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Hello Dakka.

I’ve been back on the Necromunda Wagon now for about a year and a half now. My first big ‘project’ after getting back into it was to build a scavvy gang, which I largely copied from Kid Kyoto’s ‘sewer mutants’ (http://wargamesfactory.lefora.com/2009/04/20/sewer-mutants/). Then I painted an Orlock gang for a buddy. Now, finally, I’m getting round to renovating my long-time favourites: the Escher Gang. It’s going quite slowly, so I thought it might help to get some feedback and encouragement by creating a progress log!

Bit of backstory: it is November 1995. I am 13. I live in a fairly quiet end of a seaside town near Newcastle called Whitley Bay. I own WFB and Heroquest and my big brother has Advanced Heroquest (my first ever attempt at painting was a plastic Skaven using watercolours), 40k 2nd Ed and Space Marine. I own lots of miniatures but it’s a random collection: Night Goblins and High Elves for WFB; epic scale Eldar, some Space Marines including one of my very first purchases along with a paint set from GW: the RTB01 box; some miscellaneous Skaven, Eldar, etc. I play games against my brother sometimes, but we don’t really play seriously or fully understand all the rules (we never use save modifiers, for example, so my super-heavy Falcon grav tank, with it’s 1+ save can’t be destroyed except by a vortex missile). I sometimes go up to GW in Newcastle to buy blisters, but my local ‘games store’ is a bike shop which also sells some boxed sets and paints. One fateful day I enter a painting competition there, entering a high elf on a giant eagle (the old metal one) thinking that I’m more likely to win if I enter something expensive and impressive. Cynical kid, wasn’t I? I turn up on a school night and have to wait almost an hour for the GW rep to turn up to judge it. When I walk out the shop into the dark drizzle I am carrying the Necromunda boxed set, a promotional Escher t-shirt which is several sizes too large and a couple of painting books. If they didn’t have them both already, Games Workshop own my heart and soul for the next five years.

My first gang were Escher (I had to really because of the t-shirt) and I still have the models. I got the boxed set for Christmas that year and bought as many of the second wave as I could afford with my birthday money when they came out. They were the first coherent force of any kind that I painted, have fought in dozens and dozens of campaigns and even made an appearance on the battlefields of 40k as genestealer cultists. It sounds weird, but they have a special place in my heart. They have been repainted and neatened up a bit since my first paint job, but not ‘properly’ (I didn’t know about/ couldn’t afford any kind of paint stripper in those pre-internet days!). Here’s a picture of the pretty awful job I did on the second wave of them to arrive by mail order in ‘96:



Thick, black, hand applied undercoat! Blobby details! No time spent removing flash and mould lines! Not my best work… This is one of the better ones that has been given a decent touch-up at some point:



And a few which have been stripped and repainted in the last few months:



(By the way, I haven’t heard anyone mention using something called ‘Rustin’s Cellulose Thinner’ (http://www.rustins.eu/Details.asp?ProductID=741) as a paint stripper on Dakka. It’s brilliant: blisters acrylic paint in seconds; not unlike that horrible scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit with the poor little shoe guy who gets ‘dipped’. With a toothbrush and a bit of hot water you can bring a mini from totally bodged with paint to shiny new metal in a couple of minutes. The fumes, however, stink and it isn’t kind to plastic. Also wondering what will happen if I add a few drops of this stuff to some of my thicker old paints – will report back!)

So, what’s next? Well, here are the ones that need painting/repainting in the order I hope to do them. This might well change because the girls are currently fighting in a campaign (http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/448922.page) and I might need to move them up or down in priority depending on which ones I need:



I’ve attempted a couple of neat, simple conversions where I’ve had duplicates (mostly models I butchered with weapon swaps when younger). Quite pleased with both:





Bought a few replacements/ extras from eBay and this one came with a miscast nose. Haven’t tried any finecast yet, but just goes to show, white metal ain’t perfect either! Hopefully my greenstuff nose won’t look too obvious on undercoating. I found it very hard to tell what it will actually look like in context because the metal is very light and shiny and the greenstuff jars with it a bit.



I’m hoping to strip down and magnetise this painted and slightly dodgily converted (you can’t see the weird, stumpy arm round the back of the flamer!) heavy so that she can carry flamer, melta or grenade launcher.



And where am I at the moment? Painting a Bounty Hunter of course! Not sure about the colour scheme here… thinking about redoing the waistcoat in a dark reddy brown, perhaps terracotta (think Marty McFly in Back to the Future…). I’m quite pleased with how his trousers came out though. There are lots of other hired guns to be painted/ repainted as well, I find them a refreshing change from painting purple hair and yellow tabards!





Thanks for reading, feedback appreciated!

Haha, love the pin striped pants on the hunter mate. The gang is look great. Never enough necro on the boards.

I look forward to seeing those rats re-painted, some of my favorite necro models ever.

I like it. Some nice conversions.

Consider me subscribed.

Looks good, I also like the pinstripes. I have to say your paint jobs at age 13-14 were a lot better than mine at the same time.

Great stuff... I have an unpainted Escher in one of my draws... its part of the huge pile of "To Paint" things!

Thanks for the comments everyone. Been super-busy since posting this lot, but hoping to have made some progress on the bounty hunter by the end of the week and then I've got some serious painting planned for the weekend.

For some reason I've been really looking forward to repainting the rats too! But for some reason I've been telling myself to leave them til last... weird.

Delayed gratification - saving the best till last. I think a lot of people do that... although usually it's not to do with painting rats.

Hmm, you're right. We are a strange lot aren't we.

Well It’s been busy, but I had a bit of time last night to do a bit of work on my bounty hunter.



He’s nearly done. A few more details to paint and a bit of touching up here and there and I can do the base and start on his little backpack, which for some reason I’m not really looking forward to. Sadly I haven’t enjoyed painting him as much as I thought I would. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t really plan the colour scheme and just waded into it? Still, I reckon he looks OK.

More excitingly I’ve also completed my first foray into the magic world of magnets!



This took me a LONG TIME and was SUPER FIDDLY but I’m pleased with the result. First of all they’re very strong aren’t they? And they don’t stick well with superglue: just putting them near another one whilst the glue is drying makes them jump off! Magnets covered in drying superglue flying around the room are not ideal. A bit of green stuff over and around the hole seems to have secured them a bit more.

Secondly, I made a very foolish schoolboy error in gluing the melta magnet on the wrong way round so that it was being repelled from the body one. What a chump. So if anyone is playing with magnets for the first time please feel free to laugh at and learn from my ridiculous mistake.

Here she is with her guns:





Join the debate about which gun I should buy for her here: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/448922.page

The model is a bit of a weird one in that the original plasma gun doesn’t have a left hand. The heavy’s left arm is bent round in a frankly very uncomfortable-looking position and terminates in an odd-looking box on the side of the plasma gun which is presumably supposed to be some kind of hand guard, though why you’d want your hand inside the workings of the most unstable weapon in the galaxy is beyond me. It seems like sloppy sculpting to me, which is weird because the ’95 Escher gang are some of my favourite models. Anyway, after a bit of pondering I decided to stick a supporting hand underneath the gun. It does look quite bad but I think it looked worse without. There’s a bit of GS work left (and I might churn out a flamer as well for maximum flexibility) but not very much before I can start painting!

So, bounty hunter should be finished and a start made on the heavy next week.

Cheers for reading!

Hello, I'm back.

So, what have I been up to in the last 3 months?

A holiday, driving lessons, stag, wedding and birthday weekends away, antenatal sessions with the missus. In retrospect, not a great time to start a painting blog, but never mind.

I have, in fact, finished some miniatures tough! The Bounty Hunter is done, as is the heavy with her two special weapons...





And a couple of gangers and a juve:





Not totally happy with the heavy, it’s not as neat a paint job as I’d have liked but I’m not sure about going back and adding more layers because I think the problem might have been that it’s too thick in some places already. Gangers turned out nice though!

In the campaign we're playing I've got a bit of weapon-swapping to do, so next up in my chainsword and laspistol conversion. Then I might take a break and do another hired gun. I don’t have any painted Pit Slaves yet and they’ll be a nice change from painting purple and yellow.

I also keep thinking that I’d like to make a bit more terrain. I bought some ground-level rubble type stuff (40k Urban Barricades and some barrels) to replace the Outlanders barricades which seem to have gone missing. I also want to knock up some fancy walkways with walls and stuff for cover. I notice that the one walkway with cover from Outlanders always gets set up on the battlefield and nearly always gets used during the game. Other than that and the odd bulkhead, finding cover above ground level can be quite difficult and the majority of our games take place mostly on the table. A few more attractive areas of cover between buildings might create a few new tactical situations and of course they’ll be simple to make and store flat (my favourite!). Hoping to post the designs up on here pretty soon.

Bruticus wrote:Looks good, I also like the pinstripes. I have to say your paint jobs at age 13-14 were a lot better than mine at the same time.

Second that!

Great job on the heavy! I can't even imagine trying to get that to work I've been getting into magnetizing vehicles, and the fiddeliest thing I've completed is weapon loadouts for IG sentinels. Not exactly the same

 Plip wrote:

Who's that chap in the back middle with two bolt pistols? Sweet model, never seen it before...

Cheers Rawson. He's an Underhive Scum. Came out with the original Necromunda stuff sometime in early 95. I love the scum models but the fatty with the plasma pistol has to be the winner:




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Bit of a ropey photo there, sorry.

Great painting, it's always good to see some Necromunda stuff.

Btw the link to the campaign stuff in the OP doesn't work, I'd be interested in reading it if you can fix it.

Oops, failed to actually put a link in there didn't I! Cheers Smiler, fixed it now. The campaign log is a bit of a beast: I like the sound of my own typing.

Paint-wise I think I have some free time today, hoping to finish off the barrels and stuff and have a crack at that other ganger. After that I am going to paint some more interesting (non-Escher-based) stuff.

No problem, thanks for fixing, I'll go have a read.

Btw I love the Scavvy gang in your gallery, very cool. They fit the theme of the gang well without looking like the official models, good job!

I like the magnetising on the heavy too, it was worth the trouble of putting together.

Thanks! I do have to stress, however, the idea from the original conversions came from here:
http://wargamesfactory.lefora.com/2009/04/20/sewer-mutants/

And they're for sale if you're interested...

Lol I am interested, but sadly very poor :( my hobby budget is virtually nothing. Otherwise I think considering the level of painting and conversion £50 definitely a reasonable ask.

Subscribed! Great plog- keep it up

Stuff!

Thought I’d update this long-dead thread with some of the stuff I’ve managed to do the last 12 months or so.



Back in the depths of winter last year I painted up this Pit Slave. He was great fun to paint and I had a great time giving him a really unhealthy skin tone and beat up bionics. Horrible Scars should be on the Pit Slave advance table. Looking forward to doing another Pit Slave soon with a JCB colour scheme.



Then I had a crack at this guy. He’s a Copplestone ‘Wasteland Desperado’ and is a little bit taller than most Necromunda minis but he’s quite the character. He’s obviously a doc, but I’m sure he’ll come in handy for any random NPCs or as an agent to protect in any Escort-style scenarios. In a pinch he might do for a Wyrd as well. I’m sure that bag is a counts-as club. Not sure what the nipple rings count as.



Someone on Yakromunda mentioned that they’d found a Ratskin with a Hunting Rifle (using the CE rules) to be a good purchase. I tend to hire Ratskins early on in a campaign to use their Explore Skill to net new territories and giving them a Hunting Rifle means that they can hang back and stay out of trouble. This makes them more likely to survive the encounter and be able to use Explore if I win the game! So I knocked this guy up and painted him rather hurriedly to use in a campaign. Not that happy with the conversion: the arm is too big and the pose is odd but I do like the gun. The paint job is fairly uninspiring too; I had all sorts of plans for warpaint but never reached a decision on what I wanted it to look like.



Next I decided that I wanted to fill a couple of tactical gaps in my Escher collection. I bought a couple of duplicates of the cheaper gangers from eBay and knocked up a Hunting Rifle for this one out of (primarily) shotgun bits. I also did a few minor conversions on the hair to make them look a bit different from their unconverted counterparts.
The gun looks a little bent in this photo because the ganger is pointing slightly away from the camera; it's not actually that bad, honest. I went with AndyT's idea of kill markings to make the predominately black gun stand out a bit and then also had the idea of slapping a bit of camo on there. Quite pleased with the effect.



This lovely lass, who can be used as a heavy or a ganger with Specialist (something I’ve never had in my Escher gangs) got herself given a Flamer. The eyes were a bit of a disaster which is why her eyeliner looks a bit heavy. Luckily this just makes her look a bit gothy, which is fine by me.
I managed to convert and paint these two in a matter of months rather than years, which was quite good going.



Bored of painting purple and yellow I went back to this fella, who has been sitting in my paint box for a long time now waiting to be stripped and repainted. He’s been with me for over 15 years, having been one of the first Necromunda minis I bought (sheds a tear for lost youth). A great model and great fun to paint. Weird how some models are so much more fun to paint than others: the Flamer ganger was a complete pig and this guy was a joy! I spent a long time putting wash after wash onto his hair which got a base coat of flesh colour- wanted to get that razor-cut stubble look.



Grr... Woof! It would be nice to use the Attack Pets rules someday and I think all gangs should have a faithful mascot to follow them around so I picked up a few dogs from eBay (these are Farmer Maggot’s dogs from LotR- the scale is a teeny bit small, so I built up the bases to make them appear larger) and had a fun time painting this one up. I spent a long time trying to work out what breed he/she is and settled on a Doberman Pinscher so it got an appropriate colour scheme which only took about an hour to complete. Reckon this one’s a sneaky Escher dog, there’s also a ferocious looking Orlock-y mongrel (which I might have to make a headband…) and a badass grumpy-looking Goliath Rottweiler.

Having churned out about four painted minis (OK, maybe three and half ‘cos the doggy is so small) in the last month or so I’m feeling pretty motivated, so hopefully I’ll be updating a bit more frequently! I have lots more Escher to paint, two more dogs, a brood of Milliasaurs and many more hired guns and beasties. I've also got Scavvies to finish which won't happen any time soon, but I have got a couple done and ready to paint and I suspect that one of them might be next on the list.