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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.

As I mentioned, having painted that Halloween Battle Sister and Brother Quiff, and a couple of other pieces, it occurred to me that nothing bad happens if I paint a miniature that's not part of the warband, so things have been a bit more random lately:



From the left, Sister Superior Augusta... something or other, what happened was the store had a thing where if you paint somebody from a Black Library book you get one of those little medallions, and I don't care about the medallions but it was an excuse to paint something - I don't read Black Library (I liked the first few Cain books, but otherwise I prefer my 40k lore to be in-universe documents, like the 3rd edition rulebook was full of, rather than narratives, but I figured they had to have done books about battle sisters, so I checked the site, found a few covers of this lady from the Order of the Bloody Rose, and got to work - she's specifically based on the cover of The Rose at War, the pose and details are a bit off but given that I just had the pieces (that I hadn't already used for chaos) from the Sisters and Seraphim boxes to work with, she actually got pretty close. Bloody Rose was also the first order I painted back when Sororitas first came out, before I (inevitably) changed to making up my own order (Order of Our Lady of the Rose), so she's a fun throwback to those days too. Fun fact, it really hadn't gotten through to me in a big way, before studying the cover art, that the corset and gloves on Sister armour are cloth rather than metal - I gave them a couple of washes of crimson ink to darken them a bit compared to the armour.

Next up, similar kind of story - the store recently did a contest where there's some kind of campaign going on in Sigmar, so everybody paint a Steelhelm and they'd pick one to be the store's official colour scheme in that campaign, or something? I'm fuzzy on the details, again, just in it to paint something. Obviously that's not a Steelhelm - I turned the free mini one from a few months back into a cultist, and the free Steelhelm this month got turned into a Torment (I think that's what it'll be, anyway), but according to the contest any Sigmar miniature was acceptable, and I'd picked up issue one of Stormbringer just, so I painted the Knight Arcanum or whatever she is. I'd already used the bare head for the chaos icon Chosen, and the masked head looks like it'll be creepy on a daemonette or something, so she's got a Seraphim head. That blue armour, black cloak scheme is actually from my aforementioned homebrew Sororitas order. I think the base turned out quite nicely, built up that muddy technical paint around the stone base that came with the figure an dthe colours all came together well. It's more rudimentary than the Eavy Metal minis I got the idea from, but I'm also pleased with how the half-empty potion bottle turned out.

Next, and Necron - I had a look at the sprues and realised that, after using six for Chaos Androids and then a bunch more parts for the base of that Kataphron Terminator Lord, I still had enough parts for one complete Warrior, so there it is. There aren't enough scarabs on the sprue for it to be practical en masse but I always liked the notion of scarab swarms completely covering the ground, a la The Mummy, so I got to do that. I don't love how the colour scheme came out - I wanted to avoid the traditional metal look, and tried for something reminiscent of the colours of ancient Egyptian soldiers with their white cloths and bronzed skin, but the brown wound up too close to the gold on the weapons (Lizardman shield there, another free mini leftover), and I chose the most decayed torso and head because they seemed like fun but the clean white chassis kind of works against that. Never mind, I can say I painted a genuine not-a-weird-ass-conversion Necron, so there's that.

And a genestealer. I got my start in GW (aside from some early random miniatures) with Space Hulk, and with two complete first edition sets and a second edition, I've got a lot of purestrains - and never really bothered painting any of them very well. Not that I was painting the Terminators much better back in those days, but at least I was trying - the stealers mostly just got some purple on the fleshy bits, the carapace left as blue plastic, and that was it. So I thought it'd be fun to at last give one of them some proper attention. The purple was actually the base this time around, and when I came to paint the carapace I nearly screwed myself, by starting with dark blue and a blue wash for extra shadows - it ended up so dark and glossy I had a hard time seeing where the highlights needed to be, but I muddled through. If I ever get a suitable part for the head I'd like to do a proper first-sight genestealer, with four hands and just the leech mouth instead of a face, but for now this will do.

Last month's contest entry, for Nice Ride:



...based on this from White Dwarf 94, reprinted in the Warhammer 40,000 Compendium which is one of the old tomes in my black library:



Don't be surprised if some of those other weirdos show up too, you know what I'm like.

So the reason for this was I've had this old metal Dalek miniature in the bits box for ages - I don't remember getting it, but I also have minis of Leela and Ace, so presumably it was in the set - so the conversion was always in the back of my mind, the painting contest just brought it to the fore. It needed extra height - it was to scale with the human minis and the Dalek props aren't actually that tall (one reason for the Paradigm Daleks - which I miss, I liked them - was so they could be eye level with Karen Gillan, rather than her looking down on them; as it happens they got shuffled off to unofficial retirement before she ever had a scene opposite one anyway) - so I put a layer of card on the base (leftover from building the steps for Sister Superior Augusta) then slathered on some technical paint to make it look like raised ground rather than just a solid slab, and since that was the muddy gritty technical I didn't bother with the usual flock, just painted it glittering as-is. I really need to remember to sand off the rims of bases though, they're always ending up with little bits of goop on them under the black paint.

Conveniently the Dalek was in three pieces, so I didn't have to do any hacksawing to separate it (just clipped off the peg that the 'arms' section would mount onto). I used the leftover sorcerer upper collar from the Chaos Terminator Lord/Sorcerer as a kind of waist to help blend the 40k mini in with its new skirt, but despite the skull on the now-front and various spikes I ended up thinking it was a bit plain, and didn't do enough to hide how the Dalek skirt just cut off flat at the top, so I stuck on various leftovers as trophies - skin-flap loincloth also from the chaos terminator, a Primaris helmet (I know 'red with white stripe' isn't terribly specific, but it's a Red Scorpion, Angstron Incident pursuit squad variant), the face of a free-mini-of-the-month Neurogaunt (which I sliced off to attach a daemonette head, hasn't been painted yet) painted in 3rd edition bone and dark red, on the far side where it's not visible a bare marine head (with a little bit of tubing out the bottom to represent a trailing bit of spine), and to close up the back I used a shoulder plate from that Kataphron Destroyer sprue I got from an issue of Imperium. The torso's one of the old Possessed, with mainly new Possessed bits finishing it off, although the power fist is from the Chosen - I wanted to recreate the original conversion's weapon loadout.

I do quite like how the lightning claws turned out, starting from I think volupous pink contrast and then painting on highlights all the way up to white near the tips - I may try the GW-standard power weapon paint job, with alternating highlights on the blade halves, using that colour palette next time I have an accursed sword to do. The shoulder art is, naturally, that photo shoot Katy Manning (Third Doctor companion Jo Grant) did where she posed nude with a Dalek prop, which as I recall the BBC were a bit upset about (don't expect any sympathy from me for the Beeb though, they can go get f- anyway). I imagine the mini would most naturally represent a Possessed, if we assume the lightning claw is just another of their random hacky weapons.

Finished at last - Lily II, the Keeper of Mysteries (so named because she's one of Sister Julienne's projects, the first 'Lily' was the horrific result of Julie merging six Eldar seers together into a single living mass to create a womb big enough to gestate a greater daemon inside of (Syl named it), and other Keepers of Secrets look down on Lily II because of her quasi-biological birth and refuse to acknowledge she's one of them, but nobody in the Bringers of Wonder really cares what anyone else thinks so they embrace her being different. The KoS was actually one of the first things I bought when I got back into the hobby, without any army plan besides 'get Slaanesh stuff, figure it out later' - this, a Rhino (I donated that to my gaming group when I realised I couldn't be bothered painting big models), the then-current Start Collecting boxes for Slaaneshi daemons and CSM (that was the one with Obliterators and the Venomcrawler in it), and so on. Not a very economical approach, but since I was set from the start on only doing one army, I decided to take the wallet hit and indulge the childhood dream of just walking into a GW and buying a big stack of whatever the heck I wanted. And then she sat in her box for a couple of years, because initially I didn't want to tackle such a big project when I was still reacquainting myself with which end of a brush does what, and later because as I said I just can't be bothered with big stuff. But the three-month contest here made me think, alright, let's give this a go.

So to start with the elephant in the room, yes she's anatomically accurate, and it's very detailed - same source (a Bible Black statue) as the naughty bits on the Chaos Spawn a while back (just without anything poking out of it this time), and the dick on the Venomcrawler, so now my bits box is completely devoid of realistically-moulded genitalia, which I'm sure is a great relief to all. I had the piece set aside for the KoS the whole time - no regular-sized miniature would suit it anyway (not that having a relative-size gigantic lady part taking up the entire torso of a Legionary would be out of character for Slaanesh, but since I only had the one I wanted to make best use of it) - so that was the first bit of conversion, which meant leaving the loincloth off and hacking away at the groin to make room (the other chaos gods wouldn't appreciate it if you did that to its daemons), then using milliput to fill in the gaps and smooth everything out; my sculpting's still pretty rudimentary but just making a reasonably flat area I can manage, despite the thighs on either side making it tricky to get the file in to smooth it off properly. The whole thing got lavishly superglued from inside before I stuck the front and back of the torso together, because I wasn't having this thing fall apart half-way though painting. Aside from the outer cloak, which'd have gotten in the way of painting the inner cloak and the back, I went ahead and assembled the whole thing (then, thankfully before it'd had a chance to set too solid, removed the ponytail again when I realised it'd get in the way of attaching the outer cloak if it wasn't added last.

The veiled face was also something I'd wanted to do, although I hadn't really planned how - I like that the face is more genderfluid than the old manly bull look of the v1 KoS, but I also feel like she doesn't have much character, like she's just staring vacantly, which in turn makes it difficult to imagine her being sexy, even if you're a crazed cultist who'd be into a gigantic cow daemon at all. The veil dodges the whole thing (without me having to try sculpting a new face, which would be way beyond me) - as it happened the unused loincloth made the perfect piece, cut short so as not to collide with the chest, although I did wind up doing quite a bit of eventually-invisible damage to the face, filing everything below the eyes pretty much flat to have the veil sit nice and snug. Attaching the extra cords (made from unused parts of the alternate KoS build) to make the veil hang from the horn decorations was far from easy given how small the contact points are, but in the end I managed to get them delicately stuck in the right place, then waited until they were dry (so more glue wouldn't immediately re-liquify them and make them just fall off) and slopped on some more cement to solidify the joins more a few times over the next couple of days to make everything good and solid. Slightly lower down I filed the armour on the breast away, since Keepers never used to be shy of their one boob, and used the ball tip from the side of a banner pole to give her a nipple.

The cultists were a last minute idea, when I got the weapon options - the whip was a pretty obvious choice for the left hand, but the sword and spear both seemed kind of generic, and then I remembered I had those old Ral Partha Slave Auction ladies sitting around doing nothing. Avoiding the ones that're supposed to be halflings or whatever short fantasy race that is, because the sculpts are typical 80s vague and I did not want to have tiny naked women who it wasn't immediately obvious were adults, just tiny ones, left enough for the full six (Slaanesh's sacred number), although what I didn't have enough of was chains for their leashes and the local $2 shop was out of the usual stuff, so I ended up getting a bunch of cheap necklaces and clipping the chains off those. They're a lot looser than the stuff I'd previously used, loops rather than tight-fitting segments, so the wraithbone spray alone wasn't enough to make them rigid, and there was no way I could properly cover them with gold like I'd normally do, so instead of 'main colour then wash' I went in the other direction and started by slopping on a whole lot of brown contrast paint, which got into all the loops properly, and dried more or less solid so I could drybrush gold onto them later. Incidentally having them out in front make the model's footprint too big for the original base, so that was another trip into GW to order a larger one; when I came to stick the daemon down I found that with her front hoof flat, the inner cloak's edges didn't quite touch the base, and instead of trying to glue them down under stress I jammed in a couple of leftover tentacles from the Chaos Spawn sprue to make contact points, just so she's nice and firmly anchored at three places. The bracken around the hooves was me trying to do a 'flowers blooming where the god walks' thing, but spiky and creepily-coloured - they did not help with getting the base painted, and I suspect there are still a few little bits of unpainted wraithbone in there, but I got enough covered to pass muster.

When it came time to paint I discovered right away that I couldn't just carelessly slap on contrast paint and let it do the work for me on surfaces this big and flat - I repainted the skin flat purple and then used ink and some paler highlights, which honestly is far from my best work but I was never going to be able to sustain 100% effort enough to finish this thing, so from the start I approached with a view to 'good enough' and stuck with that. For the inner lining of the cloaks, I didn't even bother that much - dark purple, ink, job done. The white on the outside is likewise half-arsed, although I got lucky and (by accident, since I'm not used to spraying such big pieces) got some inbuilt shading on the outer layer by applying a kind of sideways zenithal effect - rather than try to apply clean highlights on such long, smooth ridges, with white of all colours, I gave both cloaks a healthy dose of the iridescent medium I normally put on my marines' armour (in much more limited fashion) - it's a long way from a fancy paint job, but it's good enough, and has a nice light-catching shine to it.



I tried a bit harder on the stockings, corset, and gloves, although the whole time I was fighting the 'urgh, can this blaster thing just be done please?' factor, so I didn't aim for miracles. The gold cords and decorations at least let me get back to my preferred painting subject of tiny details - not that I obsessed over them, but I enjoyed them. The cultists - as soon as I had them in position I started calling them 'the corgis' a la QE2, which is what gave Lily II her own name - are both low-detail 80s metal sculpts and tiny, so I just gave them various colours of contrast paint flesh tones, dabbed in a touch of contrast green around the eyes (didn't bother trying to dot them as I had with Lily, I just wanted a general greenishness around there), and snuck in a six-band pride rainbow in their hair colours. If you look closely one of them's got a tail and cat ears, and another has two pairs of breasts, but all that falls well within the general chaos 'why not?' On the subject of 'why not', the inner lining of the collar's a darker shade than on the rest of the cloaks, because I accidentally used the wrong paint, but it's fine, it makes the head stand out more - likewise I meant to use contract pink for the hair but reached for the wrong pot without realising, so I ended up highlighting to pink from red. Looks okay, so never mind. The whip was a real paint to paint - should've done it before assembly - so I just used contrast black, then purple ink, then a bit of purple paint on the upper edges I could easily get at; this was one of the final bits, so I was well ready to be done with the whole project by then.

So she's haphazardly painted, and won't ever be used in a game both because she's too fragile to pack up in a carry case and because I'd feel too awkward deploying a miniature with detailed genitals in public - but I'm happy nonetheless just to have gotten through the project. And some credit has to go to the large-sized GW painting handle, for not just dropping the whole thing on the desk any of the countless times I turned it upside-down to get my brush in at an awkward angle - the base did shift slightly from time to time, but often I'd be fixated on painting and forget to keep a finger down on it to ensure it didn't slip out of the clamp's grasp, but we made it through without disaster.

Proud of you for praising Slaanesh and seeing a big project through to the end Big gal looks great (also I missed that you were using a Bible Black statue for your junk casting needs )

You've been putting out lots of good stuff in here! I seem to always check your thread, start replying in my head then never get around to typing it all out

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Proud of you for praising Slaanesh and seeing a big project through to the end Big gal looks great (also I missed that you were using a Bible Black statue for your junk casting needs )

Thanks I'm not casting them, the statue just had two different hoo hoos to be swapped depending on whether she was to be displayed with or without a 'massager' in place - since those two parts are now in this miniature and the Chaos Spawn, the statue has to keep her knickers on now.

Anyway, to somebody who's got her pants on, this month's contest entry Lady Sheeva:



...and her familiar Niamh who hasn't got pants on, but one out of two's the best you can expect from me. I had the idea for Sheeva on spotting the Leviathan Terminator Librarian in the local shop's 'while stocks last' shelf, which just means they won't stock it in-store not that you can't order more online, and they don't discount the minis going off-shelf so it's not like it's a bargain or anything, just weaponised illusory FOMO - but I'm an easy lay, and this was around the end of the month when folks were discussing the next theme, so I decided if Absolute Unit got up I'd go for the Librarian. I forget where the idea to embiggen her came from since she's plenty big already (I did recently get a big Mortal Kombat Sheeva action figure, so that probably contributed) but I had to do some rebuilding around the torso anyway - the original chestplate with the Librarian's brain-massager cables was way too distinctive to leave in place - so it didn't really end up being much additional effort I wouldn't have had to go to anyway. Cut the wrist-mounted storm bolter in half for the sides of the new waist (mini-hurricane system), in the back it's a chunk of Kataphron body that's all cables, with a couple of extra cables from the lower back to the lower shoulders plus a trophy helmet (painted Legion of the Damned) to hide some of the gaps, and in front I hadn't planned on using the Legionary belly plate/skirt but with just a tiny bit of filing where it touches the right thigh it fit in very snugly, and also made a nice match with the Chaos Terminator chestplate/collar once I'd done some trimming to fit it flush with the Librarian back piece. It's not a perfect fit, there are actually a couple of spots where if you get the angle right you can see straight through her torso, but never mind. I decided not to use trophy racks up top, since I find they kind of detract from the feeling of bulk of a Terminator - added height but there's a lot of empty space at the new 'top', whereas without them the top is just the massive slab of the back and shoulders. But since there was nothing in the way, that's where I got to feeling the top plate was a bit featureless, and added the Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned art of the Emperor confronting Horus.



I stuck the arms together in pairs separate from the torso, so I could see where the shoulder pads would end up and attach the arms so the top of the mini would look least awkward - it's mostly just a case of cutting off the top of the lower arm's shoulder and flattening the bottom of the upper shoulder, they're not really very fancy work, but the mess of shoulders is kind of hidden behind all the prominent fists and weapons so it doesn't stand out. For the left hand I replaced the original Librarian one with a similarly-posed mutated claw from the Legionary Kill Team box, and stuck a Seraphim hand flamer on top (maybe that's where the psychic witchfire comes from - I wasn't really giving much thought to how all this lines up with the Terminator Sorcerer's wargear as written in the rules), and the right hand with has the force axe I just lopped off at the wrist and replaced with a chainaxe. The head's a Seraphim, originally wearing a circlet but I filed that down to be just a bare head.

I did consider doing some fancy 'lighting' for all the runes on the shins, but the similarly sculpted recessed runes in the book on her hip were a pain to get half-decent ,so I decided to leave the shins alone - the built-in highlighting from the drybrushing and shine of the iridescent medium looks neat already, and since I'd covered up quite a bit of the upper legs with the Legionary skirt and one of the shoulders was black now (background for Sheeva's character select portrait) I felt like the shins had become kind of necessary as-is to keep the smoky white as one of the dominant colours on the mini. I'd planned to just do pink on the lightning claws, since I liked how that turned out on the Dalek Legionary (particuarly doing a dot of pure white on the tips), but since she's a Lord-level character I wanted her to have more bits of additional colour, rather than just all the trim being gold, so I ended up using the same pink on the star on her belly plate, then the Kill Team hand, and the tips of the skirt, the trim on the left shoulder, a few of the smaller cables, and the points on the chainaxe's star decoration. I feel like that nicely ties her to Niamh as well, who's just another of those old Ral Partha slave auction minis - she's meant to be a halfling or something (the set was kind of a grab bag of stock fantasy species au naturel), which makes Sheeva seem even bigger by comparison. I did think about painting her with a human skin tone, but that'd make it seem like she was just a naked lady hanging around the warband, which I've got a few of so I painted her to be identifiable as a familiar.

I've been playing 1K games lately - much more fun than 2K - so the pair of them will be making their debut this weekend at the head of a Terminator squad, which'll either do a hell of a lot of damage, or be a giant firepower magnet and get blown away on turn one.

Superb four armed termie friend !