusive Skywarp), hadn't even got my painting corner set up yet so I didn't even have a proper light to see what I was doing, but she's the only modern daemonette I've got that isn't a conversion, so I felt like she was the only one suitable for the history line-up.

Congrats on completing the family! My favorite will probably always be Juan Diaz' (and yours looks really excellent here, even if her claw isn't red ), but the Bestiarium one is my second. I'm not sure I recognized the far left one as a proto-Daemonette before but she totally is.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Congrats on completing the family! My favorite will probably always be Juan Diaz' (and yours looks really excellent here, even if her claw isn't red ), but the Bestiarium one is my second. I'm not sure I recognized the far left one as a proto-Daemonette before but she totally is.

Thanks! Yep, they're the real deal - I remember them in the catalogues from back when I was first getting into 40k, before the 'new' giant claws ones came out. I may go back over those claws at some stage, I intended the bold red to be exclusive to the '94 gals (with the pinkish tinge on the Diaz claws showing it 'evolving' towards the neutral tones of the modern ones) but then I ended up using it on the Realm of Chaos one as well (mainly to distinguish the claw from the tip of the tail also sculpted into the same area), and now I'm low-key rethinking the whole flesh-toned-claws thing I've been doing with regular daemonettes from the start. Need to get better at blending though, the hard join between colours works on the earlier ones where there's a hard line in the sculpt, but I don't think it'd look so good on the Diazzes and the moderns where the claws are growing much more organically out of their arms.

The whole 'design lineage' thing is something I've really gotten attached to working on this warband - I've always been fond of that kind of thing, like the various starships Enterprise, all the earlier-version ships in the Star Wars prequels, that sort of thing. I've got one each of the v1 and v2 Obliterators waiting for paint (even though let's be honest they both kind of suck) for the same reason - I'm busy with the second plastic one that came in the Start Collecting box currently, I wanted him to be different to the first I just painted up as a regular Obliterator and it's turned into quite a project.

Oh wow, you are totally right! I have quite a few 1988 Chaos Renegades but I guess I never spent much time looking at the fantasy daemon pages of ye olde cataloges

Nipples!

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Oh wow, you are totally right! I have quite a few 1988 Chaos Renegades but I guess I never spent much time looking at the fantasy daemon pages of ye olde cataloges

Oh I used to spend so much time just looking through the catalogue, and the gallery pages they'd put in White Dwarf - the first issue I ever had, 105, had these full colour spreads of chaos daemons and warriors (promoting the first Realm of Chaos book, I think - I got Lost and the Damned when it came out, but only picked up Slaves to Darkness many years later second-hand), plus Harlequins, and Dark Future of all things - all neatly displayed like catalogue pages, but fully painted, they looked glorious. The battle scene photos they do in codices nowadays are cute and all, but I still prefer the solo photos just for poring over every detail.

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
Nipples!

Well, as close as I can manage I think the modern minis where they're sculpted - which is to say, the etsy ones - turned out half decent, I just gave them a dab of ink and let the sculpt do the work, but the old metal ones just don't have fine enough detail to 'guide' the ink - or the ones where I'm dotting on 'nipples' to minis where they're supposed to be clothed - so I just have to steady my hand as best I can and dot on a bit of paint, and as you can see it's a hit-and-miss process. Luckily to the eye it's all so small that it doesn't bother me. One of these days though I'm going to have a go at rolling out some super tiny beads in milliput, then using my smallest drill bit to create a tiny indent and popping the beads in to create a bump - I feel like it's a viable idea, but very dependent on my ability to be precise at very small scale, and, well...

So I feel like I kind of messed that miniature up, but you live and learn, so I'm not upset over it. I just happened (not intentionally) to wander into the local GW shop on their anniversary, and figured I could probably make something out of Inquisitor Erasmus Catamaran here - quick head swap with one of those murder elves from Sigmar (which necessitated leaving the backpack off, but that's fine, a giant Inquisition symbol wasn't going to be the look I was going for anyway). Pretty quickly in the painting process I realised the resulting conversation wasn't really speaking to me - looking at the Eavy Metal art of the original, I feel like the sword is really the focal point, and everything I'd done had been to inadvertently draw the eye away from it, with the big hair shifting the mini's centre mass, and the Bringers' bright white overshadowing the blade, where the Inquisition's black colour scheme really made the snazzily-painted sword pop. So I did kind of find myself half-assing the painting - didn't bother doing any shading, or picking out the lettering, on the back of the coat. But never mind.

I was glad to find a use for the old Asdrubael Vect prisoner mini I'd been saving for decades, though - she's the one hiding a snapped-off spike behind her back ready to shank the first elf that comes near her, I always liked her moxie. As I vaguely recall there was an oblique mention of her in some fluff in some codex or other, and it didn't sound like she fared well - I mean, Vect's still alive, I guess - but that's vague, so I worked her into my own canon to give her a different fate, involving my Archon in a rare sentimental mood and some 19th millennium archaeotech. So this isn't her, obviously, she's probably another one of my chaos sisters - still chained up and hiding a knife behind her back, but that doesn't mean she doesn't want to be there, she might just like bondage and stabbing as a form of foreplay.

This month's painting contest entries - I've decided rather than just 'havocs' like everyone else, the Bringers of Wonder call their heavy weapon contingent Death Blossom (they haven't seen The Last Starfighter, they just came up with it by themselves), which yeah sounds like a bubblegum metal band, but that's totally in character for Slaanesh.



Starting on the left, I was thinking of the old metal havoc with his heavy bolter supported by a chain over his shoulder, then got to wondering if there was a left-handed heavy bolter in any of the sets I had. There wasn't, but that's no reason not to pursue a wholly impractical idea - I cut off the hand and hilt from a power sword arm to create a grip to attach to the back of a spare heavy bolter (the one from the regular chaos marine box) in place of its original right hand, and for that and the belt-fed one from the havoc box shaved off the hands holding them on top, et voila. Had to remove one of the shells from the ammo belt on the right to get it to match up to the belt piece extending from the backpack, which left it with a little kink in the middle of the belt, but nobody around here's bothered by a little kink... I was thinking about doing something fancy with the backpack - possibly some kind of jets or legs to stabilise him when he's firing, like the old havocs had those ball vent things on the sides pointing backwards instead of down which I always assumed was so they could stop the wearer being thrown backwards when they fired, but back when 3rd edition came out I went with the multi-melta on the plastic land speeder and the heavy bolter's just been sitting in my bits box ever since, and caught my eye - I feel like the supporting arm (from one of the missile loaders) is a bit thin, but I'd gone and spray primed it before I thought of sticking on some extra parts to bulk it up, and what's done is done. The head's from Warhammer Imperium issue one - I'll be turning that marine into a renegade which'll probably mean using a chaos helmet anyway.

Next to him, I finally thought of a use for one of the Dark Apostle's little minions - originally I was thinking replace the lectern with a naked cultist to turn it into a mobile porn couch, but I don't have a naked cultist (not in the right pose, anyway), and somehow the idea of a missile launcher got into my head, which quickly became three missile launchers, because when has chaos ever been about restraint? Fair bit of clipping and filing to remove the arms attached to those launchers, and the extra cables and decorations are mainly there to hide the mess that left. Since I had the Apostle out anyway he donated his arm, since the actual marine obviously didn't need any more weapons - he/she (Sororitas head) also got that whatever-it-is decoration from one of the Necromunda Escher dog herders, which I'd cut off so the Escher could be holding up a Necron's skull instead - I'm picturing it as kind of like an over-the-top and chaotic version of the braids you get on dress uniforms, and between that and making a member of the working class do their actual job for them I'm really getting a 'posh officer' vibe from this one.

Next up, a gen 2 Obliterator, which I wasn't especially looking forward to since I never much liked the look of them, but you can't ignore the bits of history you don't like, so I picked up a gen 1 and gen 2 just to have the complete set. I really wanted to avoid the 'covered with bubblegum' look of the official paint jobs back in the day, so I tried to bleed the colours into each other via the 'stretched' parts of the sculpt, like the different materials of the armour are blending into each other as it mutates - so-so result, but I'm okay with it. This boy came incomplete off ebay without a head, and I was originally going to use the Possessed head on the terminator on the far right, but after cutting the back of the head/neck so it'd fit into the collar I just wasn't feeling it, and randomly used the Escher shrouded face instead - compared to the much bigger Possessed head, that tiny thing really sells the bulk of the Obliterator. The base is an old Vyper canopy, which I've had left over ever since I used the rest of the Vyper for my Dark Eldar megatank - it's old enough that the plastic had become a bit brittle, so I just crushed it into shape by hand.

And on the far right, a chaos Cyclone terminator - if you're aghast that I mutilated a gen 1 Cyclone to get that, don't worry, Citadel did it for me, these were sold two to a blister pack when I got them, and while one of them was painted up for my Furies, the other had been miscast with the front of the helmet badly flattened, so don't feel too bad that it's had its launcher (and hand targeter) cut off now. Heavy flamer just because - the Obliterator's blade is in the way in the photo, but the armour panel on the flamer is painted dark blue with lightning, to suggest that the Bringers nicked it off a Night Lord (possibly by just tearing the whole arm off and emptying it out later). I'd had a plastic power fist (from the 3rd edition terminators, the multi-part plastic ones) in my bits box missing the shoulder for ages - I forget why, from the look of it I specifically cut off the Crux Terminatus but it's not on any of my other miniatures, maybe I just had an idea to use it but it didn't work out - so I did a little hacking at the elbow to make it look torn-off and painted it as Deathwing - just to put the boot in, I painted what Google assures me is a Lakota symbol for 'contrariness' (it apparently refers to some trickster deity figure; seemed Slaanesh-appropriate) on the chaos terminator's left shoulder, hinting that he may once have been Deathwing himself before falling to chaos and hunting his former comrades.

So I know I said when I started this army that I wasn't going to get sidetracked inventing personalities for every damn miniature like I used to, but it's happening anyway.

Great line up of heavy weapon enthusiasts

They're all great characters, but I'll give my single shoutout to the Oblit's head. It's kind of dumb that GW made models that you have to headswap to make them palatable, however you've chosen a very cool one here. I actually wasn't sure what it was until reading the description, smart stuff that really works.Plus you've nicely minimized the bubblegum flesh situation

 Boss Salvage wrote:
They're all great characters, but I'll give my single shoutout to the Oblit's head. It's kind of dumb that GW made models that you have to headswap to make them palatable, however you've chosen a very cool one here. I actually wasn't sure what it was until reading the description, smart stuff that really works.Plus you've nicely minimized the bubblegum flesh situation

Thanks I'd love to say the Escher head was a deliberate choice, but it was really more that it was the first thing in my line of sight when I decided the Possessed head wasn't working. Handy that it's got no visible flesh though - when I got the two metal Obliterators my plan was to go all-metal on the armour of this one, and then go all-flesh on the gen 1, with the 'armour' completely made out of mutated bone and flesh just to get as far as possible away from the 'made out of scrap girders' look the sculpt has. Haven't started that one yet - he's out of his blister pack (I took him out very carefully slicing the card from behind, so from the front the pack looks good as new, apart from not having a miniature in it (and the dent it already had when I got it) just because I'm all sentimental about blister packs) but since he's so relatively tiny I want to make a fancy tall base, which I'm currently planning as being a whole dead and crushed chaos marine (Alpha Legion possibly, I feel like the turquoise colour will be fun), so I need to build that, then work out how to securely fix the Obliterator onto it so the whole thing doesn't fall apart. Which I was going to do last night, but I got sidetracked making a super-possessed marine with genestealer hands for feet and a steed neck.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
when I got the two metal Obliterators my plan was to go all-metal on the armour of this one, and then go all-flesh on the gen 1, with the 'armour' completely made out of mutated bone and flesh just to get as far as possible away from the 'made out of scrap girders' look the sculpt has.

W H O A

Finally finished painting her, a little over 21 years since sneaking her into the backstory for Eidolon, Sylelle in person (but behind a spoiler, because - and I acknowledge this is becoming a bit of a running theme with this army, but it's Slaanesh after all - boobies):



Actually the miniature's supposed to be a dryad, but I'm pretending all that stuff which I assume was originally supposed to be bark-type tree decoration is just magic swirling around her - she's tall already (a marine comes up to about sternum height - she's a daemon princess, but also a raging narcissist, so her daemonic form is just her human form, but larger) but since she's the leader I decided to build up the base a bit and stuck on various fallen foes (or just people who were in her way when she was in a mood) - there's bits of some daemonettes (maybe belonging to other warbands, maybe hers, who knows), part of a banner pole, one of the arms I replaced with claws from the Lelith Hesperax mini (painted as the Kabal of the Black Heart, because I never liked them anyway), and hidden behind that, Abaddon's head, since he's clearly not using it (I mean who takes thirteen attempts to actually get a crusade past the first hurdle? Seriously).

So who is she, apart from friendly with Eidolon (I feel like the Inquisition's reading too much into that, it was more just a fling until she got bored of him and tore him to pieces for fun - but he's fine, he can never die)? Well she started out heiress to the hereditary governorship of Helsvault, a fairly typical hiveworld, and aside from the usual disregard for the working classes you get from aristocracy didn't really tend towards evil, but she did like to disappear for hours on end into the family's library, which was a disorganised mess of literature taken as trophies from other noble houses back when her ancestors were rising to power centuries ago and promptly shelved without anyone bothering to read them, which is presumably why nobody noticed some treatises on chaos worship had snuck in there. Which probably would've wound up causing some kind of minor scandal of her sneaking out after dark to some seedy club or other, except that fate (or possibly Tzeentch, who's been known to do Slaanesh a favour from time to time) intervened, in the form of a would-be summoner kidnapping her because he needed someone of noble birth to sacrifice to the dark gods himself. That went... kind of sideways for him, in that after summoning an actual daemon, Syl's mind snapped - as you do when you're just a regular mortal coming face to face with a daemon without any kind of psychic training - but due to her proclivities, her insanity took the form of suicidal enthusiasm, and the daemon decided she was much more fun that the loser who actually summoned it, who all in all was just some nonentity driven by petty spite. She played the victim long enough to be 'rescued' by her father and the household guard, murdered him, made it look like he'd been killed by her kidnapper, took advantage of the 'sympathy' of rival houses who actually wanted to adopt her just to secure their claim to the governorship, did some more murders, then decided she was thinking too small-scale, and sabotaged the air filters in the planet's hives to produce a cocktail of stimulants, hallucinogens, and aphrodisiacs that caused a few hundred billion people to slaughter each other. She got bored of that after about fifteen minutes, rounded up some likely followers from anyone who looked like they were enjoying themselves more than just because the drugs were forcing them to, stole a ship, and sailed off into the Eye of Terror to see what happened, and after various atrocities she thought of as 'adventures' wound up ruling Daemonworld Eden, which is basically what you'd get if you opened the Lament Configuration inside Disneyland. She's devoted to Slaanesh, but is the kind of true believer who'll argue she knows the will of Slaanesh best even when the person she's arguing with is Slaanesh - or at least, she's convinced she's talking to Slaanesh, and it's not healthy to contradict her. Regardless, one can only assume Slaanesh approves - or at least, is entertained - since she's an apparently bottomless font of chaos sorcery, and at some point became a daemon princess, although she's vague on exactly when that happened since she never considered herself bound by the limitations of her mortal body anyway and just trusted the ruinous powers to see her through whatever suicidal excesses she was throwing herself into this week. If she'd ever stay focused she'd be a serious threat, but her plans invariably only last as long as it takes for her to get distracted by the next shiny thing she notices, and she attacks other chaos warbands as much as Imperial worlds - she doesn't really draw a distinction between forces of chaos and enemies of chaos, since she doesn't really grasp that other people don't think like she does, and therefore may not want her to horrifically slaughter them, if they're lucky enough to actually be allowed to die at some point - the closest she comes to reality in that sense is noticing that some of her victims occasionally beg for the sweet release of death, but she puts that down to them 'being contrary', and actually considers it one of her nobler qualities that she's too benevolent to be mad at them for trying to interrupt her fun.

I didn't really have a plan when I got the Magus, I just picked her up because I figured I'd think of something to do with a haughty lady doing a power walk, but then I remembered chaos 'stealers are a thing, right? or used to be at one stage anyway, and I'm totally going to 'canon is whatever I hazily remember it being', so here we are. As usual, the lore turned up on its own while I was painting (and doing a little filing to remove the material creases on the middle section of her dress, because when you sign up with Slaanesh there are fashion rules to follow) - so what happened was even Tyranid genetics aren't perfect, so while Kariad here was born with the usual absolute loyalty to the cult, it didn't actually connect to the rest of her psyche, and while the Patriarch and other Magus's telepathic senses told them she was as committed to the cause as she should've been, she was developing a shrewd idea of what was on the horizon for their planet and decided a world about to be eaten by Tyranids wasn't anywhere she needed to hang around. She's nominally aligned with Sylelle just because it's a fair bet the hive isn't going anywhere near the Eye of Terror for the moment, and whereas most other chaos warlords would have an issue with her starting a brood of her own within their warbands, Syl thinks it's adorable, and has been coaching her so she can use sorcery to forcibly impregnate victims with horrific monster embryos just like a purestrain, but doing it for fun rather than genetic imperative. This isn't wonderful for anyone else in the warband, but they already have to put up with so many capricious threats to their lives and sanity, what's one more? That's her father's skull she carries around, just because you're abandoning your family and brood to save your own skin doesn't mean you don't miss them - although it'd be a reach to assume he wasn't still using his skull when she decided to take it with her, so I wouldn't necessarily call her sentimental in the conventional sense.

For completeness's sake, the Bringers' entry in this month's painting contest, the Edenborn (spoilered because, well, you know the deal by now, right?):



Like I said in the contest thread, far from my neatest work - they're small (they'd be just regular humans) and I'm not a very good painter, but these ones specifically are meant to be kind of messy and feral, so I'm not that fussed; to the eye rather than a zoomed in photo, I think they're fine. In other news my old habit of getting distracted by lore is starting to crop up again, so I'll turn it over to Scrivener Cotton to describe what these gals actually are (although again in a spoiler tag, because I don't want to clutter up a gallery thread with text).

I recently realised I'd forgotten to apply the cheap iridescent medium I got from Officeworks to the last few miniatures I finished - I'm always doing that - and since it meant getting them back on the table I snapped off a group photo while they were convenient:



From left to right, we start with a Possessed, made weirder by Genestealer hands for feet, and a Steed neck left over from that one I turned into a daemonette centaur - I tried using a purple ink wash instead of blue as the base for the armour, to carry through the pink/purple hue of the skin and make it look like the armour was itself becoming flesh, but turns out the drybrushing I do after the ink covers purple a lot better than blue, so all it wound up doing was make his armour look a lot cleaner white than the smoky white the others have for armour; never mind. Next up, a Sister with a bit of a naughty tentacle thing, since I realised it's really easy to make tentacles with milliput - not so easy to attach them, one of them fell off while I was painting. In the centre, Sister Josefa, this month's contest entry - I didn't bother taking new contest photos, there's not much armour showing anyway, the shine's not a huge difference, and it's the coat that's the big deal. Behind her, just a bog-standard monopose from, I think, 4th edition, around about then? Just more of my effort to have something from every era of chaos. And on the far left, the marine from Warhammer Imperium issue one, I finally did something with him - I can assure you that's a cultist chained to his shield, she's genuinely thrilled to be there, so don't worry (I've got this vague idea that it'd count as a magic item, and be invulnerable so long as she remains sufficiently 'happy', and doesn't panic at the incoming fire and lose her mojo) - incidentally it's important that you know how sorely I was tempted to paint her black with white hair a la Halle Berry in X-Men so it'd be a literal Storm Shield (I didn't mainly because I'm not very good at darker skin tones yet, and also I feel like puns are more a Nurgle thing with their jolly outlook). I couldn't think of a way to get rid of the wings on his chest that'd look good, so I decided to roll with it and paint it as if it's his original Emperor's Children chestplate, which he still wears in mockery of the Imperium (which doesn't make sense since he wouldn't have been wearing Primaris armour back in the Heresy, but whatever). Probably going to paint something on that little chest shield, but I haven't thought of what yet, and didn't want to start painting without a solid idea, so I'm just leaving it alone for now.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
I recently realised I'd forgotten to apply the cheap iridescent medium I got from Officeworks to the last few miniatures I finished - I'm always doing that - and since it meant getting them back on the table I snapped off a group photo while they were convenient:



From left to right, we start with a Possessed, made weirder by Genestealer hands for feet, and a Steed neck left over from that one I turned into a daemonette centaur - I tried using a purple ink wash instead of blue as the base for the armour, to carry through the pink/purple hue of the skin and make it look like the armour was itself becoming flesh, but turns out the drybrushing I do after the ink covers purple a lot better than blue, so all it wound up doing was make his armour look a lot cleaner white than the smoky white the others have for armour; never mind. Next up, a Sister with a bit of a naughty tentacle thing, since I realised it's really easy to make tentacles with milliput - not so easy to attach them, one of them fell off while I was painting. In the centre, Sister Josefa, this month's contest entry - I didn't bother taking new contest photos, there's not much armour showing anyway, the shine's not a huge difference, and it's the coat that's the big deal. Behind her, just a bog-standard monopose from, I think, 4th edition, around about then? Just more of my effort to have something from every era of chaos. And on the far left, the marine from Warhammer Imperium issue one, I finally did something with him - I can assure you that's a cultist chained to his shield, she's genuinely thrilled to be there, so don't worry (I've got this vague idea that it'd count as a magic item, and be invulnerable so long as she remains sufficiently 'happy', and doesn't panic at the incoming fire and lose her mojo) - incidentally it's important that you know how sorely I was tempted to paint her black with white hair a la Halle Berry in X-Men so it'd be a literal Storm Shield (I didn't mainly because I'm not very good at darker skin tones yet, and also I feel like puns are more a Nurgle thing with their jolly outlook). I couldn't think of a way to get rid of the wings on his chest that'd look good, so I decided to roll with it and paint it as if it's his original Emperor's Children chestplate, which he still wears in mockery of the Imperium (which doesn't make sense since he wouldn't have been wearing Primaris armour back in the Heresy, but whatever). Probably going to paint something on that little chest shield, but I haven't thought of what yet, and didn't want to start painting without a solid idea, so I'm just leaving it alone for now.

fantastic

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
fantastic

Thanks!

This month's contest entry, a conversion I've had in mind for a while (and had a box of bikers on the pile waiting for), and the 'Open' category seemed as good a time as any (although now I bet 'Speed' will come up as a theme next year), Doomrider:



I never got the original - never had a chaos warband back then - but I remember him being announced in White Dwarf and, well, he's not GW's best work... But nostalgia's a powerful thing, so here we are. The parts list is the basic chaos bike (slightly surprised to look up pics of the old guy and realise the bike hasn't changed in all that time) and I had it in mind to use a bunch of parts from the Venomcrawler that I'll never build, but ended up favouring the long scythe things from the Sigmar Slaanesh chariot for the front wheel, then the spiky wheel itself, and ended up just using chariot parts (and heads and arms from its crew) all over, which I'm pretty happy with - while the crawler parts would've matched the existing bike with all the chaos spiky panel trim, the chariot parts make it look properly daemonic, which I feel is a much more characterful outcome. Despite that I tried to stick to the idea of the original if not the look, so there's the twin meltaguns (donated by the Sororitas box) with the armour tilted almost flat and two blades either side of them, and a skull with a big tongue on it (the tongue's one of the only Venomcrawlers part I ended up using), and the holster for the plasma pistol stuck under the handlebars on the left, although he's wielding the pistol now instead of the sword (the sword's stowed on the right side - made from a Possessed arm grafted to a leftover horn as the handle, much more daemonsword-looking than the mundane original was), plus there's a chaos bolt pistol also stowed on the right, because he was supposed to have one according to his wargear list.

Doomy himself is mainly Possessed parts - the horned head matched the horns he originally had, although he doesn't have his tongue out, but that's too small a detail for me to be confident converting. The hair is from one of the chariot's daemonettes, with the head cut into at the back to make room for it to mount there - that daemonette had her head and hair as separate parts, and the head I filed down the back and stuck on his right shoulder pad as decoration, since I didn't have anything that'd approximate the flame motif on the original's right shoulder anyway; the left shoulder's a collection of skulls, which is close to what he used to have. The legs are from a Raptor, with the right hip cut to give him the pose of leaning out of his seat to fire his pistol (which is from the Warhammer Imperium issue 1 marine, I wanted a really chunky pistol for him - meaning it's way thicker than the holster, but aren't they always on marine miniatures), and with the backpack I cut off the bottom of it to look like the original's. Pretty happy with how the paint turned out on his armour - I don't know how they got the original effect, but on this he's started with volupous pink contrast paint, then a drybrush of blue, then a purple ink wash, then pink highlight, and a final light blue highlight - more colourful than the old Doomrider, but I feel like Slaaneshis should be colourful, and it echoes the original colour scheme. The gold's the same I use for my regular troops - I figure maybe when you summon a daemon it winds up imprinted with some of your style - and his daemonette biker gal (also something I wanted to do for the conversion from the start) is the purple contrast/gold armour colour scheme I always use, to help him fit into the army overall. She's got Escher arms, the claw hand from one of those deathmaiden things - no real reason, I just like mixing the daemonettes up with human parts.

I did intend to do a more elaborate base (and had it roughly constructed) with an Ork wartrakk (from my old Gorkamorka mob) that'd smashed headlong onto one of those tilted girder tank barricades, and Doomy would've been riding up the barricade over top of it (to fit with his 'leaping' ability) but that seemed like a whole separate miniature's worth of work, so in the end I put it aside. The existing base is from the Venomcrawler, one of the ruin parts that one of the legs plugs into - I cut off the end of the matching leg and filed it flat, then drilled a hole into the bike's back wheel, so it's pegged in place at both ends and seems reasonably stable, despite the whole miniature resting on that one little contact point. Thank the dark gods these aren't metal anymore. It seemed a bit sparse though, so I cut a few spikes off Terminator trophy racks, including the marine helmet, which is supposed to be a White Scar (not that you can really tell, since it's not one of the ones with extra decoration on his face) - I decided he managed to escape from the White Scars, despite just being a disembodied head, by managing to knock one of his own teeth out, then chewing it into the rough shape of a D6, which he used to roll a 1 and vanish.





Wasn't sure initially what to do with the screen on the handlebars, since what does a daemon need with a monitor, but then the idea popped into my head at random to have him watching porn mid-battle, so that's my effort at the pornhub start-of-video logo.



This is still the original volupous pink contrast coat on the pistol - I was going to paint it after drybrushing on the white and pale green for the plasma light, but that drybrushing actually did a decent (I think) effect at a glow, so I left the front of the gun as-is with just a few metallic details; perfectly normal for a Slaaneshi to have a hot pink gun after all.

now that bike has the best biatch pad!

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
now that bike has the best biatch pad!

You don't get to be a daemon prince of Slaanesh if that's not a priority

Some more odds and ends - no specific theme, just minis I've got finished in between contest entries, I've replaced my old desk lamp with a couple of LED lights and I'm playing with my photo settings, so figured I may as well get a group shot of anyone who hasn't been here before.



Starting from the left, and coincidentally the most recent finished (I worked on him any time I'd just put a colour on Doomrider and wanted to let it settle in, but was still in a painting mood), another of Kariad's little brood - a v1 plastic Goliath (same one who donated his arm to the stress relief servitor, I think), with a plastic genestealer claw arm (I sliced the hand arm off, I wanted his mutation to be fairly minor, so no whole extra arm). Since he's just a minor cultist, and part-timing with Kari as well as Slaanesh, I went with some dark colours on his pants and harness, rather than pastels - still a pink codpiece though, there are rules to fashion after all. Next, a recreation of an old metal chaos renegade on steed I used to have way back in the day - the poor steed's struggling a bit under the scaled-up size of today's chaos marines, but I'm sure they let steeds into the massage parlours on Daemonworld Eden, he'll be fine. No matter how much filing I did to the insides of the legs and the original saddle there was no way he was going to fully fit, so I used the backplate of one of the chaos backpacks with separate backs painted brown to look like the front of a saddle to fake looking like the saddle's actually designed for him. The shoulder pad icon and kneepad flag together mean 'genderqueer pansexual', which I feel goes without saying for Slaaneshi troops but that's no reason not to be proud of it. In the centre, not quite what most folks mean by 'Slaaneshi catgirl' but someone'll be into it anyway, just a basic marine with a tiger head, from a really cheap animal toy - the expression on the tiger face was really bland to the point of looking almost meek, so I splashed some Fleshtearer red all over her front to suggest she's been snacking on downed enemies mid-battle, to give her a bit of character. As usual I went leafing through books from the dawn of 40k to pick a chapter for the trophy helmet, in this case the Sons of Medusa - they seem to all have white helmets nowadays, but back then it was green with a white vee down the centre. Next up, one of those Escher dog herders or whatever they are - the pose holding up a leash or whatever it is reminded me of the Predator flourishing somebody's skull, and since I still had the Necron boss from Warhammer Imperium issue one lying around, he got torn open and decapitated; I still don't like painting Necrons but I was happy to get in the blue and gold Egyptian look on the chestpiece, and have some fun using metallics and washes to create a different hue of metal to the ones I use for the warband. Kind of an impulse decision to use an Escher dog head for her, but it matches the Predator 'yell at the sky' moment. And lastly, the rest of that toy tiger, which was made from really crappy plastic that was a real pain to undercoat - damn stuff ate contrast paint - so what I'd intended to be a drybrushed purple coat ended up being near black as I just slathered on dark purples to get it fully covered; on top of that I ended up realising that the static pose of the tiger body doesn't match the whip curling around as if she's in motion, and I considered just abandoning this mini, but decided it wouldn't hurt to have her in the back of the 'cavalry' squad making up the numbers, so I put her to one side and put a colour on now and then whenever I was working on something else until she was done.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:

Spoiler:

Do you remember perhaps, where exactly these miniatures are from? Asking for a friend

 Manu Miniatures wrote:

 Daia T'Nara wrote:

Spoiler:

Do you remember perhaps, where exactly these miniatures are from? Asking for a friend

They're designed by a group called Bestiarum - I got them from an etsy seller called OuroborosPrinting, who I mainly chose because they wouldn't be shipping overseas to get to me, but they did great work with the 3d printing or however you make these things, no cleanup or washing or anything needed, just unpacked, primed, and got straight to work.

Found them, thank you.

https://only-games.co/products/demonesses?_pos=29&_fid=f23ebe989&_ss=c

I figured now was as good a time as any to take stock of the Bringers of Wonder to date - it was last January, before work restarted, that I wandered into the local GW store out of nostalgia, got a couple of codices for my favourite armies just to see what they were up to nowadays and that's all the justification I need to fill up bookshelves, and while leafing through them thought, y'know it's weird that I gave Fulgrim his backstory without ever actually having a chaos army, so...

And now here we are. I'd say it's been a productive year, except none of these are ever going to be used on a tabletop (some of them can't be, like I'm pretty sure there haven't been rules for Doomrider since the early 2000s, and how do you even explain a Terminator with jump packs), so it's more accurate (and more in the spirit of 2022) to just say it's been a year. But it's been fun, and that's all She Who Thirsts cares about.

So what with this month's contest entry winding up with a pink skirt - because I've been using green for the corrupted sisters, but putting green on top of the heavy use of pink for the wings seemed like it'd be garish (and not in a fun Noise Marine way) - I've reconsidered my 'all gold' colour scheme for basic daemonettes, because originally the idea was it'd make the Bestiarum 3d printed elite daemonettes stand out since they'd have another colour compared to the rank and file, but since then the warband's predictably become just a mass of weirdos all doing their own thing, including half a dozen different kinds of daemonette anyway, so I figured what the hell, get the basic b*tches back on the table and paint their loincloths for them. And take a photo, since I've been playing with my camera settings lately (had to, it's still auto-flashing now I've got led lights over my painting corner, so I've had to find a pdf of the manual and learn how exposure settings work):



That's not all the daemonettes, just all the ones with cloth on them - there's a bunch with Escher bodies or whatever that didn't need repainting. I also took the opportunity to clean up some of the rough edges of the gold painting (and a couple of bits I'd missed entirely) since I've got better lighting now and can actually see what I'm doing; also gave them a quick drybrush of pale yellow, since that looked pretty decent on the daemonette on the back of Doomrider's bike.

I finally stumbled across your P&M thread, and all I can say is "Wow!" I've been a Chaos guy off and on since I started the hobby, but I have rarely liked anything Slaaneshi. It's all either strandard Chaos Warriors but pink, or else sexy cheesecake models. You really lean into the disturbing part of "disturbingly alluring." I really love your pale, not-quite-fleshy pastel palette.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
I finally stumbled across your P&M thread, and all I can say is "Wow!" I've been a Chaos guy off and on since I started the hobby, but I have rarely liked anything Slaaneshi. It's all either strandard Chaos Warriors but pink, or else sexy cheesecake models. You really lean into the disturbing part of "disturbingly alluring." I really love your pale, not-quite-fleshy pastel palette.

Thanks! Yeah I did want to get that 'not sure if you want to run away or take a closer look' mood - I'm a big Hellraiser fan, and the idea of the Cenobites having this beautiful kind of horror was in my mind as inspiration (even if I don't know that any of the movie designs really conveyed it, except for Doug Bradley's gravitas - until the recent reboot anyway, hell yes those new Cenobites have got it).

Having said that, today I finished a couple of sexy cheesecake models - got them off etsy a while back, and while they don't really lean very far out of the centrefold look other than being armed (although one of them does have a bit of barbed wire around her thigh, so that's something), I feel like they've got their place mixed in with the rest of the gals. Also a regular Sister, who I actually started back when 'helpers' was the painting contest theme (where the Fleshsmith was just a random mini I bought with the theme in mind, who ended up getting all my attention that month) - kind of just an excuse to use the daemonette with the giant hairdo, who I think it a bit over the top for just a random daemonette on foot. Remove the feet, though... Did a little (not very careful) sculpting for some entrails - I spent a while wondering what colour the insides of a Slaaneshi daemon would be, thought perhaps sparkly silver for a while, but ended up going with a fairly predictable dark red just so as not to make it confusing what you were looking at - and used up one of the collection of random milliput tentacles I have in a little container, because I always accidentally mix up more than I need so that's what I do with the leftovers. Spoilers, because... you know the routine by this point, right?

I finally finished the Twisted Sisters for this month's painting contest - I originally got them way back last year, when we were having a federal election (in case the result went an undesirable way, so I could think to myself, okay, country's chosen ruin, but I've got a sweet chaotic rock band, yay - which happily wasn't necessary), but I had this idea to do my still-boxed Rhino up for them as a mobile battle concert stage - and put them on techy Necromunda bases that'd fit in with its hull accordingly - but my habitual disinterest in vehicles larger than a bike (maybe a land speeder at most) reared its head, and they just sat around not being painted for months (the Rhino's still in its box). So for the contest I pulled out the round Venomcrawler base (which the Venomcrawler won't need, since I don't really see a way to Slaanesh up a robot spider - at least without much additional sculpting, which I don't do well enough to pull off - so it's slowly being parted out to various other conversions), slapped some milliput on it leaving space for the girls' bases, and put my usual sparkly purple ground texture over the Necro bases to make them all fit in.



I was thinking white armour with gold trim like the rest of the warband to begin with, but while I was painting them I was grappling with what colour to do the various little bits of cloth hanging off them - pink or purple would be obvious, but I wanted their hair to stand out as the colourful bit of them, and didn't want to overshadow the 'angelic' look of their colour scheme by having a big bold purple make the white/gold seem like background - and in the end (kind of inspired by The Young Pope/The New Pope and its reminder that the Catholic Church has zero restraint when they come up with costumes) changed my plan to all-gold armour with white cloth. I was hoping for a more shining white-gold result, but the Auric paint is such a pain in the butt to use I ended up not bothering too much; using Agrax Earthshade for the ink wash, instead of my usual Crimson, I felt like the gold looked suitably distinct from the rank and file of the warband as it was. The instruments were another thing I had a question mark on - again, I didn't want them to overshadow the armour and skin, and in the end it was a combination of having covered the minis with skintone contrast paint (not just the areas that would be skin - I like to either contrast or ink wash the whole mini as a starting point just so I can properly see the sculpted detail) and the organic base on the lead singer got me thinking, hey, living flesh musical instruments, why not?

(And here's the uncensored version, for the glory of Slaanesh and all that.)



And a shot of them individually. It's a bit messy (as they always are) but I'm quite proud of freehanding the original Emperor's Children banner from Realm of Chaos vol. 1 onto the side of the drum - I was actually planning to leave that white (with the main point of interest being somebody's flayed face stretched over the other side of the drum), but I absent-mindedly didn't put her on her side while the white contrast paint was drying, so it pooled at the bottom and looked dreadful, and I'm no patient enough to do the fifteen thin coats needed to get a nice smooth white surface back. Also, fun story, I had a genuine moral conundrum about whether to use the 'bonus' loincloth on Vyrona (the lead singer, I named them - the drummer is Fleur, the keytar is Jaze, the piano is Hush, bass guitar flashing the horns of the devil is Beatriz, the other guitarist with the shouty guitar is Maxim), because obviously I don't want to be implying that being trans is 'deviant' by association with Slaanesh - but my mindset for this whole warband is old school, and chaos used to have nuance (Khorne representing valour and martial prowess, as well as just smashing people's heads in, and all that), so her being trans is simply reflective of Slaanesh being all about individual expression and embracing your truth, versus the Imperium's monolithic repressive culture, and it's just the cruel irony of the 40k setting that good and evil are represented by the same gods (ask me about the real tragedy of Fulgrim some day), so anyway I let her have her dong. Massively overthinking a miniature, of course, but you watch enough Star Trek and you wind up analysing the morality of everything you do. I think it's a positive.

I may one day field them as Noise Marines - I have joined a gaming group and started actually playing the game (badly, I lose a lot, but it's fun anyway) - in which case since she doesn't have a weapon, we're just going to assume that Vyrona can shout loud enough to count as a blastmaster or something.

I saw Twisted Sisters and clicked this thread expecting to see painted models of Dee Snider. I am so disappoint. Well, at least those Noise Marine ladies look like they wanna rock.

 ShadowsAndDust wrote:
I saw Twisted Sisters and clicked this thread expecting to see painted models of Dee Snider.

Haha And unlike their namesake, being good Slaaneshi followers, they are gonna take it (probably without bothering to find out what 'it' is in advance, even).

Wooooow, how did I miss so much Slaaneshi goodness ! Congrats on a magnificient collection, love the white armours, definitely gives a pure vs corrupted vibe, especially on the one with a DP head a few posts above.
Great job digging out old odd models too, these chaos genestealers rock.
Keep up the great work !

evil, evil, sluts, but nice work

 KernelTerror wrote:
Wooooow, how did I miss so much Slaaneshi goodness ! Congrats on a magnificient collection, love the white armours, definitely gives a pure vs corrupted vibe, especially on the one with a DP head a few posts above.
Great job digging out old odd models too, these chaos genestealers rock.
Keep up the great work !

Thanks I'm really glad I held onto enough of my childhood collection to be able to sprinkle in some properly ancient minis along with the new stuff - sometimes they earn their keep too, this past weekend the 1989 Space Hulk Terminator (in the role of Aspiring Champion of the Terminator squad) got within a CP reroll of outright killing a Death Guard Lord of Contagion in a single round of combat.

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
evil, evil, sluts, but nice work

Thanks If I ever print up a proper codex for these folks, that's going to be the in-universe quote on the back cover: '"Evil, evil, sluts." - Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau'.

Been a little while since I posted an update, because I wanted to present this lot as a group - since I started actually playing games I've realised all those weird conversions have left me a bit short of just plain Legionaries to make up the numbers in the Troops section, so I threw a few together. Couldn't resist messing about with them anyway, of course:



From left to right: 'Bluetongue' (named after the lizards that sun themselves in the backyards here), based on the war trumpet from the Daemonette sprue - her leg is in Word Bearers colours, and there's a little (haphazardly painted) bit of unholy scripture or something on the side, in orange to look like it's glowing, to hint that she was one of the God-Botherers Legion before succumbing to Sylelle's allure. Next up, one who's taking 'incorporating daemons into your chaos marine army' very literally, and also has a former-allegiance piece, with her right thigh coloured for Iron Warriors. Next, someone with a giant crab claw (which kind of defeats the point of these being 'just normal Legionaries', but we can count it as a chainsword, basically), and also a Sigmar murder elf face stuck on the chestplate as decoration, which yeah means there's a spike pointed at her own face but nobody ever said chaos marines were good at workplace safety - to make the running pose look a bit less awkward I dug a bit of base terrain out of the bits box (I forget what it came from, it's just a bit of rock and a girder) to make it look like she's taking a running leap. Next, again the 'normal' bit slipped my mind when I noticed the combiweapon hand in the bits box but we can just call that a regular flamer, and also I stuck a Terminator trophy spike to her groin because, well, Slaanesh - her left shoulder ended up glued on a bit too high, so I decided she's really proud of it and spent a while painting a fairly involved design based on something I googled up. Next one of the monopose (I mean, more than usual) marines from the Start Collecting Chaos box, who I couldn't really think of any elaborate conversions for so I just glued on a giant mutant dong made from a daemonette claw. And finally, Brother Arteros from the blind boxed marines, who I picked up for a conversion I ended up deciding I couldn't be bothered doing (my first idea for 'using the terrain' in last month's Location painting contest was a daemonette with tentacle arms, plunging them into the ground and having them burst out beneath a loyalist marine, but it felt like it was relying way too much on my ability to sculpt milliput to be workable right now), with a genestealer hand and little spike glued to her head; after doing the basic white colour scheme I drybrushed on some blue and added bits of yellow trim, and the red bolter casing, to hark back to the classic brightly coloured 2nd edition Ultramarines. And yes, I've decided all my Emperor's Children (whatever their personal orientation, which would probably be in a fairly haphazard state of flux anyway what with Slaanesh) outwardly identify as female, as their way of honouring their Primarch, based on my pet theory (which I didn't explicitly write into the Index Astartes, but it's Xena-level Blatant Subtext) that Fulgrim's problem wasn't pride, it was unrecognised gender dysphoria.

Dig the daemonette-taur the most, but great squad of weirdos. You know, I just noticed the sparkle in your purple basing, very nice

Also! Twisted Sisters is great, those are some excellent sculpts / conversions, loads of character!

Nice CSM!

That's a cool squad of troops. My favorites are the Blue Tongue and the Daemonette-- they both look like they are squirting out of the neck of the armor, a delightfully gross image.

Nice to see the faction! I hadn't seen any links to your post in Homeworlds so I add this topic there. I still can't get over razor sharp grass...sounds like one hellva trip to hang out with this bunch.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Dig the daemonette-taur the most, but great squad of weirdos. You know, I just noticed the sparkle in your purple basing, very nice

Also! Twisted Sisters is great, those are some excellent sculpts / conversions, loads of character!

Thanks No converting on the Twisted Sisters, that's them au naturel. The sparkle is just cheap glitter paint, very watery so it really gets slopped onto the base, but the flock drinks up the excess quite well so it dries to a pretty good finish.

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
Nice CSM!

Thanks!

 JoshInJapan wrote:
That's a cool squad of troops. My favorites are the Blue Tongue and the Daemonette-- they both look like they are squirting out of the neck of the armor, a delightfully gross image.

Hadn't thought of that specifically, but I like the idea, might see if I can convert up a couple more legionaries on the theme of 'like that guy from the end of Akira'.

 Adeptekon wrote:
Nice to see the faction! I hadn't seen any links to your post in Homeworlds so I add this topic there. I still can't get over razor sharp grass...sounds like one hellva trip to hang out with this bunch.

Good idea, thanks. I have to admit I got the grass idea from Aeon Flux.

Anyway, finished off a new squad tonight, simple people of the land, the common clay of the Eye of Terror, y'know, morons:



Mostly just various headswaps - in one case swapping the head from one cultist onto another, so the grenade launcher cultist, plus the redhead aiming her rifle, have female heads on male torsos, but if you're not genderfluid are you really worshipping Slaanesh hard enough? So does the giant flamer gal (head from the Sororitas box), but since the torso is covered it just looks like she's super built, which nobody's complaining about either. The one on the far left, plus the heavy stubber, got a sexy boot and helmet respectively from the Age of Sigmar Dread Pageant set - the boot would've been a simple conversion, since that leg's a separate piece on the cultist mini, but I only thought of it after I'd glued it together, so I had to do some hacking to make everything fit. In the middle, behind the cult leader with the claw arm, I couldn't really see how to do a headswap on that guy given how his rifle's over his shoulder and is all one piece with his head, so I filed off the fabric creases on his trousers and glued on a mutant dong (tip of a daemonette tail) to make it look like he just decided to go into battle pantsless. It's not really the cleverest idea, but you can't question his devotion to Slaanesh. I tried some rudimentary chipping on the bits of their armour they've painted pink, since they're not important enough to get shiny new gear issued from the armoury before every battle, and really slopped the Apothecary White contrast onto their skirts to make them seem grubby.

They (along with some other minis to pad out the numbers) had the debut in battle tonight, where they achieved precisely nothing, but that's to be expected really (on top of everything else, I'm really not very good at playing this game).

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
I have to admit I got the grass idea from Aeon Flux.

Ah yes! Good movie, and series.

 Adeptekon wrote:
Ah yes! Good movie, and series.

I loved the series; can't say I cared for the movie overmuch, apart from a handful of creative flourishes like the grass, and just having Charlize Theron in it at all.

Anyway, here's this month's contest entry (on the theme of 'doomsday', Sister Verity - once again narrated by Scrivener Cotton, who'd probably rather I stop coming up with his miserable life:





I actually picked her up for the Helping Hands theme last year, but got distracted painting the Fleshsmith instead. Conversionwise she's pretty straightforward, just grafting the hand/book and backpack from the Dark Apostle onto the Dialogus body (plus a Terminator trophy of a Guardsman head onto her staff), and while normally I like to pretend that just painting them pink makes all the Ministorum symbols heretical so I don't have to convert them, the necklace seemed a bit blatant, so that got filed down and replaced with the chaos star from one of the Apostle's helpers, which ended up looking like a giant Flava Flav clock, but nobody ever accused chaos of being restrained. Painting the scarf (or whatever it actually is) as if it's skin (it's probably literally skin) was just a hail mary since I didn't have any better ideas, but I think it turned out well, and I'll probably use more of that where I can. The hot pink on her robes, same as on Sister Angelica, is something I think I'm going to adopt for the entire Order of the Honeyed Abyss - which means repainting a bunch of them who have green skirts. Sure hot pink isn't very creative for Slaanesh, but the classics are classic because they work.

The daemonette (named Scientia) is just the lectern top from the Apostle's other minion, left over from when I turned the actual minion into a missile launcher bearer, with the Dialogus lectern's speaker mounted on her groin, because of course it's on her groin. The little trinkets in place of arms are a star from the cultist leader's chainsword (the whole chainsword arm got replaced by a claw), and the ball is from the other Apostle helper, who having lost all his gear I now have to think of something else to do with.

Very nice, I like the pink and purps personally, maybe a touch of black for some starker contrast.

Great paintjob on that sister!

Nice work, as always. I particularly like your use of pink/purple as a motif-- the flames and book are weird and really draw the eye.

 Adeptekon wrote:
Very nice, I like the pink and purps personally, maybe a touch of black for some starker contrast.

 kestral wrote:
Great paintjob on that sister!

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Nice work, as always. I particularly like your use of pink/purple as a motif-- the flames and book are weird and really draw the eye.

Thanks folks I think I'm subconsciously avoiding black in reaction to how GW seemed to paint all their Noise Marines back in 3rd edition, where they'd basically just be black but with pink trim - felt like they were going for 'looks cool and buyable' over 'but this is what the lore says Noise Marines should look like'. Although I've got one on the table that's pink trim over a dark purple base, kind of alluding to that era of Slaanesh paint jobs - for various reasons I keep putting off working on her, one of them being I'm not certain whether she'll strike that balance, or just look plain, and if so whether I need to add a bunch more colours in. Also I decided to paint an album cover on the loincloth, that's kind of an intimidating prospect.

Currently though, Terminators - having had virtually my entire army bounce off a solid block of Black Legion Terminators in their last game (I mean, helped that they had Abaddon hiding behind them, coward that he is, buffing them with all his aura) I've decided I need to up my tactical dreadnought wardrobe:



Trying out a new backdrop as well. On the left, I decided when it came time to paint her bare head that she used to be a Salamander (and a he, therefore), so I went with the jet black skin and red eyes - since all the Bringers of Wonder have Syl's green eyes I put green on the various eyes of the Venomcrawler face which I stuck on as a kind of ornate collar (the Venomcrawler continues to vanish piece by piece, although I am considering assembling what's left of it via a conversion to fill the missing bits with parts of other kits). So that's her old helmet up on the trophy rack, rather than a fallen enemy - also, light coloured wood on the spikes, I didn't want all the trophy racks to look similar (hence also messing with the orientation), since that doesn't seem very chaotic. I also gave her the front of a chainsword, since I really miss the chain-bayonets the old metal chaos Terminators had. In the middle, another Venomcrawler bit in place of the left hand, and the Talon of Horus on the right - presumably a knock-off, maybe there's this Warpsmith of Tzeentch who's got some convoluted plan to get around trademark law by writing 'Talon of Horrus' on the ones he sells to gullible renegades. And on the right, suffering a bit from a bumpy paint job since I was holding the spraycan too far away, my new Terminator squad champion, with chainfist and combi-plasma, both of which she's probably going to regret when 10th edition rolls around and presumably she'll no longer be able to ignore the -1 to hit on using both of those. She's got a bunch of Abaddon's trophies - back in the day I used Abaddon's body to make my miniature of Sylelle, wearing a Terminator suit because this was long before you could just order up a naked lady miniature off etsy, so I pretended she occasionally went into battle wearing armour (or anything) - so the spare parts from that have been rattling around my bits box this whole time. Painting the helmet was a struggle owing to the imperfect primer, but it's supposed to be the Tiger Claws chapter. I didn't intentionally make a trend of decapitated heads on bases, they were just what my eye lit on when I was looking for something to make the bases less plain - I have fun trying out the entirely different paint schemes of other armies on those bits, and for the Ork I went old school with the checks and bright red trim off a 2nd edition Goff.

Do you use any washes?

 Adeptekon wrote:
Do you use any washes?

Pretty often, yeah - my armour colour for the Bringers is a dark blue ink over the wraithbone spray, then drybrushed back up to cloudy white, which in addition to giving it that blue tinge (and letting me just slather it into any areas my brush is going to struggle to reach, so they just look naturally shadowed anyway and don't need more work than that) is a huge help in letting me actually see all the sculpted detail; eyes growing old. The basic Bringers gold is likewise gold paint with a crimson ink over it. Aside from skin tones I haven't really taken to contrast paints in a big way, I got most of my painting experience back when it was just paints and inks, so that's still my default approach.

Ah I see, and I just bought me some contrast paint, maybe one of these days I'll have something up here myself...

I only ask because from the pictures it seems like there could be more shade in the groves and folds etc.

But that could just be lighting. I almost posted some minis I painted, but my phone makes them look worse than they already are.

The lightening or my camera totally washes them out.

Yours look good regardless.

 Adeptekon wrote:
I only ask because from the pictures it seems like there could be more shade in the groves and folds etc.

The grooves yeah - my drybrushing game is kind of haphazard, it's not rare that I go at the mini with too much paint still on the brush and white out some of the sculpted detail. Probably ought to carefully go back in with some thin ink lines to pick the detail back out, but I'm kinda impatient like that. The cloth is intentional though, particularly on the more recent minis I've found that painting loincloths and cloaks and so on with just a medium scarlet and highlighting up to pink, no shadow wash, makes it feel very Rogue Trader/Realm of Chaos to me.

Anyway, finished off another batch:



Now that I'm playing games I've noticed my tendency to mash together daemonette and Escher and Sororitas parts has made it kind of difficult to be certain if they should be fielded as daemons or cultists or accursed cultists or what, so - along with the mostly non-mutated cultists earlier - I set about doing some 'normal' daemonettes. That plan went a little bit sideways when I started playing with parts, but all four of these would definitely be fielded as daemonettes, so success, I guess. Starting on the left, because techpriests have dirty fantasies too, a daemonette with a robo-arm, sources from the leftovers of Fabius Bile's backpack - I didn't notice at the time but the lower 'arm' is supposed to have an extra part attached on the end, but I kind of like it as-is, the random swivel joint with a cable just waving in the air has a 'no idea what this is for' feel that I like for daemonic tech. The head's from the Escher deathmaidens because I like the blindfold look, and I used the tip of a spare daemonette tail to give her a penis because, well, does Slaanesh need a reason to be handing out extra genitalia? Next to her, the most normal of the batch, with just a tentacular arm courtesy of (I think) also the deathmaiden set, and a Sororitas head (but she's not a mutated sister, she just likes the hairdo), with horns made, I think, from Terminator tusks - since I keep using alternate heads for Termis I've got plenty of helmets left over to hack up for extra horns. Third the most ambitious of the bunch, plugging a daemonette torso and head into a Scourge - I figured using the standing daemonette legs would look pretty awkward with the wings, and filing the waist to fit into the Scourge hips seemed like the easiest way to give her a flying pose. The head was actually the one with the three topknots but I think those look a little awkward, so I clipped them off (been using them as tassles for pistol hilts and so on) and instead gave her the leftover ponytail from the Callidus. And finally, she actually is a mutated human, but she functions as a daemonette rules-wise - wasn't planning her beyond just throwing together random parts, but I decided she's a sister of battle who was a really good duellist but never got to show off because her comrades kept just shooting enemies instead of backing off and letting her swordfight them in the middle of battles, so Syl lured her to the dark side with the promise of all the one-on-one matches she'd ever want, and even talked her into letting herself be possessed by a daemonette to show that she didn't even need her body to be her own to win. Also I clipped off the tip of her tail and attached a spare genestealer hand in its place because... I forget, but why not, right? I had the idea to do a faceless daemonette but when I'd got as far as filing down her mouth I thought that was pretty creepy by itself, so left it at that - I'll probably revisit the faceless idea later.

Getting better at dotting nipples on, too, which is a very niche painting skill, but useful for a Slaaneshi warband. Not bothering with a spoiler tag since, well, it's just paint on a non-naughty sculpt, and besides you know what to expect in this thread by now.

These are really looking good!

Love these, great colour scheme, great paint job top effort...and ( # y # ) for the win.

So evil

 Adeptekon wrote:
These are really looking good!

 SpaceMcQuirk wrote:
Love these, great colour scheme, great paint job top effort...and ( # y # ) for the win.

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
So evil

Thanks

Just one today, but I'm pretty proud of it - the newest member of Death Blossom (that's my Havoc team, it's not a band... although they may be a band in their down time between battles, everyone needs a hobby), Pax:



So yeah, she's named (almost) after Paz Viszla, because after I'd put the mini together - just because I hadn't done a chaincannon yet - that's where I got the idea for the paintjob. My first attempt at object-sourced lighting (not counting deliberately not cleaning up after I drybrush the glow onto plasma gun coils, so the paint spreads onto the gun casing a little), and I guess it'd kind of rudimentary, but I'm pretty proud of it nonetheless. Just as well I'm happy with that part of the job, since the rest of the paint's fairly unimpressive - in fact, due to the ammo belts and the ram bar on the base being in the way, half of his right leg is barely painted, just the blue ink wash over wraithbone spray that I use as a starting point and that's it; luckily having a dark base means anything blocked enough that I can't get my brush to it looks like it's dark because it's in shadow anyway. I initially thought to have him standing on top of something, but nothing leapt out at me when I was looking through my bits box (aside from the remains of the Falcon hull, and I can't have everyone standing on top of a crashed Falcon), but I'm happy with the Gorkamorka ram bar as a substitute - he's not up on top of it, but it bulks out the base which is ultimately what I was after. Kind of a coin toss whether to paint it as Evil Sunz or Bad Moons - I like the look of the bright Ork paint jobs (and I'm finding I really enjoy doing these bits of other armies' colours on base decorations) but ultimately I'm too amused by Red Wunz Go Fasta (and the fact that it was an actual gameplay mechanic) to pass up the Sunz.

Another outstanding set of models. I'm particularly impressed by your work on the wing membranes. The "splotchyness" (that's a real word, right?) gives a real sense of the organic, like there really are connective tissues and blood vessels just under the skin.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Another outstanding set of models. I'm particularly impressed by your work on the wing membranes. The "splotchyness" (that's a real word, right?) gives a real sense of the organic, like there really are connective tissues and blood vessels just under the skin.

Thanks, but confession time, my 'technique' for the wing membranes was to slop on some contrast paint, lay the mini down flat so it didn't pool at the bottom edge (I blu-tack them to little wood blocks as a painting stand, so the back of the actual mini wasn't on the table) and go play Dreamlight Valley until it dried - did the front and back separately and painted a little extra pink on the 'fingers', but that's all. Sometimes the best solution is the laziest one

 Daia T'Nara wrote:

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Another outstanding set of models. I'm particularly impressed by your work on the wing membranes. The "splotchyness" (that's a real word, right?) gives a real sense of the organic, like there really are connective tissues and blood vessels just under the skin.

Thanks, but confession time, my 'technique' for the wing membranes was to slop on some contrast paint, lay the mini down flat so it didn't pool at the bottom edge (I blu-tack them to little wood blocks as a painting stand, so the back of the actual mini wasn't on the table) and go play Dreamlight Valley until it dried - did the front and back separately and painted a little extra pink on the 'fingers', but that's all. Sometimes the best solution is the laziest one

I find that I get the best results with a more Impressionistic technique rather than trying to paint every little thing, so your method gets a big thumbs up from me.

Mutation. Don't listen to Professor X, it's not all it's cracked up to be.



Thought I'd be cute and snap a photo of various recent minis in order of how recognisable they'd be to their parents at the moment. Starting from the left, last month's free mini of the month (first time I found out about that), an Intercessor who turns out needed an intercession himself as his faith in the Emperor clearly wasn't as rock solid as the Howling Griffons chapter would've liked - I painted her chestplate (girl now, it's an Emperor's Children solidarity thing) as a Griffon because I've always liked the future-medieval look of the halved and quartered chapter colour schemes, and as with the Warhammer Imperium one a while back I couldn't be bothered filing off the aquila and painting on something else, so I figured I'd hang a lampshade on it instead. Took several passes to get that colour centre-line properly aligned, respect to anyone who paints a whole army of those. The folks at the GW store cut me a break, since I'd just dropped in randomly to pick up a couple of paints and didn't have time to assemble the stock they'd only just received - they let me take it out, so I promised to come back and assemble it in store the following day (when I didn't have a bus to catch right away), which I did - Slaanesh keeps her promises - but took the opportunity to test fit a bunch of parts from the bits box to chaos it up. (I did this month's free mini, the Arbites one, in store today, and just brought a little container full of parts I thought might come in handy.)

Next up, every other part of that mini from the Sigmar Dread Pageant had been used - the goat legs, goat head and crab claw left arm to various Legionaries, the right hand and sword to the Fabius Bile conversion - and the torso was lying around looking all forlorn, so I decided to make use of it. I was originally thinking it'd be a Possessed, but later I decided on a purple skin colour scheme for my Possessed (since they're possessed by daemonettes), and they don't use pistols anyway, so I guess she's just an aspiring champion or something. To her left, the Possessed that got me settled on said colour scheme, one of the two Greater Possessed from the previous Start Collecting Walking War Crimes box - as always I can't just leave well enough alone, so that one got an extra arm and stabbity backpack courtesy of the old Possessed set (its actual backpack is on the Griffon). I used the normal sized base since there aren't Greater Possessed anymore - it leans quite a way forward, but luckily the chunky right arm flung out backwards counterbalances it pretty well.

And finally, this month's painting contest entry, Formerly Sister Misericordia. I mentioned a bit of the process in the contest thread, but to explain in full: I've had this miniature dildo (don't ask) in my bits box for ages waiting for the right mini, and naturally I thought a spawn would be the proper moment to just throw subtlety in the bin and have a giant dick waving around, but the hunched-over posture of the spawn minis didn't really suit that (it'd have been dragging on the ground), but contemplating the dick (phrasing) reminded me that it'd come from a statue that also had interchangeable lady parts, one just as-is, one sculpted with the protruding end of a vibrator sticking out. I'd been idly thinking I'd one day use the default one for the Keeper of Secrets whenever I got around to that, and didn't really think there'd be a suitable use for the other one, but with spawn parts all over the table it occurred to me I could file down the end of the vibrator to match it up to a tentacle, and that somehow reminded me of that critter from the middle of John Carpenter's The Thing with the head on a tentacle - I'd originally been thinking the spawn wouldn't have a recognisable face, but having the un-mutated head on the end of the tentacle like that seemed much more disturbing. For the rest, I just tried to make her look random, rather than the 'Abomination from the Incredible Hulk movie but with a bunch of tentacles' look the default spawn builds have - I feel like that arm coming out of her groin does a lot to mess up the basically-humanoid silhouette, and that's actually another of the heads (the face is in the armpit) on the right side instead of a conventional limb. It was actually kind of intimidating to approach painting, since the mini by that stage was such a convoluted mess, but I decided sticking to just one basic skin tone, rather than using 'monster' skin colours, would be a creepy reminder that she used to be human, so I let the contrast paint do most of the heavy lifting, and just picked out details like claws and eyeballs (there are a few on her back). Having the joints bleeding was a mid-painting decision, just based on how obvious a lot of the joins are between parts (even the ones I'd assembled the way you're supposed to) - I feel like that turns a bug into a feature, making her body look like it's on the verge of breaking itself. My original idea was that the Sororitas backpack and cloak would be hers, but then when I was coming up with her backstory I would up making her a Hospitalier from some obscure minor order, so on the basis that the debris's from her latest victim I painted it in the recognisable Order of Our Martyred Lady colours. Pretty pleased with that overall - the only down side is I can't think of how I'd do anything similarly messed up, but not in the same way, for another spawn, so Formerly Misericordia is destined to remain my warband's sole spawn, with the parts of the other one in the box just going to random future conversions.

Sister Misericordia is certainly something...Living in Japan, I have come to associate pixelation with a certain, shall we say genre of entertainment? This being Dakka, though, I assumed it was an artifact of the photo. This being your project blog, though, means that my first assumption was, indeed, correct.

The kitbash/conversion is superlative-- everything blends together seamlessly, and the end result is weird and gross. You'll definitely be getting a vote from me in the Comp.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/s/i/at/2022/8/12/f03b5b72e7d819828cd24754627a3e9e_131635.jpg__thumb

Holy space moly that is a nice kitbash on the bazooka-bodied..eh.. well.. marriage I suppose?
Also love all the colors making you imagine the scent of peppermint and sweat.. (what?!..)

Hmm..

On the latest pic you've posted, that's quite the quality photo and as for the contents, I think you've become one with Slaanesh irl to think up something as bordering on full on pornography there, You'll definately get a vote from me in the challenge entry.

Hadn't even looked on page 2..
Man, you should make the sculpts for GW from now on, awesome kitbashing.

why is one on the left got digital blurring?

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
why is one on the left got digital blurring?

Its obscuring a not safe for work bodypart commonly associated with the female species.

Also popping in to validate the pixelation Gnarly conversion for one helluva spawn.

Thanks folks Don't worry, we'll be back to normal next time - I've already got next month's contest entry planned (pending my ability to actually convert it without making a mess), and it'll be super tactful, there's gonna be a loincloth covering the orifice the daemonette's dragging herself out of and everything.

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
On the latest pic you've posted, that's quite the quality photo and as for the contents, I think you've become one with Slaanesh irl to think up something as bordering on full on pornography there

Oh me and Slaanesh go way back Actually, funny story, Tzeentch was the first chaos god I took an interest in - for lack of choice partly, I got Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned very early in my 40k fandom (before I even really knew about 40k, I was just a Space Hulk player then), so it was Tzeentch or Nurgle, and while I appreciate Nurgle's place in the lore, if I'm going to spend hours and hours painting things I'd like them to be pretty, and inscrutable bird demons seemed cool (I had one of the old metal ones - no longer, sadly). Never really prompted an interest in having a chaos marine army once I discovered 40k proper (tail of 2nd edition, hit my stride during 3rd) - I don't really relate to the idea of armies of Tzeentch, I feel like he's more the type to Eldar it by manipulating some other poor sods into doing his dirty work (but better, since everyone knows that's what Eldar do, whereas my version of Tzeentch would be the one who's convinced the galaxy he doesn't even exist) - and Noise Marines being the point guys for Slaanesh in 40k didn't really convey much of her nuance (don't get me wrong, I love them, but they're silly as hell). So it took a while for me to consume enough lore to really start to get a sense of what was going on with Slaanesh, and realise I liked her best - also this was around about when Paul Sawyer put the Index Astartes legions they weren't doing in-house up for grabs, and I had this fixation on female protagonists (still do) so I bagsed the Emperor's Children because I'd decided Fulgrim was trans (didn't actually write that into the index, it's just subtext, like I'd learned how to write from watching Xena - kind of wish I had, although I don't know that GW would've gone for the background to the Horus Heresy taking a three-page tangent to explain gender dysphoria).

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
Thanks folks Don't worry, we'll be back to normal next time - I've already got next month's contest entry planned (pending my ability to actually convert it without making a mess), and it'll be super tactful, there's gonna be a loincloth covering the orifice the daemonette's dragging herself out of and everything.

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
On the latest pic you've posted, that's quite the quality photo and as for the contents, I think you've become one with Slaanesh irl to think up something as bordering on full on pornography there

Oh me and Slaanesh go way back Actually, funny story, Tzeentch was the first chaos god I took an interest in - for lack of choice partly, I got Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned very early in my 40k fandom (before I even really knew about 40k, I was just a Space Hulk player then), so it was Tzeentch or Nurgle, and while I appreciate Nurgle's place in the lore, if I'm going to spend hours and hours painting things I'd like them to be pretty, and inscrutable bird demons seemed cool (I had one of the old metal ones - no longer, sadly). Never really prompted an interest in having a chaos marine army once I discovered 40k proper (tail of 2nd edition, hit my stride during 3rd) - I don't really relate to the idea of armies of Tzeentch, I feel like he's more the type to Eldar it by manipulating some other poor sods into doing his dirty work (but better, since everyone knows that's what Eldar do, whereas my version of Tzeentch would be the one who's convinced the galaxy he doesn't even exist) - and Noise Marines being the point guys for Slaanesh in 40k didn't really convey much of her nuance (don't get me wrong, I love them, but they're silly as hell). So it took a while for me to consume enough lore to really start to get a sense of what was going on with Slaanesh, and realise I liked her best - also this was around about when Paul Sawyer put the Index Astartes legions they weren't doing in-house up for grabs, and I had this fixation on female protagonists (still do) so I bagsed the Emperor's Children because I'd decided Fulgrim was trans (didn't actually write that into the index, it's just subtext, like I'd learned how to write from watching Xena - kind of wish I had, although I don't know that GW would've gone for the background to the Horus Heresy taking a three-page tangent to explain gender dysphoria).

Oh yeah, Tzeench has some great units, I also got some AOS Slaanesh but converted them into being 'redeemed' Sylvaneth servants (yeah thast a mindblower) in some weird storyline I wrote that got out of hand and became an entire book.

The first army that took my interest was actually the eldar (dire avengers) seeing them in a shopwindow when I was about 10 years old but never had the funds to buy them then, got my first box of those about a year ago visiting another city that actually has a warhammer store.

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
I also got some AOS Slaanesh but converted them into being 'redeemed' Sylvaneth servants (yeah thast a mindblower) in some weird storyline I wrote that got out of hand and became an entire book.

Oh I know that feeling - back before I fell out of 40k I had this random notion to write the memoir of a battle sister, starting with being taken to the Schola and I didn't really have a plan, just let the writing go wherever it wanted, and wound up neck deep in Sensei fighting the War of the New Emperor (he wasn't, of course), which didn't even involve any of my actual armies (she wasn't even from the Order I was painting). If that 'mercenary' topic ever gets up in the monthly painting contest I've got an Inquisitor Greyfax who'll be the basis for a conversion that'll tie that whole debacle to Syl's warband, just so I can pretend it was relevant somehow.

Leopold Helveine wrote:The first army that took my interest was actually the eldar (dire avengers) seeing them in a shopwindow when I was about 10 years old but never had the funds to buy them then, got my first box of those about a year ago visiting another city that actually has a warhammer store.

It was Harlequins for me - my first contact with 40k (even before Space Hulk) was White Dwarf 105 with them on the cover, and I got quite a set of minis between the Harlies and a bunch of the first wave of Guardians, without any knowledge of the rules, just for fun. Even had the old dreadnought at one stage - not any more sadly, although thankfully the smaller minis are all still around. Around the tail of 3rd edition, before I drifted off 40k entirely, I started working on collecting an army, although it never amounted to anything much - I got a box of the then-new plastic Guardians (still think they were pretty cool), but this was back when Aspect Warriors were three to a blister pack, and I wanted all the Aspects (except Warp Spiders, never liked how they looked) but couldn't afford to be getting multiple packs of multiple Aspects to have enough for full squads. I ended up getting the bare minimum and painting just one or two of each, which again thankfully I still have - they were some of the final minis I painted back then, so my peak as a painter, and I'm honestly pretty proud of them:





First version Avatar on a WFB Alarielle to create my Farseer - actually not a farseer, she's the craftworld's lavair, but they have this cultural thing where the lavair's effectively their leader. Also low key slightly part god, and Syl's got a huge crush on her, because I thought that was hilarious (kinda reciprocated too, she's an odd one). I like the current Aeldari minis well enough, but those old metal Aspect Warriors have a special magic for me, it'd be really high up on my Win The Lottery list to ebay up a whole Aspect army's worth of them and finish what I started. (Probably just as well I don't play the lottery, so I'll never have to find out exactly how much worse my eyes are now than they were back then with a 1-to-1 comparison, can't believe I was actually dotting pupils and doing proper gemstones and everything.)

 Daia T'Nara wrote:

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
I also got some AOS Slaanesh but converted them into being 'redeemed' Sylvaneth servants (yeah thast a mindblower) in some weird storyline I wrote that got out of hand and became an entire book.

Oh I know that feeling - back before I fell out of 40k I had this random notion to write the memoir of a battle sister, starting with being taken to the Schola and I didn't really have a plan, just let the writing go wherever it wanted, and wound up neck deep in Sensei fighting the War of the New Emperor (he wasn't, of course), which didn't even involve any of my actual armies (she wasn't even from the Order I was painting). If that 'mercenary' topic ever gets up in the monthly painting contest I've got an Inquisitor Greyfax who'll be the basis for a conversion that'll tie that whole debacle to Syl's warband, just so I can pretend it was relevant somehow.

Leopold Helveine wrote:The first army that took my interest was actually the eldar (dire avengers) seeing them in a shopwindow when I was about 10 years old but never had the funds to buy them then, got my first box of those about a year ago visiting another city that actually has a warhammer store.

It was Harlequins for me - my first contact with 40k (even before Space Hulk) was White Dwarf 105 with them on the cover, and I got quite a set of minis between the Harlies and a bunch of the first wave of Guardians, without any knowledge of the rules, just for fun. Even had the old dreadnought at one stage - not any more sadly, although thankfully the smaller minis are all still around. Around the tail of 3rd edition, before I drifted off 40k entirely, I started working on collecting an army, although it never amounted to anything much - I got a box of the then-new plastic Guardians (still think they were pretty cool), but this was back when Aspect Warriors were three to a blister pack, and I wanted all the Aspects (except Warp Spiders, never liked how they looked) but couldn't afford to be getting multiple packs of multiple Aspects to have enough for full squads. I ended up getting the bare minimum and painting just one or two of each, which again thankfully I still have - they were some of the final minis I painted back then, so my peak as a painter, and I'm honestly pretty proud of them

My first box was actually an AOS Khorne vs Stormcast box: https://miniset.net/files/styles/set_preview_500_box/public/set/gw-60010299007.jpg?itok=SoPKHgtp
Never bought any more Khorne though, went straight into building a huge stormcast army which I don't even like (and want to get rid of but cannot find buyers..)

I like your choice of wraithbone on the Eldar btw. My Eldar are illustration-style (from their wiki pages) Yme loc and Lugganath.

I get bored super fast so I made loads of different armies, and some of them aren't painted yet (my AOS Nurgle army is still hardly even basecoated -_-)

Anyway, Aspect was never something I wanted to get into, did like the look of warp spiders but I hate working with resin so meh..
Was pretty cool when we atleast got the rangers in plastic.

The positive side to writing books of text to the lore of our creations is that you end up with a lot of thematic ration and characters to recreate, for instance after making my current challenge entry (phonzo) I now kinda want to also make his superior (tarosso), but no clue with what .. maybe when I go visit the other city again sometime I'll pick up a starter (gift) stormcast. I did buy some 50% off boxes of paint and tools lately that have intercessors so I got plenty of spacemarines to add as victims to bases now xD

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
I like your choice of wraithbone on the Eldar btw.

Thanks This was back when Ulthwé were yellow over black, before they changed to their current scheme, so it stood out - I had the notion that the craftworld was flush with wraithbone and used it for everything, including painting all the gems bone, except the one spirit stone. As much as I loved the look of the old Eldar, it bothered me how piecemeal they looked with all the Aspects off doing their own thing colour-wise, hence everyone having bone helmets.

Leopold Helveine wrote:The positive side to writing books of text to the lore of our creations is that you end up with a lot of thematic ration and characters to recreate, for instance after making my current challenge entry (phonzo) I now kinda want to also make his superior (tarosso), but no clue with what .. maybe when I go visit the other city again sometime I'll pick up a starter (gift) stormcast. I did buy some 50% off boxes of paint and tools lately that have intercessors so I got plenty of spacemarines to add as victims to bases now xD

That's very much how I used to work - now I'm kind of doing the opposite, starting with just an idea for a fun conversion (usually from the painting contest), and coming up with the personality behind the mini while I'm painting. Although that's started sprawling out too, since I started framing their backstories as in-universe records - I have this tendency (I blame George MacDonald Fraser) to buck the law of conservation of detail, throwing in completely extraneous background just because it makes the setting seem richer.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
I like your choice of wraithbone on the Eldar btw.

Thanks This was back when Ulthwé were yellow over black, before they changed to their current scheme, so it stood out - I had the notion that the craftworld was flush with wraithbone and used it for everything, including painting all the gems bone, except the one spirit stone. As much as I loved the look of the old Eldar, it bothered me how piecemeal they looked with all the Aspects off doing their own thing colour-wise, hence everyone having bone helmets.

-
That's very much how I used to work - now I'm kind of doing the opposite, starting with just an idea for a fun conversion (usually from the painting contest), and coming up with the personality behind the mini while I'm painting. Although that's started sprawling out too, since I started framing their backstories as in-universe records - I have this tendency (I blame George MacDonald Fraser) to buck the law of conservation of detail, throwing in completely extraneous background just because it makes the setting seem richer.

Wraithbone spirit stones sounds cool to begin with, like marble spirit stones hmm.

I also come up with the personality behind the mini -while paiting- because I'm rather whimsical and dreamy during a paint and that has as a downside (or upside, depending on how you look at it) that mini's end up completely different than what I intend prior.

Besides preparing for next month's contest I haven't really been working with a purpose lately, but as chance would have it a few cultists recently got finished, so I thought they'd make a nice group photo (plus one I've had done for a while, just hasn't been shown in this thread yet):



From the left, this month's free mini from the GW store - since I have my rule that (oldhammer aside) everything's got to be a conversion, large or small, I looked up the sprue when the mini was announced so I could see how it fit together, and brought along a little container of likely bits from home to improvise on the spot. I ended up not using the chaos backpack I'd prepared - a typical Legionary one but with the side vents clipped off, to make it more compact - since marine helmets were too large for the body, leaving the Escher whose hair got in the way of where the backpack would've been. The gun was pretty ambitious, working under store ceiling lights rather than the point-black LEDs I use ta home to make up for my tired old eyes - clipped the shotgun off just forward of the trigger then cut the back of the bolter to match the length, so the sculpted-in left hand would fit with the left arm. Wasn't perfect - under the skull the shoulder's not quite flush, I just slathered glue on to secure it - but it's good enough. Of course cultists don't have boltguns, whereas the shotgun could've been more plausibly covered under 'cultist firearm', but I'm never thinking about rules when I work.

Next up, since I've done a few Eschers with daemonette claws, I wondered if I could get one to match up with a leg instead, but between using the leader body with the big coat and the pose kind of randomly turning out pretty characterful I've decided she's the overall leader of all my cultists, and therefore painted her clothes in full warband colours, rather than the mishmash of street clothes the regular cultists I did a while ago got. The leg didn't quite match up seamlessly, so I filed it down as best I could, and hid the ridge of the two pieces joining at mid-thigh with some fleshtearer red to make it look like she's taken a cut in combat.

And on the right, two old souls in young bodies, veterans of Necromunda first edition. I've got a bunch of Escher juves in the bits box without their heads - not for any scary reason, they were just my go-to for female heads for marines back in the day, since they didn't have the high armour collars of sororitas making it impossible to easily swap them, and their hairstyles were more restrained then the big hair of the grown gangers (so the Furies kind of have a thing of baby-faces veteran sergeants, but never mind). I actually clipped the helmeted head from the current cultist set and glued it on the juve long before I started working on those cultists, it just happened that I didn't get around to painting this one until recently. And beside her, one of the original plastic Orlocks - besides the pastels, I filed the fabric creases off the butt and painted the hips as bare skin, with the bandana around the leg becoming the top of a thigh boot, because nothing says Slaanesh like going into battle without your pants on.

I like the contrasts on these.

 Adeptekon wrote:
I like the contrasts on these.

Thanks

Finished a varied trio of flyers recently:



On the left, I've been getting to the tail end of my old box of Possessed - who've been serving as a general-purpose parts pack for all sorts of things - and since they've now been given the sack and replaced with shiny new Possessed, I felt sorry for them and decided to put together one that's pure... whenever they had their debut, I wasn't actually in the hobby at the time (that's right, I'm being nostalgic about something I didn't even know about when it was new) - aside from the giant dong of course, these Possessed may be slightly old but they're not Oldhammer (not for another decade or so at least) so I didn't excuse it the usual conversion on the basis of historical value as-is (but the dong's also a part from the old Possessed box, one of the horns with the tip sliced off and a teensy hole drilled into the tip - I don't feel like this is NSFW since it's so low-detail). Since it was lying around I gave him the backpack whatever-that-is from the store birthday exclusive squat (who's being painted as a chaos squat currently, and had his usual decoration replaced with the big star of chaos from the CSM sprue) - most of the runes are on the other side, I accidentally glued it on backwards, but I guess that's how it would've been facing when it was torn off its former owner, so that checks out.

Next up one I've had half-finished for a while, a Raptor with butterfly wings - not the best implementation of the idea, I picked up some cheap trinkets from the local $2 shop to see what I could do, and this is just one of them saturated in purple contrast paint. Probably should've painted the metal parts gold to match the armour, but the whole thing's kind of tacky so I didn't feel like spending that much time on it. Still, she looks okay at tabletop-distance, and I like the idea of not everything being bat wings all the time, I'll definitely return to the idea next time I see a likely wing donor. She's half Raptor half Warp Talon just because I was picking whichever parts looked cool, and didn't know the difference anyway.

And lastly, speaking of not always being bat wings, the wings from the Sororitas box, previously attached to one of those skull-headed cherubs or whatever they are, now on a cultist - of course there's no rules for flying cultists, but those wings wouldn't be able to support her anyway (unless she got hollow bones to go with them, and cultists are fragile enough as it is), so they're just decorative both in-universe and out.

The possessed's dong

Fairy wings are great too and the cultist is a solid little kitbash.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
The possessed's dong

Fairy wings are great too and the cultist is a solid little kitbash.

Thanks

Anyway just for completeness's sake, last month's contest entry, Sister Julienne:



It was originally going to be the Hospitaller set's fallen sister down on the ground giving 'birth' to a daemonette, but after Formerly Misericordia I felt like I ought to be more equal-opportunity in my abominations, and there's no reason men like old mate from the Black Legion can't give birth too. Well, no reason that can't be solved by Julienne's medkit drill attachment (speaking of, that's from Fabulous Bile, so it didn't fit into the socket on the Hospitaller backpack - I cut the ball off that side and glued it back on over the end of the new servo-arm's 'shoulder'). I was kind of undecided on whether to go with the original Black Legion colour scheme, where the trim is silver, or the modern where they've gone for bling, so the dark brass is kind of a halfway point - not my favourite bit of painting (should've just gone full retro, as always) but he's just an accessory to the main miniature, so never mind (likewise, I forgot to paint the Eye of Horus on his shoulder, but it's the shoulder facing away from the 'front' of the mini so who cares). That dais is from the old Ral Partha Slave Auction set, same as the gal serving as a targeter on my Havoc lascannoneer, I've been wanting to find a use for it for ages since the naked lady frescos are ideal for Slaanesh, but it's also not the kind of thing you'd find on the battlefield, wouldn't make sense to just have a Legionary standing on it - Julienne doesn't get out much, just stays in her 'nursery' on Eden and has victims brought to her. Fun fact about her boobs (the kind of phrase you only get when discussing Slaaneshi armies), I did the overall paintwork on her early on, including the bare breasts and (chortling to myself as I always do when I think up something fun and weird) the milk leaking from her nipples, but then took a week off painting entirely because a big update dropped for Dreamlight Valley - by the time I came back, and painted all the highlighting on her robes and all of the backpack and staff and her book, I'd forgotten I'd done that, so I didn't put her behind spoiler tags in the contest thread; luckily Nevelon or a mod did it for me after I posted the final pics. The book is Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness - unfortunately I didn't think of that until after I'd assembled the miniature and it was too late to file the covers flat, so the original Sororitas book cover sculpt is still there with the RoC image just painted over top of it, but since the best I could do at that tiny size was put blotches of colour in the right place, it's not that big a deal. She's got it open to the rules for summoning daemons - of course there wasn't anything in the book about summoning them directly into people's abdominal cavities, but the rules back then were more just guidelines for players to riff on.

So that was a chore:



Saint Valerie, known to her pals in the warband as 'the Salvation Engine', for this month's contest - taking the 'upcycling old parts' approach to Renewal, because I initially didn't plan to use the Venomcrawler at all (hence it losing various bits to other conversions), the base was originally put together for Doomrider before I ditched it to concentrate on painting Doomy himself and used a simpler base, and the fallen sister was originally going to be on Sister Julienne's base before I decided to use a legionary instead, so this is a real collection of leftovers. By the time I decided to do something with it after all the Venomcrawler had lost one of its stabby forelimbs (haven't finished the miniature it's used on yet), one of its tentacles to a Terminator, its face to another Terminator, its tongue and the piece of ruin one leg plugs into to Doomrider, and both excruciator cannons and sets of exhausts to the Noise Obliterator I've been very slowly working on in the background of other projects. Instead of the stabby forelimbs I used a pair of the large daemonette claws, and in place of the tentacles I just went with human arms, one from an Escher deathmaiden, one from the Melusai holding somebody's heart. Also the dick, which I figured was now or never since it'd be comically oversized on any other miniature - I cut up a chaos bike's front armour to make a kind of sheath for it to be poking out of, to tie it more into the cyborg look of the whole thing (and less obvious that it was just a wrong-scale dildo glued onto the model). I haven't bothered uploading an uncensored version - you're all on the internet, you know what one looks like.



Probably the aspect of the Venomcrawler I least liked was its butt-up-in-the-air posture, so I clipped off the pegs on the 'hips' of all four legs leaving them just ball joints, and glued them back in with a backward lean, as well as having it crawling upwards over the wartrakk to further tilt it back - what with the spider abdomen hanging out way behind the legs I ended up having to use the one remaining forelimb to support it, since it's not actually glued to the base (to make it easier to paint both parts), and even if it was the contact points would be so small it'd probably fall off backwards anyway without the extra limb. Maybe should've filed down the tip of the leg to get rid of the ground pad on the end of it, but it helps keep the whole thing a little more stable, and when it's based that's hidden behind part of the tank trap anyway. Valerie's upper body (not actually her original body, she had herself fed to the crawler to possess it, then mutated out a replica of herself from its head) uses a pair of outstretched sword arms - since she's got so many other limbs for attacking with, I thought it'd be fun to have her torso arms in a 'behold my magnificence' kind of pose. I went for gold on her insignia rather than the usual pink to go with her saint status.



Since I already did Evil Sunz colours on the ram bar on Pax's base I decided to go Bad Moons on the trakk - tried to tell a little story with it, with green blood splattered all over the tank trap spike that's smashed through the driver's seat, and what's left of the driver landed there. His colours and the design on his remaining shoulder are copied from an example in Ere We Go, the only one of the old Rogue Trader era Ork books I've got. You can see on that side some extra armour over the track made from halves of fuel cans - this used to be one of my Gorkamorka vehicles, all of which I heavily converted (before getting bored of the whole thing, since nobody else around here seemed to play it). The crescent on the front of the track you can see on the first photo, painted yellow as a Moons emblem, is actually the remnant of the glue I used to stick on a missile pod, which I took off again to strip the vehicle down for use as a base - convenient shape as it turned out. What with needing three or more hands to hold the crawler and its leg and the plastic cement while I was attaching the legs, they didn't wind up in quite the right place, so I had to dig into my bits box and use an old bit of stowage of a crate and a rolled up tarp, stuck onto the front of the handlebars so there'd be something for the limb to rest on there.



To replace the missing excruciator cannons my first thought was daemonettes growing out of the sides of the abdomen wielding heavy weapons, but that seemed like it'd be difficult to have their hips set horizontally into the cannon mounts while getting their torsos upright enough to not be staring at the ground (and also figuring out how to make a daemonette hold a lascannon). So instead we've got a couple of sisters, impaled on the end of Melusai tails rather than growing directly out of the crawler - Val probably could've found volunteers among her fellow chaos sisters to have a snake tail stuck up them but I like painting other armies' colours on bits of armour and stuff on bases, so I decided she's using Imperial sisters as her improvised gun turrets, with the tails manipulating their spines to make them fire their guns since they're not going to cooperate on their own. Since I've got that box of skulls around I decided one of them had been up there long enough to die and decompose - also clipped her leg off and used a couple of bits of plastic rod to make shin bones. The purple on the heavy flamers, and the gold around their barrels, is a concession to rules (not that I'm ever going to use this thing on the tabletop - my enthusiasm for playing 40k's waning in any case, regardless of how much I still enjoy modelling and painting), to pretend that chaos magic is causing the flamers to behave just like excruciator cannons. I chose Argent Shroud and Valorous Heart for the orders of the 'gunners' based on colours - I wanted to do the Argent Shroud's bare metal paintjob, and since she's therefore got red on her gun casing and the lining of her robe I didn't want red on the other sister, so it wouldn't look like they were a matching pair somehow - that ruled out Bloody Rose, I'd already done Martyred Lady on the chaos spawn's base, Ebon Chalice would've had the same white robes, Sacred Rose's white armour would be too similar to the chaos sisters, and that left Valorous Heart.

If we're being honest, I got pretty tired of painting this thing well before it was finished - its size and complexity, plus the totally different colour schemes of Val and her two gunners plus the Bad Moons stuff on the base, made it feel like a long slog to actually be making progress towards completion, and on top of that not having the crawler based meant I was hanving to just hold it while I was painting it, which was inconvenient, and slightly painful given all the spikes. (I did try putting some padding on the inner edges of a painting stand and clamping them around the rear leg, but it just snapped off given how much the rest of the mini was wobbling around while I was turning it this way and that to paint, and I couldn't see any way to more securely attach it to a handle.) I don't regret the job - and once it was done, the next evening I was happily back to painting the bunch of regular minis I'd set aside to focus on this, so it hasn't burned me out on painting as a hobby or anything - but I won't be attempting anything this size again.

I'm not familiar with the base model, but the final result is pretty cool. I can see how one would get tired of painting it, though, especially given just how much of the model is white.

The white was actually another one of those 'lazy with good results' parts, just Apothecary White contrast, then a single pass of lining the panel edges next to the trim - that took a while, but it was the first step of painting so I hadn't had time to get tired of it by then, whereas by the time I got to putting all the gold on, which is roughly the same amount of work as lining the white, I was pretty over it. I feel like the worst part was how many parts of the model got in each other's way, al the legs being bunched together, the 'turrets' making the sides difficult to get to and vice versa - while I'm fairly content with my current 'screw vehicles (not like that)' policy, I doubt a Rhino would frustrate me the same way - at least not unless I went wild converting it with extra bits, which I would, because what'd be the point of doing a Rhino if it wasn't some crazy conversion...

(If I did have to though, I'd definitely use the Night Shift trick of drilling a hole through the bottom of the tank where nobody'd ever see it and supergluing a bolt onto the inside, so it could be screwed onto my little camera tripod as a painting handle. I did think of doing that with the venomcrawler, but there's no flat 'bottom' to it that'd be invisible once based to drill a big ugly hole into, and the body's in halves cut vertically so it'd be a pain to get a bolt secured inside it anyway.)

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
. . . while I'm fairly content with my current 'screw vehicles (not like that)' policy, . . .

If it truly is not like that, you should perhaps not put genitalia on all of your vehicles?

It's a cool conversion, though. Lots of different things going on that all work together.

W H O A

Bravo on another crazy conversion giving life to a twisted mockery of Imperial morality And also putting the rather bleh venomcrawler to good use, extensive upgrades and all.

 DJJazzyJeff wrote:

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
. . . while I'm fairly content with my current 'screw vehicles (not like that)' policy, . . .

If it truly is not like that, you should perhaps not put genitalia on all of your vehicles?

It's just this one... of a total of one vehicles I've made (not counting Doomrider's bike). I did have this idea for a Rhino with a, let's say, 'fleshy' front deployment hatch that'd be literally giving birth to troops, but luckily that'd require a lot more custom sculpting than I'm capable of, so that's not going to happen.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Bravo on another crazy conversion giving life to a twisted mockery of Imperial morality

Thanks

So, getting Saint Valerie finished let me get back to work on all the half-finished minis I'd put aside in the meantime, so here's this weekend's batch:



Three of them obviously first assembled right after I put together Formerly Sister Misericordia and had spare spawn parts lying around - not much to say about them, although for the dismembered space marine arm (a leftover 2nd edition plastic arm from when they used to be used on metal marine bodies) as usual I went back to the Rogue Trader chapter gallery and picked the old logo of the Fire Hawks, who nowadays seem to have a fairly mundane phoenix kind of symbol in place of their old delightfully war punk mushroom cloud. The shoulder icon on the three-headed legionary is from Realm of Chaos's 'dictionary' of chaos runes, and does indeed mean "multiple heads". And on the far left, another of those blind-boxed marines, with my usual workaround to using loyalist minis without all the spiky trim that she's still mutating into her 'proper' armour - Lamenters in this case, I'd seen a youtube video (Miniscape, if you're curious) about how to paint a Lamenters shoulder pad and wanted to give it a try, under the comforting assurance I'd only ever have to do it once. The video actually recommended drawing on the initial grid with a fine-tipped marker, but I didn't have one handy, so I just painted the whole thing - can't decide if that counts as laziness or the opposite.

And in the middle my new field commander of the 2000pt 10th edition army list I'm working on, Eternalia the Luscious - my compromise between Lucius the Eternal being the only thing that makes an Emperor's Children army Emperor's Children nowadays (not that I'm expecting to use Lucy's Noise-Marines-as-Battleline rule, since I've only got a handful of Noise Marines and half of them are old metal minis I don't want to be carrying around to battles, but it's the principle of the thing), and Lucius's miniature being butt-ugly. So she's got a stabby thing (old Possessed arm) and whippy thing (Escher flail on the hilt of the mini's original chainaxe) to replicate the wargear loadout, and I put her up on that big skull so she stands out as the force's leader - which'll probably mean she'll have trouble getting behind cover, but nobody ever said Slaanesh was sensible. She's far from flawless, but given her status I took my time to paint her as well as I'm capable, and I'm pretty proud of the result. My favourite bit's actually the bolter on the base - an old 2nd edition one with its stock still attached, painted to match the Blood Angel captain on the 2nd edition game box.

I've been having a glance back through this thread, and noticed since I like to post groups and themes rather than just every mini as soon as it's finished, I'd missed out on a few - so here they are:



From the left, the fourth recipient of parts from that one Dread Pageant goat mutant mini, in this case the head - filed the face of a helmet flat to create somewhere to mount it on all hunched forward like that. Next, the only thing I could really think of to use that giant hair daemonette head, this was actually put together way back during the Helpers painting contest, but I got fixated on the warpsmith and decided not to split my attention, so I finished this one off later. Haven't repainted her skirts to pink yet, I've got a bunch of minis on the go (as always) so refitting old ones is a low priority. Next a couple of Noise Marines - the original (the actual metal original, not the similarly posed plastic version), and a 2nd edition metal. I really like the 'avalanche of colour' look for Noise Marines, so if we do get an Emperor's Children codex and it's Noise Marine Everything, I'll probably keep using the basic CSM list just because I can't make myself paint these things in bulk. That's a current-style resin Noise Marine head on the 2nd edition one, I saved the oldhammer head for another piece I'm working on. And lastly, a random idea I had after I got the Amazon Blood Bowl team for parts and started playing around - the Amazon head on a Legionary body looked quite striking so I painted her as an original Emperor's Child, with just the one white shoulder pad showing allegiance to the Bringers of Wonder. She'd be post-fall, obviously, with all the spiky trim, but not one of the rabid pastels-and-guitar-guns crowd - I like to see Slaanesh as the whole spectrum of 'to hell with anyone else, do what YOU want', and she wants to keep wearing purple and gold because it looked amazing the whole time.

(Incidentally that last one also shows the different between my current and old base styles - I used to paint the base dark purple then drybrush some highlights onto it before applying the sparkle paint, now I just slop on Shyish Purple contrast paint directly over the wraithbone base coat then put on the glitter.

September's contest entry, Aurora, covering all three bases: big guns, big biceps, and shooting miniature suns.



Although put a question mark on what actually comes out of the gun - since cultists can't have plasma guns I decided the gun's so busted that it just belches out unfocused gouts of plasma with the same effect as a flamer. Not that I plan to play any 40k any time soon (I got tired of 9th as it was wrapping up, and haven't felt any need to try 10th), but it's fun to have the rules as a structure to work within and find unexpected solutions to. The idea of the gun being super busted (which also probably explains why it hadn't been confiscated by a legionary) gave me the idea to go heavy on the wear and rust, which I don't normally get to do given how the Bringers love their immaculate shiny armour - I thought it'd be fun to have this gun start off as an old school red casing 2nd edition weapon that got captured and never repaired since then. Not that I'm very precise with the chipped paint and rust effects, but it was a fun little project, and also ended up giving me the idea to paint the plasma canister on the backpack blue with a little Ultramarine logo, and similarly beat up. I also painted a couple of the plasma coils (or whatever they are) dark grey after the usual white coat before drybrushing on their 'glow', to make it look like they'd burned out - went with a blue glow rather than the usual green to further reinforce that the gun's salvaged, rather than from the Bringers' own armoury. I remember the first time I painted this miniature, back in Necromunda's first run, enjoying how drybrushing picked out all the little details on the backpack, although back then I just did the whole thing brown - this time I wanted more of a 'random assortment of gear' look, and since she's a Slaaneshi cultist, the rope is red to look like bondage rope, the two cylinders above the plasma pack got painted black and flesh to look like dildos, and the spanner got red tips to look like a miniature cattle prod. Since she's got a plasma gun, regardless of how barely functional it is, she presumably has a bit of status among the cultists, so I gave her a mix of the grimy brown clothes the regular cultists have and a few more colourful bits - the lozenge 'camo' pattern on her boot is a recreation of the pattern I used for my Eschers back in the day, although theirs was black on white.

It only occurred to me while I was painting that the cables from the gun are probably supposed to plug into the end of the backpack canister, but I guess I didn't realise that when I first put her together, and since her old paint wasn't a thick coat I just resprayed her as-is rather than disassembling and stripping her. I guess the cables are all wired into the unseen side of the canister somehow instead.

You did a great job on this nifty model. I like all the naughty little details you added to tie her in with the rest of your army (warband? team?). The plasma glow is quite effective-- I can never seem to do that sort of OSL to my own satisfaction.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
You did a great job on this nifty model. I like all the naughty little details you added to tie her in with the rest of your army (warband? team?). The plasma glow is quite effective-- I can never seem to do that sort of OSL to my own satisfaction.

Thanks I tend to use 'warband' just because that's how Realm of Chaos called it, even though they were mainly referring to the WFB side of things - the Bringers probably think of themselves as a 'blessed host' or something, but then again they probably change it five times a day as the whim takes them, so no sense trying to keep up.

The glow's nothing fancy, but I'll run it down in case it's any help - it's basically just a gentle drybrush, in this case pale blue, with the plasma coils painted pure white beforehand. I've got a couple of nice brushes I use for proper painting, but for drybrushing and slopping in contrast paints and inks and so on I just get packs of cheap brushes from the local $2 shop and replace them once they get ratty - for a small area like that I use one of them that's about 2mm wide, and wipe virtually everything off before I drybrush so it takes quire a few passes before any real colour starts showing up. The 'glow' is just a matter of not being careful about where the edges of the brush are, the only part of the glow I brushed on by itself on this one was on the boob closest to the coils.

Actually got the technique, if it counts as one, from doing it by accident on Doomrider's plasma pistol - my plan was drybrush the colour onto the coils then paint the pistol's casing afterwards, so I didn't have to be careful of the edges, but after the drybrushing I quite liked the effect, and since the pistol's base colour was the volupous pink I'd done the whole mini in on step one, I figured it was fine to just leave him with a pink gun. I've got some more glows planned for this month's mini, which may need more actual painting to make work, we'll just have to see in time how that turns out.

Not technically part of the warband, but in the same sub-canon (and they'd probably fancy her anyway, skull and all) - this month's contest entry, a Sister Superior of the Martyred Order:



To recap how we ended up here in a bit more detail than I did in the contest thread, obviously I started out thinking Legion of the Damned, but I couldn't find a suitable mini - the new set of blind-boxed loyalist marines aren't being sold at GW stores (apparently they're intended for newsagents and third party stores, but I don't think anyone's told them), and aside from the old 2nd edition monopose plastic tacticals I don't have unpainted non-spiky marines just lying around, so I got to thinking about alternatives, and 'Order of the Damned' popped into my head, which seems a lot more me anyway. The skull-headed sister corpse on the Venomcrawler is the obvious inspiration for the conversion - since the skulls don't have necks I just used a krak grenade I'd clipped off something or other from the bits box, since it's small and basically round; probably could've done with clipping it a bit shorter, but 40k mini scale is so wonky anyway I think it's fine even with the head a bit higher than it ought to be compared to a regular Sororitas mini. The original plan for painting was to go classic LotD, with bones painted on the armour - I filed off the fleur-de-lys on the knee and backpack to make room - and the flames on the skirt and sleeves, but I had second thoughts: since the weapons are so much more prominent on this mini than a marine's boltgun I wanted to try something a bit special for them, and the memory of JoshInJapan's Burning Men from a couple of months previously popped up, so I painted the sword and gun (and the various holy icons and the wings on the left shoulder) got upgraded to 'made of hellfire', following roughly the same technique I used for the glowing hot autocannon a little while back. Having done that I thought it'd be a bit much to add the flames on the cloth pieces as well, so they got ditched - and then looking at the mini it occurred to me that it'd really only be her shin that could have a decently-sized bone painted on it, since everything else was either covered by skirts or so small and obscured that it'd just look like bone-coloued lines of paint - so I left her alone, on the basis that having a bare skull is close enough. For the belts and holster and scabbard I used whatever that charcoaly black paint is, just so I could say I'd painted them something other than the base coat, and the metal that's not glowing - buckles, buttons on the skirts, and the pistol hilt - I did in dark copper, since I didn't want everything metal on her glowing hot. Back when I was planning a more classic Legion of the Damned look I went through the PDFs I definitely don't have of old White Dwarf issues and printed out the original LotD article with its art for inspiration, and their Rogue Traderish punk graffiti look, with things like 'born to die' written on them, inspired the 'no rest' on her backpack (since I'd filed it flat and had to put something there); originally I was thinking 'no respite' but I can't paint that small.

I haven't really nailed down the lore of how we ended up with the Martyred Order exactly, but given the miracle wackiness than normal Sororitas get up to, it's probably just the result of a bunch of them being outnumbered a zillion to one in battle and praying really hard while in a bad mood during their last stand, and became kind of daemons but on the Emperor's side, they just appear out of nowhere in the middle of battles that have already degenerated into raw butchery (even by 40k standards) and get stuck in. I won't be painting any more, since it'd just be doing the same thing over and over (and I can't even be bothered playing normal games of 40k, I'm not touching that miracle system with a ten foot space pole) but I fancied the idea of painting this one as if she's part of an army, so she got a different base style to the Bringers - no glitter, and blue drybrushing over black to look suitably midnighty. The little terrain piece was left over from the Venomcrawler, used to be attached to one of its legs - having the Sister with one foot up on it meant her boots weren't quite flat to the base, but that was nothing a whole lot of plastic cement couldn't sort out.

This is a really cool army. Love the use of space hulk terminators!

The Damned Sister looks really good-- I think you nailed to red-hot glow on the accessories. I feel like the bolter and sword might benefit from a more extreme gradient- close to black- as you get away from the hottest section near the core, to really sell the internal heat.

 PaddyMick wrote:
This is a really cool army. Love the use of space hulk terminators!

Thanks. Space Hulk was my first GW game, so naturally there's a lot of nostalgia there. I don't know if I'll be adding any more of the old plastics to the warband (unless I think up some new way to use one, besides just 'paint it chaos like the last one'), but I've got a squad of five unconverted gen one plastic Terminators waiting for paint at the moment, which I'm planning to do as classic Space Hulk v1 Blood Angels just for old times' sake.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
The Damned Sister looks really good-- I think you nailed to red-hot glow on the accessories. I feel like the bolter and sword might benefit from a more extreme gradient- close to black- as you get away from the hottest section near the core, to really sell the internal heat.

Thanks. Yeah I think you're right about the weapons - the bolter in particular, if I had it to do again, I'd drybrush up to orange then repaint the outer shell dark orange, crevices and all, and start drybrushing darker from there. Never mind though, live and learn.

As usual for completeness's sake, November's contest entry, Terminator Lord Obsidia:





Based on, initially, finding one lonely issue of Warhammer Imperium in a newsagent with a single Kataphron Destroyer - I hadn't thought of doing anything with any Mechanicus parts, but no way I was passing up a sprue full of interesting parts I didn't already have, and fond memories of an old 80s B-movie called Eliminators featuring a tank-treaded 'mandroid' naturally led to this. Given the bulk of the thing I decided this'd fill a 'Terminator Lord' spot I had open on my 1500 point 'goal list' (I've kind of abandoned any intention of playing games - a mix of it being awkward to move minis around on public transport, and honestly I don't enjoy the actual gameplay much anyway - but the list is a nice bit of structure to work with), which in turn meant the weapons would be a combi-weapon and chainfist. I decided to take 'chainfist' literally, using a chainsword arm from the old Possessed set, and for the combi-weapon it occurred to me that now they're all just 'combi-weapons' there's no reason one barrel always has to be a bolter - so this'll probably become illegal once Codex Chaos rolls around and GW backtracks on that dumb idea, but like I said, not playing anyway, who cares. I tried a bit of an orange-red-purple gradient on the melta barrel for heat damage, but it didn't really show very well - I was using contrast paints, I might try it again just with regular paints next time I have a meltagun.

I'd recently gone through the Chaos Rhino set (I decided I couldn't be bothered painting a vehicle, so I kept the bits I thought I'd find a use for - leaving enough to still credibly decorate a Chaos Rhino - and donated the set to my local games group to be someone else's problem) so those parts were handy - I actually didn't notice the Mechanicus symbols on the sides of the tracks until I'd glued it all together, so those got hastily filed flat and had those hound heads stuck over top of them, which turned out to be decent mounting points for the Rhino trophy spikes I'd been having trouble finding somewhere to attach. The skulls on those are actually a bit chunkier than the ones on the regular Terminator spikes, but maybe those are Astartes skulls, and the smaller ones are from Guard colonels or whatever. The Tau helmet didn't turn out the way I'd hoped - obviously I wanted the classic 3rd edition Tau but I haven't needed that faded orange in my palette yet, so I tried to improvise using brownish skin tones and brighter highlights, then since it wasn't really working decided to just call it a different colour scheme and did the 'eye' and antenna white in case that looked interesting, then gave up and just slopped some purple 'blood' over it hide it a bit and moved on. It's not very clean but I'm happier with the marine helmet, done as a Rogue Trader era Raptor Legion (back before they became massive Halo fans, I assume from their 'modern' look).

Given the way the 'waist' of the Kataphron's sunk down between the front of the tracks the mini actually ended up a bit short compared to regular Terminators, so I decided to cheat my way out of that problem by bulking up the base - after a quick look around I remembered the leftovers of the box of Necrons I got to do chaos androids (squad of six, naturally, so four left over) and went for a kind of reverse James Cameron look of a human (technically) rolling over a pile of machine skeletons. Speaking of the treads, I decided to paint the inner wheels with grey rims, which I gather is what actual tanks have (from watching Night Shift videos) - bit silly to be going for realism at this point, but hey, why not? The tentacle was added last, both to fill in the visual gap left by the chassis rearing up over the Necron pile (and obscure the boring underside), and because I hadn't used it on the Venomcrawler, since the other tentacle had already been used in a prior conversion and I didn't want to have half the pair there. The pointy tip, plus the horns on the helmet, got painted as flesh because, well, Slaanesh.



And of course the Botticelli on the shoulder - that wasn't planned at all, I just needed to think of something to put there (since the Bringers of Wonder don't have a standard warband symbol, they all have their own individual thing, because they're all raging egotists) and 100+ minis in I'm low on ideas for doing the Slaanesh symbol in different ways, so the first random idea that pops up is what I do; in this case I've got a Birth of Venus action figure (yes really) still waiting for me to unbox her, so that was in my line of sight. Like the cover of Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness on the Hospitaller's book, it was really just a matter of getting splotches of roughly the right colours in roughly the right place, but given my ability I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The only thing I'd prefer to have different would be for the background to not be so close to the grey-white armour colour, so it's more a case of edge-to-edge art on the shoulder pad, but that's (roughly) the colour the sea and sky are in the painting; I went over the sky with a pale blue but it's very close to the grey armour, and for the sea I just sketched in some hints of the shadows of the waves in a darker grey. I like the idea of classic art on the shoulder pads - it seems a very Emperor's Children thing to do, in hindsight I feel like even their pre-Heresy colours should've been less 'purple and gold' and more 'entirely covered in fancy artwork', so that's something I'll do more of (which may or may not end up looking a lot like I'm recreating the gallery from Animal Crossing).

nice

Smart conversion, I want some destroyer tracks to mess with the more I see them used for nefarious chaos deeds. ...

Thanks folks

Finally finished the gen one Obliterator, so I took a family photo with its descendants:



I don't know that the 'just made of flesh and bone' idea worked that well - sound in theory, but I feel like the sculpt was really fighting me the whole way, with all its obvious riveted panels. Still, I think those things look rubbish painted as metal (even the old Eavy Metal photos, no matter how good the painters were) - I kind of wound up liking the detail-heavy sculpt, once I'd put some contrast paint on and could actually see the detail, but I think the only way to really bring that out would've been doing the whole thing non-metallic metal, and I'm just not up for that on a sculpt that's so complicated and that, honestly, I still only half-like. So yeah, she looks like she's maybe made of a combination of wet sand and play-doh, but never mind, one thing it's not is normal, and that's good enough for me.

very nice

Thanks

He's not technically a member of the Bringers of Wonder, but I imagine he works for them on occasion (I first put him together back when 'mercenaries' was among the voting options a few months back, but left him unpainted since it didn't get up) - from 1987's Space Pirates line by Iron Claw (they were a kind of boutique offshoot of Citadel that eventually got re-absorbed), Dambo Kweltz:



My idea for the base was that this guy's survived all ten editions by being 40k's answer to Chuck Norris - and hence, the reason he'll even work with Sylelle and her mad little carnival of degenerates is that he's seen so much dren that every horror the 41st Millennium has to offer is just another paycheque to him. So naturally I dug into the bits box (both old and new drawers - it's a little makeup organiser set of clear plastic drawers) for parts of fallen foes. Since I used to have a Dark Eldar army back in 3rd there's naturally an abundance of their odds and ends: the jetbike fuselage (just the top part, it's hollow at the back, but this guy's just to go on a shelf so I don't have to worry about what it looks like from the back) got the black with gold edges of the default Kabal in the original 3rd edition Codex Dark Eldar, while the bike-mounted blaster cannon's red colour scheme is kind of extrapolated from an Archon with a red bike in that codex; the underslung weapon was actually black on that model, but I wanted a variety of colours on the wreckage, so I changed it up. Just peeking out from behind the barrel-spikes of the blaster cannon you can see the tip of a jetbike scythe, in dark silver with the housing painted purple, from my own old Kabal, the Lost Souls, and failing anything earlier (they seemed to only have one Incubus ready to be photographed in that first codex) I went with the ghostly green colour scheme GW seemed to settle on for the Dark Eldar later in 3rd. The old shuriken catapult's likewise one of my armies, the craftworld Zaran, whose farseer is Syl's recurring nemesis and does not fantasise about her, thank you very much, stop asking. Most of the other junk is just a random assortment of armies - the Venomcrawler leg painted to match the box photos, the chainsword in a dark red scheme I saw in one of the chaos codices (I forget which now, probably 3rd), the old metal Terminator banner pole in Ultramarine blue, and the Falcon antenna from Iyanden (it was originally Saim-Hann, but I decided there was too much red on the various pieces). The Necron big gun's a new one, yet another leftover from that box I got to make chaos androids, but I tried to paint it similar to the original Necron scheme from that issue of White Dwarf that came with a free Warrior, so the tip of the barrel's glowing green as well as the bits on the side, and I did the red light in the bayonet to echo the red targeter on the Warrior's rifle.

For Dambo himself I pulled out the White Dwarf Compendium and looked at the colours on the original Imperial Guard in that, copying the brown spats over black boots (his feet got kind of sunk into the terrain, but the toes and heels are black - not actually intended to have spats like the Guard, but the boots are so wrinkly that there were folds to use as the 'edges' of the spats), gold armour (shoulder rather than cuirass though), bare metal helmet with a coloured stripe, and the red coat I took from the red jackets worn by the Penitent troopers; my backstory for Dambo is he deserted, got captured, wound up in a penitent brigade, but managed to relieve himself of his explosive collar and deserted again, properly this time. Since his autorifle is so obviously just the M-16 that was every schoolboy's idea of what a soldier carried back in the 80s, I went full retro on that with a wooden stock and grip. The base is the usual Shyish Purple, but I deliberately left off the glitter paint - he fights alongside the Bringers, but he's got no use for sorcery, just cold hard cash. Along with the RTB01 marine now serving as a legionary, Dambo's the oldest mini in my warband - for the moment, In my 'waiting for paint' box I've got a modern daemonette riding a chaos steed that was actually Elrond's warhorse from Citadel's 1985 Middle Earth range.

So after that Terminator Lord with the Botticelli, and the earlier Sister Dialogus with Slaves to Darkness kinda counts as well, I've been having fun with this whole 'tiny art' thing:



If nothing else, it keeps me from having to think up yet another variation on the Slaanesh symbol for everyone's shoulders, or trying to do lines thin enough to look like text on a scroll.

First up, my Balefire Tome bearer (the actual book's nothing to brag about, but it was a free mini of the month, so I was doing the conversion in the GW store and lacking the bright desklamps I have at home to help my tired old eyes see fine detail I didn't fancy trying to file the pages flat without ruining the piece outright, so I just painted the runes as best I could; the main thing is it stands out on the tabletop), with that Berzerker Terminator from 2nd ed Codex Chaos that's now the Warhammer+ gift mini. Why would a Slaaneshi Legionary have a Khorne worshipper on her shoulder? Pick a fetish where one partner's aggressive, any of them could apply. As usual, since I couldn't get rid of the Imperial eagle on the chestplate, I just painted it as if it's the Legionary's former chapter - the original Minotaurs in this case, with their super-Rogue Trader quartered and striped red and yellow.

Next, another of those Blood Coven witch elves or whatever they are, refitted as one of my chaos sisters - that head's the one meant to be pulling a grenade pin with her teeth (which I remember reading is a really stupid thing to try to do and will likely just result in losing a bunch of teeth, but I guess if Battle Sisters believe hard enough that they can do it, it works out fine), so I attached the tip of a spare milliput tentacle to hide the shape of her mouth; didn't quite manage to file off all of the grenade pin, so I painted what was left as if it's a stray bit of hair, it's okay at tabletop distance. I actually had this one fully painted except the scroll for ages since I wasn't sure what to do with it, then having done the Botticelli Terminator I was in an art mood and decided there can't be any holier relic (or unholy, works both ways) than the book that created the universe. Normally I paint any purity seals that end up on my minis black with purple seals, but Rogue Trader gets a proper seal.

Next, what was supposed to be my Balefire Tome bearer, because I swear I checked the data card to see if the Tome replaces the boltgun or is an add-on, but on double-checking (after doing the conversion), yeah, it replaces the boltgun - so this book's just a Chaos Icon now. I went for The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (y'know, the lady with the octopuses) - the original, or at least the one on wikipedia which I assume is the original, is spread across two pages as well so it seemed appropriate, although with these pages being much squarer, and the bookmark or whatever taking up a chunk of space, the woman's torso actually wound up a lot longer than it should be, but never mind. Fun fact (I only learned this while looking it up for reference), according to the text on the artwork (which is way too small for me to try replicating, but it's all over the 'black' space on the pages) the lady's not unwilling and in fact is super enthusiastic, so that's good I guess, but the octopus duo are a father octopus and son octopus, which... does that make it more weird, or is having an octopus go down on you already across some threshold of 'weird' where any further kinks just don't move the needle any more? Also wondering if Hokusai knew they have beaks, that seems less than ideal. Anyway, I hadn't really planned to go fancy on the shoulder as well, but it was blank and I was on a roll, so on a whim I googled up the cover to a volume of Paolo Serpieri's Morbis Gravis, which isn't very recognisable since the monochrome-with-yellow-highlights background is hardly distinctive at this scale, but regardless it's a naked lady, that's appropriate for a Slaaneshi Legionary. (Druuna, the protagonist, isn't actually naked on that cover, but there's no way I could paint a skimpy g-string at this scale, and it's not like she doesn't get naked constantly anyway.)

And finally a flamer Legionary (who was actually a plasma gun Legionary but I've already got a plasma gun in the ranks and I didn't think just putting a different Legionary head on was enough of a conversion to count as 'changed'), whose shoulder is the Nintendo Switch home screen icon for Gris, a five-stages-of-grief platformer I've just recently been playing. By which I mean, the areas you progress through are themed after the five stages of grief, not that the games makes you experience the five stages of grief just by playing it - that'd be Celeste (which is also wonderful, but hard).

Heh that "subtle" tongue on the girl, you really seem to be having fun making all your colorful creations.
I think thats the most important, to envision something and make it work.

I'll never understand people that just build something the way its shown on the box and then color it the way its shown on the box.


Anyway, you using any tyranid parts?

Particularly well painted set this time around, tiny art for sure but also in general. Blood Coven conversion aka Tongue Girl takes it for me

Wow, these are superbs ! And the art recreations are really well executed, congrats friend !

Do you have other tiny artworks in mind for future projects?

I would be interesting to see how certain works would translate down to this scale. Like how would pointillism work? Impressionist and expressionist works should do fine. Would you be able to get a Rothko or a Pollack though? I know those hit completely different in person on canvas vs. the small images in art textbooks.


Always fun to see what you are painting. Keep the the great work.

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
Heh that "subtle" tongue on the girl, you really seem to be having fun making all your colorful creations.
I think thats the most important, to envision something and make it work.

I'll never understand people that just build something the way its shown on the box and then color it the way its shown on the box.


Anyway, you using any tyranid parts?

Twice so far, not counting genestealer bits - I've never collected nids myself so I don't have parts spare, but since I started converting the free minis of the month, whatever they are, I've wound up with these two:


No idea what that Termagant-Steed would count as - Accursed Cultist possibly, and just pretend it's too insane to aim the pistol so it counts as a melee attack because that's the only time it'd hit anything - but I'm quite fond of the Hormagaunt-Daemonette (I've named her Hormagaunt Replacement Therapy), I like the sense of motion in her pose, like the old Juan Diaz daemonettes. Plus I keep the leftover bits - the termagant head's on a spike on one of the Chosen's backpack, but there's still the hormagaunt head and torso and its little abdomen-limbs in the bits box which could turn up on something. And the termagant's lower legs come to think of it, wouldn't be difficult to graft those onto a daemonette or a cultist or something.

I used to do a little 'canonical' painting back in the day - I've still got an Eldrad Ulthran and Kharn the Betrayer (the first versions of them) that I followed the Eavy Metal colours on, since they're specific people and that's what they look like (apart from Kharn, I had blood gushing out of the mouth of the skull on his belt; didn't really look that good though) - and last year I did an old metal Terminator just like the box art for Space Hulk first edition, for a retro painting contest. Special characters aside I did always do my own homebrew armies though, and I feel like chaos really invites it. Plus everything being plastic makes it so easy.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Particularly well painted set this time around, tiny art for sure but also in general. Blood Coven conversion aka Tongue Girl takes it for me

I'll let her know

 KernelTerror wrote:
Wow, these are superbs ! And the art recreations are really well executed, congrats friend !

Thanks

 Nevelon wrote:
Do you have other tiny artworks in mind for future projects?

I would be interesting to see how certain works would translate down to this scale. Like how would pointillism work? Impressionist and expressionist works should do fine. Would you be able to get a Rothko or a Pollack though? I know those hit completely different in person on canvas vs. the small images in art textbooks.

I wouldn't say I really 'plan' anything much, but since my fine detail brush is still cooperating (until it degrades to the point where I have to get a new one, and then spend time getting used to it) and chaos marines have blank shoulder pads to fill, I'll keep doing mini-art. I don't really have a very comprehensive art background, beyond completing the museum collection in Animal Crossing, so the choices will remain just a random selection of whatever first occurred to me, or popped up when I started googling random words, when I got to that part of the mini - for instance yesterday I finished off a Havoc Aspiring Champion, and decorated her shoulder with a teensy recreation of a publicity photo of Vasquez from Aliens with her M56 smartgun, because obviously a Havoc would revere her, and my plan for the loincloth on my second plastic Obliterator (converted to a Noise Marine) is to try to recreate the cover of Oblivion by D-Rok, as best I can with the cloth being narrow and tattered and folded over. But I've also got Leda and the Swan saved in my ipad for reference next time I have a marine on the table and don't have any other ideas, so there's really no telling what'll crop up.

I hadn't planned to, but this weekend I turned out another part-Tyranid Slaaneshi, so I figured I'd gather them up for a family photo:



That's the torso of the Hormagaunt (arms and legs on the left), forming the head of my newest Possessed, who incidentally completes the squad of five. And since it's the first time I cracked open the new Possessed box, she's the only one with the right size base, but I never pay attention to base sizes anyway. Pretty happy with how the eyes (from the Spawn sprue) turned out, I tried to speckle them to give a suggestion of compound eyes, and at tabletop distance it's not bad.

This month's contest entry, and the founding member of whatever my gals' bikie gang will be called (some pun based on either Raven Guard or White Scars, haven't decided yet), although I suppose in a pinch I could add in that legionary riding a Steed as well:



So that began life as yet another random issue of Warhammer Imperium I found at a newsagent - looks like the full sprue for three Outriders was split up across two issues, but the parts I had were enough for one complete bike. Even though the whole point of this is 'the chaos bikes are crazy old now' (the sprues are stamped 1999) I got sentimental and reused what I could of the old rider - torso, backpack, right arm (except the hand, the outriders have the hands moulded into the handlebars), and both shoulders; the head and left arm with mace came from the Chosen. For the bike itself, you've got pieces of the chaos bike 'windshield' plate stuck on either side of the front wheel to give it some of the old spiky metal trim, and a Warp Talon 'wing' between the bolters - I didn't realise those things came in pairs, with the spikes on top leaning off to one side, up until I came to paint this and the contrast paint showed the detail clearly I thought they were symmetrical. The 'sight' is also from the Chosen set, it's supposed to have one of the four little chaos symbols plug into it (as the squad's Chaos Icon, I assume) but I liked it open, and behind that, since the top of the Outrider's kind of sparsely detailed, I stuck on one of the plug-in plates from the Legionary backpacks. The tusks either side of the front wheel are from a spare Chaos Terminator head - what with there being extras in the set, and my doing a lot of head swaps as conversions, I've got a whole lot of spare Termi heads - and of course then there's all the trophy racks, which along with the rock outcrop on the base come from the Chaos Terminator Lord/Sorcerer set, which I've actually downgraded to just a regular Terminator (with the basic trophy racks) since I've got both my army list's Termi Lord slots filled already by conversions. I took the opportunity to paint the rider separately - the 'opportunity' being that after hacking off the Primaris torso, the waist wasn't a very clean join for the glue so it popped off when I accidentally knocked the bike over after priming it. Whatever works.


Didn't do anything much different with the paint, although for the bike I basecoated it with Apothecary White, rather than Space Wolves Grey then drybrush back up to smoky white as I normally do - I figured it'd be next to impossible to drybrush through the trophy racks on the sides of the bike, and they're so big and flat (under the spikes) that they'd stand out a mile if I just left them dark grey. As you can see there's a bit of a difference between the final hues between bike and rider, but I got to wondering if it's really that significant, so at the moment I'm painting a Terminator (the former Lord, in fact) using Apothecary, to see if that winds up close enough that I can skip the drybrush step on future Legionaries. It's not really obvious that the tyres are made from flesh, but even though the brushwork is a bit blotchy I like the effect I got from adding veins to the exhaust pipes. For the Tyranid head I tried for the default 3rd edition codex colour scheme, the skin part of it came out a bit more bone than GW's colours, but the caparace is the main thing (and you probably do lose a bit of colour from your cheeks if you get decapitated and stuck on a trophy rack on a bike). Speaking of trophies, have they ever canonically addressed why the Terminator trophy racks have those little satchels on them? I assume they've got random trinkets from fallen enemies in them, like Eldar soulstones or whatever, I just wonder what GW had in mind specifically. (Naturally my headcanon is that, on my troops, they're actually foes' scrotums - bit oversize but we all know GW scale is wonky.)



Two bits of freehand on this one - the shoulder pad is White Dwarf #5, colourised, and that's me adding the pixellation there, the actual issue just had whoever-she-is with her boobs waving about for all to see (I assume some kind of vampire lady or something?). For the tactical screen I'd already used the pornhub logo on Doomrider's screen, and couldn't think of any other way to indicate in tiny form that she's watching porn mid-battle (aside from just some random naked folks, but they'd be barely recognisable), but I randomly had the idea to do Baywatch instead (I've decided Emperor's Children are fans of the Hoff) - still a very rough approximation, even just with a single vertical line of flesh tone as each 'person' (with tall or short blobs of red to suggest trunks or swimsuits as appropriate) I still wound up with room for only six lifeguards, rather than the seven in the image I was working from; I think the beach/sea/sky colours behind them carry it well enough though.

I've still got most of two chaos bikes left though (after using one for Doomrider) - just the windshields missing, since I also used one as extra armour on Saint Valerie. I'm kind of torn between fixing up a replacement for the windshield and just having an old-style chaos bike in the warband for nostalgia's sake, or throwing the two bike chassis together with the bits from the Slaaneshi Daemons boxed set to make a bike-drawn daemonette chariot.

As great / ridiculous as the freehand art is, I can't get over the veiny exhaust pipes Great / disturbing eye for detail there!

EDIT: Looks like I never complimented you on how well the gaunt legs work for that daemonette, or how kaiju-tastic the gaunt body is as that possessed's head

Nice bike

 Boss Salvage wrote:
As great / ridiculous as the freehand art is, I can't get over the veiny exhaust pipes Great / disturbing eye for detail there!

EDIT: Looks like I never complimented you on how well the gaunt legs work for that daemonette, or how kaiju-tastic the gaunt body is as that possessed's head

Thanks. That daemonette is a bit of a favourite - I even had a look at the hormagaunt set to see how well it'd work for more of them, but turns out most of them don't have the semi-upright stance the free-mini-of-the-month one did, I don't think they'd take to a humanoid torso that well. Fun fact about those exhausts, I did briefly contemplate having, well, let's just say 'a white substance' spraying out the back, I'd like to say I decided against it out of good taste, but in fact it was that there's so little base behind the bike there wouldn't be room for an exhaust trail that looked like it'd been expelled at speed, it'd have just looked like it was dribbling down onto the ground directly below the exhaust as if it was stationary.

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
Nice bike

Thanks

So, this month's painting contest space marine - to recap, during February I was browsing through a PDF of the Book of the Astronomicon and noticed 'Brother Lustgarten' on one of the ad pages (fifth row, far right):

Naturally the name caught my attention, and on googling I found out that the same mini had originally been advertised as 'Brother Quiff', so that was enough for me to ditch my previous idea for March (I picked up that 'armour through the ages' made-to-order a while back and haven't painted any of them yet) and bring Brother Quiff out of obscurity and into the present.



Primaris Lieutenant as the basic miniature, with hair grafted on from a daemonette - I didn't initially mean to go that big with the hair, I was thinking more something along the lines of the original mini's battle mullet, but I spotted the head in my bits box and now here we are; the hair's actually flowing sideways on the daemonette, but once she'd been scalped that wasn't an issue, although getting the top/back of the Lieutenant's head in just the right shape to line up with the hair without big obvious gaps was a bit of a struggle; I ended up favouring the left side for lining up the pieces since it's the viewing angle of the mini, so the right's a bit off, but never mind. Despite all the weapon options in the Lieutenant set I stuck to the basic bolter on Quiff's original mini. So that was a long wait through February to get started on him - although I put the time to good use, I've gotten back to working on my Sonic Obliterator, and now I've largely solved the 'what colour is that bit going to be?' issue that was stalling me I might be finishing that in the next couple of months.

That is a Bringers of Wonder helmet on the base, I decided they'd be honoured to be killed by Brother Quiff (and probably masochistically get off on being killed anyway) - although I do wonder how exactly the back of the helmet's got room to be buried like that since presumably the stone eagle continues underground... I don't have a lot of dusty paint colours - not a lot of call for them with Slaanesh - so I made do with various dark flesh tones instead. For Quiff himself, besides the blue-with-red-stripes hair from the original (I slimmed the red down to just a single stripe on each side) I got out my 3rd edition Space Marine codex with its Crimson Fists cover art as a guide, although the chest wings on those were quite bright, which I initially copied, but then decided I liked the steel look on other depictions of the Fists' chest wings, and darkened the white back down with a coat of Space Wolves Grey contrast. But the 3rd ed codex provided the green laurel wreath (on the lead marine's chestplate on the art) instead of the gold used on the Primaris Lieutenant's promo photos, the fist-with-lightning-bolts army badge on the left knee (it's on another chest plate on the codex), and just visible on one marine on the cover, the troop type icon being a pale blue outline, rather than the same kind of red-icon-inside-a-red-circle design as the chapter logo - I thought the different style would be more fun, and also given the name badge (which I just barely managed to get his name onto) there's not a lot of room left on the right shoulder. On the occasions when I've been painting Primaris minis in loyalist colours (either half-converted marines, or captives) I've been using grey plus a black wash for the underlying bodysuit, rather than the bronze-plus-agrax I do on my Legionaries, to make them different and a little more advances - in this case I decided to extend that to all 'metal' areas, so the techy bits of the backpack, the bionic eye (neatly echoing the original mini's eyepatch), and the underside of the bolter, with a light grey highlight (which I don't bother with on the bodysuit) to make them stand out a little - so kind of accidentally my first real effort at non-metallic metal, and I think it turned out pretty well.

So that was a lot of fun - as was a White Consul I did not long ago, I'll show him off here sometime when I get around to it - and as a result, I've been thinking it'd be nice to paint some more classic chapters, just as one-offs; I'm kind of thinking it'd be more satisfying if each one was a particular character (not necessarily a canon character, just each mini having a particular 'thing' that defines it, like Quiff here recreating the old mini), so future loyalist minis may have to wait for individual inspirations to strike, rather than just me buying a box of Primaris Interocitors or whatever the hell they're calling Tacticals nowadays and doing each a different colour, but I expect more loyalist marines will turn up in time.

As I've mentioned before, back in 2nd/3rd edition I played loyalist marines, the Furies chapter - and having just said I wouldn't go buy a box of Primaris marines just because Brother Quiff was fun, I went and bought a box of Primaris marines, and among other concepts (which I'll post when they're done) I had an idea: what if I painted one as a Furies marine, but starting from scratch inventing the colour scheme anew, rather than just copying my 90s colours (which were red because I started painting the 2nd edition tacticals as Blood Angels to go with my Space Hulk Terminators, then decided I wanted them to be 'mine' and painted black over the helmets to make a new chapter). So here's the result, along with the Furies. previous incarnations:



Starting from, obviously, when I got 2nd edition (which would've been 1996 or so) - I do have better examples even of the old monopose tacticals, I just picked what was obviously baby's first paint job to get the full range of 'styles' here. Not 100% sure where the backpack's gone, it may be debris on a base for one of the warband now. Next, 1998, third edition, and I'd discovered both ink washes (which accounts for the shininess, those things didn't dry matte back then) and highlighting - although at the time I didn't highlight the black casing on the boltguns, which I remember led to one of the GW staffers back then giving me a points penalty in the campaign the store was running for 'unfinished paint job', which I felt was a bit harsh. Next, early 2000s sometime, the store had a show-off-your-homebrew-chapter event, so I made a custom marine, using armour parts from a bike and an Eldar Guardian backpack, plus the high-collar 'errant' torso in the 3rd edition sprue, to make what I guess would be a heavy intercessor or something today; also tweaked the colours a bit, changing the blue eyes to red, losing the black helmet, and having bone instead of black on the shoulder trim. Next up, my entry for last year's marine month here - back to black trim, but I went with just the face of the helmet black rather than the whole thing, although mainly since with it sitting on the ground if it'd been all-black it would've looked like it belonged to someone else. I used a varnish to recreate the old ink wash gloss, and in hindsight I probably could've ditched that part, I'd done a fairly restrained set of highlights on the armour and all the reflections from the gloss obscures most of them. And yes, they were lady marines from the start, what else did you expect from me.

And finally the reboot version - black since I ditched the old Blood Angels red, although still with a bit of a crimson tinge, both as a nod to the old version, and because while the Furies are more associated with black in Greek mythology (that's what wikipedia tells me anyway), they did wear red when they showed up in Xena, and that's an important primary source too. Their old backstory was a cavalcade of heroic clichés, I imagine the reboot version would be much more akin to Legion of the Damned - they're not supernatural (or whatever the LotD are), but they do the same 'show up out of nowhere, kick ass, leave without explaining themselves to anyone' thing, with virtually nobody knowing what the deal is, except that somebody high up in the Inquisition's sealed their file and put a big 'not heretics, let them do their thing' stamp on it.

I'm absolutely not going to do an army of them though, all that edge highlighting (and the new Furies scheme has two layers of it) is even more of a chore than the spiky trim on chaos; the only way I'm getting through the Primaris box is that each of them is their own colour scheme, which helps keep it feeling somewhat fresh.

This month's contest entry for Let's Finish This - I started out with the goal of finishing nine miniatures (all in various states of progress at the start of the month) to complete my 2k list, but by the time these five were getting their final touches I was feeling a bit tired of legionary-type sculpts, and since pushing on regardless would just mean I'd start rushing just to be rid of them (and I had five minis done, which is all I needed, and they did finish off the Chosen) I called it a day and put the others aside for a later day. Anyway, here's the final five members of the Servants of Bliss, my list's 10-strong Chosen unit:



All with a head on a spike mounted on their backpack, that's how I distinguish Chosen from the regular Legionaries, since my Legionaries also have mutations and funky wargear.

Starting from the left, the obvious solution to Chosen being able to have bolters and plasma pistols at the same time, because I feel like it's okay to have a bolt pistol just chilling in a holster but a plasma pistol is Important and should be more easily visible on the mini. I'm kind of surprised that worked as well as it did, I just sliced the round top off the shoulder of the lower arm, mounted it low, and sliced the upper shoulder to fit, it's really just luck that it doesn't look more awkward. The shoulder pad has Leda and the Swan painted on it (vaguely), which seemed appropriate for Slaanesh since they'd be okay with a) lack of consent (in most versions of the tale) and b) banging an overgrown goose. The trophy helmet's a genuine RTB01 beakie, painted in the colours of the Shadow Falcons - that was a homebrew chapter that won a couple of Golden Demons in the 90s in squad categories and got featured in White Dwarf as a result, and was a really striking design, so... okay having your head stuck on a spike is kind of a backhanded compliment, but it's the thought that counts.

Next up, starting from a Possessed body - my squad of five Possessed only used one of the new ones, so I had these leftovers, and I feel like even though they're not possessed possessed, Chosen ought to have a few mutations and daemons rattling around in there since they've been in the Eye of Terror so long. It's mostly hidden in this photo but in place of the usual claw on the left hand I just stuck on a chaos bolter, with the right hand and grip clipped off and replaced by some spike or horn or something from the bits box, which I painted pink and fleshy, and did the same thing to get rid of the hand on the plasma pistol. If memory serves the ponytail is from a witch elf or whatever they're called nowadays. I wasn't initially sure I wanted to go with the bare flesh for the thighs, since I feel it looks a little comical on the GW promo photos, but since this mini has that maw in her abdomen, plus the left shoudler's got eyes growing out of it so I figured that should be flesh, I decided to go for it, and ended up thinking in the contest of a Slaaneshi warband it's a good look. This was the first flesh-heavy paint job (more than just a head) of the minis I was working on, and I tried out a contrast-heavy approach, starting from the middle of the three caucasian contrast skin tones and highlighting all the way up to pallid flesh - good look I think, so I did the same on the rest. That backpack's the one with big eyeballs sculpted in place of the vents, so on a whim I painted them as regular human eyes (blue, if you're curious) and painted a blotchy little fleur-de-lys on one of the backpack's 'arms', to indicate it was a sister of battle who's been mutated into a backpack because... I dunno, my gals thought it'd be fun I guess.

In the middle, the only one this month I started completely from scratch, because a few days into the month I was looking over my list and realised I'd never gotten around to making the Chaos Icon mini - mainly because I hadn't decided what I wanted the Icon to be, I like them to be a little more elaborate than just a symbol stuck on someone's backpack (because, again, everyone has extra junk stuck all over them anyway); in the end for want of any better ideas I nicked the Terminator Sorcerer's staff, since that mini got assembled as a regular Terminator so the staff's a leftover, and stuck the Slaanesh symbol from the Chosen sprue's (rather small) Chaos Icon onto the front of the magic eye. Since the mini needed a bolter I replaced the left claw with a power fist (not actually a power fist ruleswise) and stuck half a combi-bolter to it, Calgar-style - it was only later, after most of the painting had been done, that I double-checked the list and realised she was supposed to have a plasma pistol as well, and since I was out of limbs (it'd have looked comical in the little limb growing out of her side) I chopped off the spike from the top of the axe and mounted the pistol on that, making it into some kind of wacky plasma glaive or something; my first attempts was atcually to paint her mouth and cheeks as if they were glowing green from within, to suggest she could just spit plasma, but it looked awful so I painted skin tone back over it and went with the axe option. That head's from Stormbringer issue one, since issue one is always cheap and I'd got it just for parts. Since she's on a large base for balance, but doesn't actually occupy much of it in terms of her actual footprint, I added a backpack just to stop it looking too bare, with the winter camo-ish pattern of (according to a Rogue Trader era source) the Executioners chapter.

Next up, a series of errors that turned out alright - I had the Victrix sprue from an issue of Imperium I found, and decided to use one helmet and one bare head for this to suggest that a Victrix had turned to chaos and stuck his own helmet on a spike to mock his former comrades - leaving the Victrixes otherwise intact just with one alternate head; later I realised the 'alternate heads' are actually meant for Marneus Calgar, who's the other half of the half-sprue the magazine came with. That's fine, he's just a marine who looks like Marneus Calgar - it's not like there's a lot of variety in space marine faces for the most part. (I ended up giving the Victrix sprue away at the local gaming group, they're such specific that I didn't really see a satisfactory path to converting one into a chaos marine without it ending up just looking like a Victrix with an axe or something.) Then the face sculpted into the chestplate caught my eye, and I thought it'd be fun to do something with that - my first idea was that as part of merging with the armour the marine's head had relocated to his chest, with his former head now just a piece of armour that still looked like a head, but leaving it smoky white looked like I'd just forgotten to paint it - so then I painted the head as if it's dead, on the basis that this guy tried to turn to chaos, but chaos rejected him (maybe he wasn't sufficiantly lusty, who knows, I feel like 'corrupted by chaos' is a two-way street, you can try for chaos and fall short), and his lifeforce was drained by the armour, which is now itself alive, and carries his corpse around inside herself as a trophy. Again, replacing a mutated spike with a gun to make her a Chosen rather than Possessed, the left arm is a regular Legionary arm with the shoulder sliced to fit into the cavity meant for the Possessed fleshy-cleaver arm, and the hand from the Terminator to give her a combi-weapon. The head was initially pointed off to the left like she's reacting to something over there and bringing her gun up to fire at it, but now the chest-face is looking directly ahead I guess the pose is just puffing her chest out to intimidate whatever's in front of her - if I had it to do over again I'd rather have positioned the head with a zombie-like tilt, but it was already glued in by the time I started changing my mind.

And lastly, paired accursed weapons - I feel like 'accursed' weapons should be a little bit more funky than just power weapons that happen to be wielded by chaos, so we've got two spikefists from the old Possessed set. How does she play with herself between battles then? Carefully. Or maybe not, you never know what Slaanesh. The head's from the Chaos Biker, and since she ended up with a blank shoulder pad I gave her the succubus from an old game series called Wizardry - the original art has some of her hair draped over her hip and between her thighs to give her some modesty, but a) Slaanesh don't do modesty and b) I'm just painting blobs of colour anyway, what is there that needs hiding? For the Scourge trophy head I went right back to the beginning for them, with the dark blue and silver colour scheme from the cover of the first Codex Dark Eldar in 3rd edition. Normally I do the eye lenses in trophy helmets dark, but I felt just the blue helmet wasn't very identifiable, so I added in the red eyes - maybe the Scourge is still alive in there, who knows? Given how much effort they go to to avoid Slaanesh getting their souls, being stuck as a still-living head on a spike may not be the worst thing.