Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey mate, green looking beautiful as always. I'm actually a fan of the blue canopy as well, it's a nice focal point that draws the eye and then lets it run over the nearby details - I think it enhances the paintjob rather than distracting from it. Love the vines on the serpent too!

I like the canopy, too. The color stands out, but not so much that it competes with the green. I think when they are all done in a similar fashion it is going to look really good.

Thanks both. I think the longer I looked at the photos and the actual physical models, the more I felt that the blue canopy was OK, so I think I'll leave them like that. Time for a painting session!

Great to see the progress on your trio of wave serpents, they're looking really good. I also have to say the blue canopies are growing on me the more I look at them, as tzurk said, it draws the eye well.

Keep at it!

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
Great to see the progress on your trio of wave serpents, they're looking really good. I also have to say the blue canopies are growing on me the more I look at them, as tzurk said, it draws the eye well.

Keep at it!

Thanks sir! I shall.

I bought new models. I'd been thinking of ordering a couple of Start Collecting Craftworlds sets online in an FLGS's new year sale, but I decided against it through the idea that it would leave me with an absurd amount of unpainted plastic and that it wouldn't be that much more expensive to wait and buy them when I actually needed them. Then I heard about the upcoming price rise so yesterday I went off down to my local FLGS to pick up a couple of boxes. I particularly wanted them for the Wraithlords and War Walkers - I feel like those work quite nicely in threes. Not necessarily in game, just in a collection, and until yesterday I had one of each. Plus I felt that I needed more Wraithlords given that I've now got three Wraithknights from three copies of the Christmas Battleforce, and that I should at least have as many of the smaller wraith construct as I did of the bigger. These are the convoluted justifications that go through my mind for buying more models. It also takes my Wraithguard/blades count up to 20 - enough to do one squad of each type.

So that's brought me up to an absolutely ridiculous quantitiy of miniatures to work on, to the extent that the pile seems overwhelming. I'll work through it gradually! Given the quantity of sprues I have sitting around, the last few days I've been doing a lot of assembly. Somehow it seems better to at least get things assembled even if it will be months before I paint them. I've built a Crimson Hunter Exarch, 3 Windriders and a squad of 10 Dire Avengers. I actually picked up another box of DA's yesterday, as if having 20 to build wasn't enough. The issue was that I wanted to build two squads of 10 - one with a Diresword Exarch, and one with Glaive/Shield - and paint them in different schemes so it's not like I could make them interchangeable. The issue was that after buying those 5 sets of legs as bitz, out of the 20 DA's I could build, 3 needed to be Exarchs. So I figured if I bought another box then I'd be able to do those two squads of 10, and one more MSU squad. These plans just seem to multiply, and it's a lot quicker to think them up than it is to carry them out!

Anyway, I built the squad of 10 with the Diresword Exarch today. I think I'll do these in a scheme with traditional blue body, a red helmet and white faceplate, somewhat inspired by Asurmen and by one of the alternative schemes in the 2nd Ed Codex. At the miniute I'm thinking when I get around to Glaive/shield squad I'll do them closer to the box art, and the other MSU squad with dark blue armour and black helms.

I've also done a bit of work on my second batch of 10 Guardians, bringing the white up to scratch. I'm jumping around a bit between the 3 Grav Tanks, the 10 Guardians and assmebly at the minute.

New models multiply at an alarming rate sometimes. I do my best not to think about it as things left undone but more as potential for the future. It works most of the time.

Bellerophon,

The temptation to buy more is always so strong when you hear GW is raising their prices again.

Good luck with your painting.

Cheers,

CB

Indeed. This collection has swelled at an alarming rate – partly metal Aspect Warriors that I’ve grabbed from ebay when they turned up at the right price (got to get them when you can, right?), and then more recently things like the Christmas battleforces with FLGS pre-order discount. Suddenly before I knew it my Craftworlds collection is literally 10k points, possibly depending on how I equip things or kitbash one kit into another. And as you can see from this blog - which features all of the completed models to date - only a small fraction of it is finished.

Talking of Christmas battleforces, I started building a Wraithknight. Fully planned on magnetising it like I tend to with all of my vehicles, but I couldn’t decide how I was going to do it so I’ve gathered a pile of cut and cleaned pieces with very little gluing. The problem is that although I can see how it would be simple enough to magnetise, I feel it would be quite a lot more time consuming to fully magnetise it to a ‘perfect’ state that I’m happy with. I’ve seen a lot of magnetised models where it’s pretty obvious where the magnets are or when some aspect of the pose is sacrificed for modularity. I’m very particular – I like my magnetised models to be totally incognito, where you wouldn’t realise it was magnetised until you pull one of the bits off.

Like for example, some of the folks who magnetise WKs, when they’re making the right arm gun swappable between the HWC and the Suncannon will only make the main barrel swappable, and will glue the HWC bits all over the rest of the gun housing (so that it matches the other one) and who cares if the ancillary bits and pieces aren’t right when they use the Suncannon? Me, that’s who. I care.

So, I was scratching my head trying to figure out how I was going to do a perfect, hidden magnet job and started to wonder whether to bother at all. That thought seems weird to me because it’s been a long time since I haven’t magnetised a big model and general wisdom is that it’s such an expensive model that you’re doing yourself a disservice by not magnetising. But because I bought three Christmas battleforces, I’ve got three of the things. So I could just build up one suncannon WK, one sword and board, one with dual HWCs.

And given that
a) I basically never play the game anyway and if/when I do play it would be a very casual game.
b) Any game small enough to care about the loadout I doubt I would ever want to field more than one WK (I’m still fundamentally Biel-Tan and want Aspect Warriors first and foremost), and if I’ve built all three types then I have all 3 options to choose from anyway
c) Any game big enough where I would want to field more than one is getting towards Apocalypse type stuff where it’s more about throwing the models on the table – and a trio with all the loadouts is a pretty cool group to put on the board.
d) I could probably pull off some cool poses more reliably if they were fixed rather than magnetised.
e) Building fixed loadouts instead of making the main arms/guns swappable would drastically cut down on the build and painting time, which would be nice considering the sheer number of models that I have in the queue.

I’m leaning towards not bothering with the magnets. Like I said, feels weird. Anybody want to tell me I’m being an idiot?

In either case I’ll probably put the cleaned bits into a box for now. If I’m building them with fixed loadouts/poses, I kinda want to build all three at the same time to concentrate on getting three different poses that suit the loadout and look good as a group, and I reckon that’s going to work better if I do them together. So I'll put those pieces aside until I feel like clipping and cleaning the next one - or until I change my mind and decide to go with magnets after all.

I agree completely with all your reasons for not magnetising.

 Bellerophon wrote:
I like my magnetised models to be totally incognito, where you wouldn’t realise it was magnetised until you pull one of the bits off.

I totally agree. I'm not familiar with the Wraithknight Kit (currently working my way around the Imperial Knight kit) - but as much as I like to magnetise everything I agree with youwashock - your reasoning to not magnetise, for you, in these circumstances, is perfectly sound to me. General wisdom is just that - general - it should not be applied to all circumstances all of the time

I agree. Don't magnetise.

Thanks folks. I guess the thought of not magnetising was so different to what I normally do I wondered whether I was thinking straight. Anyway, I've clipped and cleaned all the bits from one WK kit and put them away in a box for now. Like I said, I think I'd like to glue all 3 WKs together simultaneously so I can sort out the posing for each at the same time.

No photos today, because I've still been on my assembly mission. Grey plastic is grey plastic and mine will look much the same as anybody else's. The last week or so I've built a Crimson Hunter Exarch, 3 Windriders, 10 Dire Avengers, 5 Scytheguard, and stripped and assembled 10 metal Striking Scorpions. I think I'll put the glue aside for now and get some more painting done. Hopefully in the next week I'll be able to finish those grav tanks and guardians, and get some photos up.

The grav tanks look amazing already!
Seems you've been really busy building stuff. It's good to build a bunch at the same time so one can focus on one aspect of the hobby at a time.

Also quite a collection of space elves. Sometimes the amount of grey plastic just piles without even realising it.

Seeing the pistol and diresword reminds me that the next batch of Avengers I make must have an Exarch with that loadout.

Agreeing with you and others that not magnetising for your reasons is reason enough.

3 wraithknights together... surely the only appropriate way forward is to recreate the Charlie's Angels logo

Thanks again folks!

Latest additions - finished those 3 grav tanks. They took a while, but I'm pleased with the results:















I also finished the next 10 Guardians. I decided to mix in a few more green and black faceplates with this group, vaguely based on the proportions of faceplate colours used in the guardian squad that was on the box art 20 years ago when these models were released.



What's next? Just started working on a squad of Fire Dragons.

One of the maxims amongst the old guard Napoleonic figure painters was "In mass lies perfection". By this they meant that one could paint a single figure to a decent tabletop standard, but once you multiplied that by dozens- or even hundreds- the assemblage took n a quality all its own.

Here, you have achieved both individual high standards and perfection 'en masse'. The Biel-tan colors, combined with individual vine patterns makes each tank special and part of the whole. I know that's the purpose of Craft World themes, but you've carried it off well, here.

Great work!

The grav tanks look great. Such a clean finish. Love 'em.

Bellerophon,

The tanks are beautiful. Exalted that post.

Cheers,

CB

Absolutely gorgeous! The vines look spot on.
The guardians are also looking good. Yet again, the whites are so clean

Cheers all, I really appreciate the comments. It's reassuring me that all that time I spent on the green was worth it!

I can only imagine how long it's going to take to do the same thing on the Scorpion. Speaking of which, I've moved that one tiny step closer to painting by having another go at heating and then bending the pulsar barrels. They're not totally perfect but they're probably as close as I'm going to get them and most importantly they're level with one another. I still need to finish making the base before I prime and paint though.

I've made a bit more progress on the Fire Dragon squad this evening, but still at the stage of blocking out colours and putting down the first washes, so there's quite a lot yet to do on those.

Right, I've got the Fire Dragons done. After such a long period juggling painting 3 tanks, a guardian squad and also building various things, it's been nice to just concentrate on painting one squad and getting them finished in a relatively short space of time.

I've already made a fairly big deal of how big an influence WD236 was on me as a lad as my only source of information for quite a long time, and I've based the squad colour scheme on the Fire Dragons in that magazine. It's also the same scheme that's shown on the back of the 3rd Edition Codex and is also similar to the scheme they used for Fuegan (not only is his sculpt ancient, the paintjob they show on the webstore is almost as old as the model is!). For the longest time I thought that it was the 'official' scheme for Fire Dragons and had no idea that most of the time the studio painted them orange/yellow. It looked like this:



That's always been what I think a Fire Dragon ought to look like. So my squad looks like this:



I pretty much went for copying that old scheme, with the sash things in green for a little tie-in to the Biel-Tan colours. I'm quite pleased with how they came out, though I'm not sure whether I could have used a slightly brighter highlight on the helmets. As ever I think they look better IRL than they do in the photos, but that's probably a common problem that we all wrestle with. There's more depth to the shades/highlights than there appears to be in the photo, probably because of the lighting.

I've actually got enough Fire Dragons to make two more squads. I wanted this first squad to be 10 strong, not particularly for game reasons, just that I've been painting up 10-strong squads where I can, depending on the number of models I end up with after my ebay hauls. That leaves me with 2 more Exarchs (one firepike, one flamer) and 12 regulars to split between them, so I'm thinking either a squad of 8 and one of 6 (which fits in a Falcon), or two squads of 7 (which would fit in a wave serpent with a 5-man squad of something else to perfectly fill the 12-model capacity). Either way, I'm thinking one squad in a scheme closer to the studio's orange/yellow, and one squad in a really dark red with black helmets and really bright faceplates to contrast. Or alternatively, I've also seen some FD's with bone helmets that looked cool. I'll make my mind up when I get closer to painting them.

For now, I'm about to start on some Striking Scorpions. I'd like to get one squad of each type of Aspect Warrior painted - at least the ones that I have. I've also got some Dark Reapers to do, and a Crimson Hunter Exarch. The only Aspects I don't actually have are Shining Spears (don't want the old bikes and haven't got a conversion for the new jetbikes that I'm happy with yet) and Shadow Spectres (I want to buy the Exarch with the squad, and the Exarch seems to have been "temporarily" out of stock for about a year). I'd also like to get more Dire Avengers done soon.

An excellent recreation. Lovely looking squad. In my mind, it is hard to beat the original models (Jes is the man, and when you add nostalgia, well...), but that Exarch is a really cool figure.

 youwashock wrote:
An excellent recreation. Lovely looking squad. In my mind, it is hard to beat the original models (Jes is the man, and when you add nostalgia, well...), but that Exarch is a really cool figure.

Thanks again sir, I appeciate it. I love Jes' originals too, and I think principally the reason that the 'current' aspect sculpts appeal to me is because they're largely an update to his 2nd ed designs, keeping the same overall look.

--

I've not updated this Blog for a couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. I've just completed some Striking Scorpions.

Like with all my Aspects I've been buying the metals from Ebay rather than the finecast. I'd managed to get my hands on 18 regular Scorpions, 2 Exarchs with Scorpion's Claw and 1 Exarch with Biting Blade. So I decided that I would paint them up as one squad of 10 with a Claw Exarch in one colour scheme, and the other 9 regulars and 2 Exarchs in a different scheme. So they can be run as two small squads, or they can be a squad of 10 with a choice between claw and biting blade for the Exarch. That's the squad that I've painted first. I had a moment of horror earlier when I dropped the Biting Blade Exarch and bent the blade right back, but a bit of careful and determined bending got it back into shape. Thank goodness for the malleability of metal! Luckily it dropped on carpet and the paint didn't chip.

Anyway, some photos:







I'm also currently in the middle of painting 3 Windriders, 10 Dire Avengers and 5 Dark Reapers, so hopefully it won't be as long a wait until I finish something else. I'm also thinking it's about time I took another army shot, since the army has expanded quite considerably since the last one.

I don't know how I managed to miss an update, let alone three! Those are some lovely tanks and the vines are great! Your Guardians are superb, I like that you've gone for some green faceplates, I did that on mine too when I tried out Biel Tan!

Digging your colour choices on your aspect warriors, I really like the red and it's serving as inspiration for my own Fire Dragons! I like the dark yellow faceplates you've gone for on your Scorpions, it breaks the colour up nicely.

Yikes! Nothing quite like losing your grip on a freshly painted model to tighten that lower GI tract.

Looks like no harm done, thankfully. Another sweet looking squad down. Looking forward to that group shot.

Bellerophon,

Beautiful Fire Dragons and Striking Scorpions.

You should try and track down a copy of WD 127, when the Jess Godwin models were introduced and the initial background was added.

Cheers,

CB

Ooh, my favourite aspect warriors . Looking good!

Tyranid Horde wrote:I don't know how I managed to miss an update, let alone three! Those are some lovely tanks and the vines are great! Your Guardians are superb, I like that you've gone for some green faceplates, I did that on mine too when I tried out Biel Tan!

Digging your colour choices on your aspect warriors, I really like the red and it's serving as inspiration for my own Fire Dragons! I like the dark yellow faceplates you've gone for on your Scorpions, it breaks the colour up nicely.

Thanks sir - I've missed plenty of updates myself on blogs that I follow, so I think it's easily done! I've definitely put quite a bit of thought into what colours I wanted to use on the Aspect Warriors, so I'm glad you like them. I'm planning on doing other squads in different schemes like they come from different shrines, so that ought to be fun. The red on the Fire Dragons is VMC Carmine Red, washed with AP Red Tone then edge highlighted with VMC Vermillion. The helmets are AP Chaotic Red, washed with AP Dark Tone and highlghted with VMC Carmine Red. Not exactly the same look as the old squad that I was emulating, but close enough.

On the Scorpions I wanted to do something close to the standard studio scheme with the yellow markings on the armour, but I didn't want to make them too bright, so I picked a yellow ochre. I also remembered seeing one of the old metal Autarchs painted up Biel-Tan with a green helmet and a dark yellow faceplate and always thought it looked really cool, so it was quite an easy choice to use for these Scorpions. As and when I get around to my other squad I'm contemplating doing them in a really dull/dark scheme that I feel would suit their role as stealthy ninja-elves somewhat better than bright colours do. That's part of the reason I didn't want to make the yellow too bright on this first group.

youwashock wrote:Yikes! Nothing quite like losing your grip on a freshly painted model to tighten that lower GI tract.

Looks like no harm done, thankfully. Another sweet looking squad down. Looking forward to that group shot.

Cheers - yeah I was pretty worried for a few moments there. Not least because at first I couldn't see where the model had bounced to. I'm sure a lot of us have experienced that, moving around absurdly carefully and watching every footstep just in case the model happens to be underneath it. It certainly happens to me pretty often when assembling things, when a part pings off somewhere and manages to hide in the carpet.

Captain Brown wrote:Bellerophon,

Beautiful Fire Dragons and Striking Scorpions.

You should try and track down a copy of WD 127, when the Jess Godwin models were introduced and the initial background was added.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks - I'll have a look for that one. I'd been gathering up all the old Codexes from eBay, and I'd been considering looking for some relevant issues of WD.

CommissarKhaine wrote:Ooh, my favourite aspect warriors . Looking good!

I find it so hard to choose between them, they're all so cool.

--

I sorted out some army photos this afternoon. This time they're on my table tennis table. So I quickly set them up and put them away again before they faced any danger of stray ping-pong balls. Not the best lighting unfortunately, but I still think they look pretty cool together. I've got an army list spreadsheet and I've been using it to keep track of the size of the fully painted army, and it's about 2600 points currently. So that's about a quarter of the total then. There's a lot of work to do.

That's a gorgeous looking Swordwind host! Thank you for the recipe on the red, I may have to borrow it!