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Hello Dakkanauts! (Is that a thing?) Kogsnatcha and Da Feevin’ Gitz are here!

I’ve been a lurker on this site for a while now but never really got round to posting my own stuff… until today!

So I’ll start off with a quick introduction. I got back into the hobby about two years ago when a mate I met a Uni mentioned he played and lent me his Gaunt Ghost book which kicked up my passion for 40k, a universe I had always enjoyed but never gotten into in terms of collecting. So, with my new found flames of inspiration from those books I bought some guard and began painting and modelling. Whilst I built up my guard my one true love started to flare up again... The Orks!

Needless to say I’ve been collecting 40k Orks and loving it. I’m definitely a fluffy collector, and whilst I love playing the tabletop, I prefer to use armies I like and units that I like, rather than collecting just to powergame the tabletop (not that it’s easy to do with orks at the best of times these days!).

So why should you care about my blog? Well firstly I asked nicely But in all seriousness I hope it’s because you’re interested in seeing my work, the progress of Da Feevin’ Gitz and hopefully it’ll inspire some of you as you have inspired me over the past couple of years.
What makes my army different? Well like nearly every other Ork player out there, I love doing conversion work with my orks. For me, it’s what got me into the orks; the ‘We’ll nick your stuff, slap metal and guns on it to make it better and more shooty, then use it against you!’ approach with that hint of mad max mentalsauce that I love.

But where I think I differ from other ork players is that I don’t buy vehicles to loot. I loot the vehicles I’m currently using in my other armies… Let me explain: Being a poor student with a new interest in an expensive hobby, I wanted to get the most bang for my buck, and when it came to the orks I found a way. Instead of buying ork vehicles for my army, why not use loot the ones from my existing army? That way I don’t have to buy a bunch of vehicles to go with my hordes of infantry (which can be expensive in of itself). How have I done this? With magnets and some imagination
My looted vehicles differ from everyone else I’ve seen because I’ve taken a vehicle and magnetised in a way where it can be used for it’s original army (with all their weapon options) OR I can take some bits off, swap some parts round and Viola! An ork vehicle that’s looted, with all the ork weapon options available to me AND cheaper than buying the vehicle kit. Plus I get the added bonus of none of my vehicles looking identical, something which bugs me when an ork force is supposed to be ramshackle.

Here’s an example of what I mean:








The trukk/chimera above is a very simple example of what I mean and was one of the first one’s I did, but you can see the concept. Since then I’ve converted other trukks, battlewagons and even killa kans, which you can look forward to seeing soon (once I get round to photographing them). You might wonder how I saved money doing this; so far I’ve managed to convert 2 chimeras and 3 leman russ’ into 2 trukks and 3 battle wagons, using just the bits from a single trukk and single battlewagon kit. Thus, I’ve made a gain of 1 trukk and 2 battlewagons worth of money. AND I can still use the imperial vehicles for my guard because everything is magnetised, so the price of the original vehicle doesn’t count here as it wasn’t bought for the orks

So what’s the plan with this blog? Well there’s a few things:

1) Start a blog in the 2016 new year…. Whoops! Well I’m off to a great start… but better late than never I guess!

2) I want to keep myself motivated by posting regularly on here (probably twice a week if possible). These will be updates on my hobby progress, as well as a variety of other things like background on the armies, army lists, collection breakdowns, future plans, campaign ideas and tutorials if people want them!

3) I want to interact with you guys to get C&Cs on my stuff, helpful suggestions on how to improve it, and to generally bounce ideas off of you. Plus I want to help inspire you guys as you have me.

Now this blog will primarily be an Ork blog, with a focus on the looted magnetised conversions I do. However, I have an interest in collecting many armies, and as I mentioned before I’m a fluffy collector, so I’ve already started to think about other races to collect and I have a target force size/collection that I want to own for each of them... except the orks. I want the orks to continuously grow and expand alongside every other army. I said before that I loot vehicles from my other armies, and in fact that’s the only way I intend to get ork vehicles. Therefore whenever I work on another army, I’ll be working on the orks as well. I also intend to expand the ork infantry by painting a few boys for every squad of something else I paint. Essentially my collecting of other armies will affect how my orks expand and grow.

Thus, whilst this is primarily an ork blog about Da Feevin’ Gitz, I will inevitably show you vehicles from my other armies and how they’re reversibly looted. So I figure if I’m going to show you the vehicles, I may as well show you my other armies as they grow as well, plus this means I can get feedback on everything, not just orky stuff.

Anyways, if you haven’t guessed by now, I’m a rambler. But hopefully you’ve gotten an idea of what type of things to expect here and it’s not been a complete waste of your time reading all this. So to keep things short, I won’t go into the fluff of my army just yet, but I will just say that my ork force is known as ‘Da Feevin Gitz’, led by a brutal but kunnin deathskull ork by the name of Kogsnatcha, reknowned for stealing a baneblade in the thick of battle!

Now just a few questions for you guys before I go:

1) I’m still not sure how to best convey how my conversions work. The photo’s above are my current idea; I.e. show you the ork form, the original form, and all the bits used. I’m completely happy to answer questions about how things are done, but I’m not sure if it’s clear enough. Does the above seem clear enough and can you think of a better way to show this?

Also please excuse the potentially bad photos, I’m in no way a photographer and only just built a makeshift lightbox this week and I’m still getting used to it as well as new editing software!

2) What’s your initial thoughts on these conversions? All C&Cs welcome!

3) In terms of updating my blog with certain things (e.g. my collection list, fluff etc) would you prefer it to be a separate post, or an edit into this first, probably under a spoiler just to minimize unwanted text on the page? Preferences?

So finally, what’s coming up in the next few weeks. Well I’ve just finished the first 2000 pts of my orks, which includes a number of looted vehicles to show you. I’m now going to work on some terrain, but that will shortly be followed by a necron army, and I’ve got some really cool ideas for some conversions there, so keep an eye out for that!

I’ll leave you now with a couple of images, the first being a set of trukk boys showing you the other trukk conversion I have (It's my favorite one so far, simple and fun). And the second picture being of Treddnikka (and his squig Nee-Kappa), one of the lead warboss’ under Kogsnatcha, who I like to imagine is doing a very Queen Elizabeth style hand wave with his power klaw as you move on with your lives.

Cheers guys, I look forward to hearing from you!

Ha, that's a cool idea and some pretty nice models too, great stuff.

What is this wizardry?!

That's a great idea and excellent execution, consider me subbed as I want to see more of this dark art.

EDC

Looks like this is going to be a cool thread! So from what I have gathered, you don't play too much with your orks on the tabletop? If that's the case, I personally think it's awesome for an ork converter as it gives you more liberty to build from your imagination rather than being confined to the games rules.

You mentioned that these guys are lead by a deffskull. Any plans to incorporate their clan colors or are you going to stick with a custom scheme?

Looks awesome so far - Looking forward to seeing more!

This is really cool. A really good idea to maximise your models, and really well executed too!

I'm currently magnetising a Predator, just to allow weapon swaps, but thinking about it it would work really well to stick Orky bitz on too.

Looking forward to seeing what else you've got

Cool idea, looted vehicles in the true sense. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

Nice looking Orks here, and I love the arms sticking out of the gun ports. That's some serious converting to be able to switch between the normal version of a vehicle and a looted version.

And that purple tank! Inspired by the regiment in the first Ghosts book?

Hey guys,

First of all thanks for all the positive feedback! It really means alot and gets me proper excited to do more work and to show you what else I've got, so thank you for that!

I intended to do another big post showing off another couple of things today but the building of new desk took way longer than I planned tonight. (Still kinda counts as hobby progress thought, right? ) So I'm just going to answer your questions right now, but I'll get the post up tomorrow, so be sure to check back in! (And spoilers, it may be Grot-tastic )

So yeah, sorry about the slight delay, but I'll get right on it tomorrow.

Whittlesey40k wrote:This is really cool. A really good idea to maximise your models, and really well executed too!

I'm currently magnetising a Predator, just to allow weapon swaps, but thinking about it it would work really well to stick Orky bitz on too.

Looking forward to seeing what else you've got

Thank you! I think with very few ork elements you can fairly easily give the impression of a looted vehicle, for example the chimera above with the arms out of the las-ports. There is very little done there, but you can clearly tell it's looted, so even if you don't want to do heavy conversion work or are trying it out, you can start simple and still get good results. Let me know if you do convert your pred and if you upload any photo's, I'd love to check it out!

hungryp wrote:Nice looking Orks here, and I love the arms sticking out of the gun ports. That's some serious converting to be able to switch between the normal version of a vehicle and a looted version.

And that purple tank! Inspired by the regiment in the first Ghosts book?

Thank you! Funny enough it's probably my favorite conversion even though it's the simplest, purely for the humour value. I'll upload some better photo's of that chimera in the future, but on the other side of that chimera you can just about see there's an ork with his head stuck in a port, which just feels so right to me xD With regards to the tank, thank you! I really um'd and ah'd about how to paint it for the longest time. And to be honest I can't at all remember an army with a purple scheme from the first book, which force was that? I'll have to read it again xD The scheme actually came from the (boring) fact that purple and orange are my favorite colours, and when deciding which one to use for guard I felt purple just fit much better than orange, because at least it can be vaguely be considered camouflage. Especially at night in city fights and raids, which is what my guard specialise in fluff wise

Novasetri wrote:Looks like this is going to be a cool thread! So from what I have gathered, you don't play too much with your orks on the tabletop? If that's the case, I personally think it's awesome for an ork converter as it gives you more liberty to build from your imagination rather than being confined to the games rules.

You mentioned that these guys are lead by a deffskull. Any plans to incorporate their clan colors or are you going to stick with a custom scheme?

Looks awesome so far - Looking forward to seeing more!

First off thanks for the support! Actually I do play the tabletop a fair bit, though I've only just started playing with my orks (because I've only just finished them and now have an unwritten rule that I'm not going to play with unpainted models anymore). It's more that I play with friends, so we're much more focused on fun than winning, so I'd say my collecting is much more about building the best list from the models I collect, rather than collecting the models for the best list I've written. Though I do completely agree that by not abiding by the tabletop rules gives you so much more freedom to create truely awesome things, and I'd encourage people to do it if they wanted and would be totally fine with playing against it on the table.

However for me, I actually like trying to make things WYSIWYG, for a couple of reasons:
1) By trying to make things WYSIWYG, it creates a challenge that I find exciting, trying to find a way to make this basic chassis fit all the option from the ork codex, as well as give weapons similar firing arcs and displaying upgrades (which I've tried to do)
2) The guys I play with are very casual and are focused on fun, so we're happy to say "this weapon X counts as Y". However if I ever wanted to enter a tournament or play with random people at my FLGS, by being close to WYSIWYG i can reduce the chance that people will bitch and moan that I've converted to my advantage.
3) I also really like having WYSIWG just because it's helpful to both players. It's helpful for someone not familiar with your army to clearly see what you've got (both weapon and unit wise), and it's a helpful reminder to me to see what upgrades I've taken. I will say though that If I took the unused upgrades off (in the case of the 2nd chimera for example, either the big shoota/gunner or the rokkit on the turret) whilst that's more "accurate" to what it has ,it reduces the amount of orky bits on it. So despite this I'll generally keep all the conversion stuff on just to improve the look of the model, but it's nice to have to option to remove it if I want to.

However, trying to get all the options for the batlewagons (which you'll see soon) was both challenging and stressful, and I'll be honest and say that although I'm glad it's relatively close to the actual model for size, firing arcs and weapon options, that by having those did limit some creative ideas that I had but just couldn't fit on with everything else, so I really am debating whether next time to just ignore the rules and convert how I want. Especially seeing as now that I have 3 which are accurate, I can always use them if people get arsey... unless I want to take like 5 BWs xD


If you have any other questions please ask! I love reading your comments and feedback, and I look forward to plenty more from future post.

Cheers guys, and speak to you tomorrow!

Hey guys,

As promised I’m back with a proper update this time, full of grot-tastic fun.

But first, as this isn’t a showcase blog, I’ll normally go over what hobby progress I’ve made since the previous post and probably ask for feedback/advice on things that I’m working on.

So this week I’ve mainly been trying to get some terrain done, as I regularly play with my friends at my house rather than instore. But now that I’ve got painted armies, playing on unpainted terrain just looks naff. So I’ve been looking at scatter and cover terrain and home making it. I’ve already got a bunch of MDF buildings made, and a mate is coming round this week to help me get them painted, but until then I’m looking at making some craters, fences and impromptu barricades for now.



I intend to make sandbags and actual imperial guard-esk fortified positions, but I like the idea of hastily made barricades/cover out of sheet metal in hive cities etc. Quite simply just made out of plasticine, sprue and some card, then sprayed silver and washed with agrax earthshade and seraphim sepia in patches. What I like about it is that it’s still malleable, so I can bend it into shapes that suit me, something I really look for in terrain; flexibility.

As you can see on the fence I’ve not painted the posts, but I’ve experimented on the fence panel. Again this is designed to be flexibile, so I can fit the panel on any side of the post. Any thoughts how I can make it look better? I intend to magnetise some barbed wire to the tops at somepoint too which might do the trick.

Also shown is a 5” blast crater, and has actually come out alright. Annoyingly I use card as a base, and it seems to warp a bit after the glue dries, but always in the wrong direction, so that it lifts the edges rather than doming the middle. Fortunately I managed to dome it and then spray it, and now it’s set domed and the edges don’t lift quite as much. Still yet to paint it of course. Let me know if you know how to prevent the warping of the base as the glue dries!
Besides building a desk, that’s all I’ve got round to this week!

Now for todays main event, the grots! … Well you’ve got to start somewhere right? So it may as well be at the bottom…

First off, my pitiful grot squad, who is still yet to be named:



I actually like to name all my mobs, but I haven’t gotten round to fitting these guys in anywhere name or tribe wise yet, so I’m totally up for suggestions!

And now, their mighty (ish) walkers, the Krust Bukkitz, in both forms:







Again I haven’t got round to naming these guys individually yet, so ideas welcome!

These guys are all magnetised in a similar method, so I’ll just go through one and you’ll get the idea of how they’re each done.





So I decided that it’d be simpler to model the sentinels scout sentinels, using the roll cage parts for the guard, and then using the armoured sentinel parts you get in the sentinel kit for the kan ‘lids’. I’m not bothered if they can’t technically be armoured sentinels, I’ll still use them as armoured if I want. The sentinel kits also come with multiple ‘face plates’. I wanted to give the kanz a bit of a face, cause that just feels orky to me. So I used the plain faceplate with just the imperial eagle on it, sanded down the eagle and then added random bits from the kit to give them face and teeth like features, with the viewports in the cockpits acting as eyes, which I’m quite happy with and really gives an orky feel.



I use the magnets already there for the sentinels weapons for the kanz shooting weapons, and then I hide the klaw weapon magnet with the spotlights. I put the klaws over the kans shoulders because the magnets weren’t strong enough to support the arms alone, and I had to build in a little bar which threads through the wiring of the klaws just to stop them falling down. However I really like the over the shoulder look and I feel it gives some real menace to them. I would like to have done that with the shooting weapons as but I felt that a) arms feel more orky than shoulder mounted weapons and b) the shooting weapons would be upside down without major modification, so it was just simpler this way.

I used a single kan kit to convert these so I have the option to take 1 skorcha, 1 big shoota, 1 rokkit launcha or 1 grotzooka, and all have klaws. Normally I try to convert to save money, but in this case I had to buy a kan kit to make 3 kans. However I’m left with a whole host of bits, including the kan bodies and legs which, hopefully with your guys help and advice, I intend to turn into a crude form of mega armour for some kustom mega-nobz!

What I will quickly say is if you’re interested in doing this yourself, seriously consider using the deff dread model. Not only can you get it in the get started box cheap, but it comes with far more weapon options and bits that would be great for giving you more weapon flexibility and kustomization. However you don’t get the grotzooka in there, and in the kan kit you definitely can convert 3 guys with not a lot of remodelling of parts, but you are limited in weapon choice, and I have to run a squad with 3 different weapons which isn’t ideal. In the future I fully intend to see if I can convert sentinels just out of the deff dread kit, and to see how many I can do from a single kit, so if you’re interested in that let me know and I might get to it sooner.

Right that’s it for this week and by god do I ramble! I might post so that my hobby progress status/fluff/extras is on one post a week and the model showcasing/progress help/tutorial type stuff is on another day, just to reduce post length. What do you guys think?

Just to let you know what’s coming next, I’ll be continuing to work on my terrain but I’m going to start working on my necron army (feel free to boo xD). This will just involve building 20 necrons and possibly testing out my paint scheme for now. For the orks, I’ll be building 2 more nobs and posting pictures of my 30 boy mob, painboy and warboss, and a little discussion/question on an issue relating to that to you guys.
Anyways, thanks again for the support guys, and I’ll see you in the next post!

Sentinel-Kans look really good! Very ambitious with all the magnets. I like the orange and purple color scheme as well, very unique.

Wow. Amazing work on the Sentinel Kans.

Each model must take a fair amount of planning, what's your approach in the early stages?

EDC

Oguhmek wrote:Sentinel-Kans look really good! Very ambitious with all the magnets. I like the orange and purple color scheme as well, very unique.

evildrcheese wrote:Wow. Amazing work on the Sentinel Kans.

Each model must take a fair amount of planning, what's your approach in the early stages?

EDC

Cheers guys! And good question:

Generally speaking, as I mentioned before, I try to do a WYSIWYG model, or at least be able to present it as such if I want/need to. So that tends to be my early focus in a build.

Depending on the model, what I tend to do is build it to a stage where its basic structure is there and it's essentially usable, but I still have access to everything. So taking a chimera as an example, I built the treads and the bottom half of the chassis, but left the very top tread track unglued, so I could drop magnets into the side later on if I wanted (infact its still not glued!). I then just rested the roof and rear door on the model, which is pretty stable and doesn't need gluing to stay relatively usable. I also left the turret unglued.

At this stage I focus on getting the imperial side of the vehicle done first, as that takes priority. So I magnetise the model so that all the options for the imperial vehicle that I want can be taken (in the case of the chimera, the hull and turret mounted weapons, along with a tank commander type model out the top just for appearances. You could easily add the searchlights and storm bolter on the pintle this way as well, I just didnt )

After the imperial side is done, it's at this stage I'll focus on getting the ork weapons done. To me I'm building these models to be usable on the battlefield, and I want them to be fair to the actual kits in terms of weapon options and firing arcs. So I'll have a look over the actual kits for the vehicle I'm converting it to and try to get a feel for where the firing arcs are and what options there should be. From there it's a bit of freestyle on how you achieve this, for example with the chimera with the turret, a 360 arc is easy to achieve, and instead of magnetising interchangeable weapons as such, I just put a rocket where the chimera weapons go and put a big shooter on the pintle support, meaning that my chimera always has both options. With more complex vehicles like the battlewagons, I generally counted up how many weapons should be able to hit an enemy each side of the vehicle (e.g. for the rokkit/big shootas you can take up to 4 on it, 2 can all around wagon, and then there is 1 side gunner on each side. Therefore 3 weapons need to be able to hit the sides and 2 from the front and back. This could be achieved by having 2x 360 degree weapons on the top, and one side gunner each side (like the actual model) or you could do 1x 360 degree mounted weapon, and 2 gunners on each side and one extra front and back for example). On top of that you can even do it so you have multiple... "items" on the wagon for each weapon. So for example, you could have big shootas in the leman russ's sponsons, then an ork sitting on top of the sponsons with a rokkit launcha. I technically count that the firing arc of the sponsons is covered by both weapon options, so if I take big shootas, its there, if I take rokkits, its there. This also means you have more orky looking bits on your wagon, even if you accept that half of them arent actually in use and are justt decorative (i.e. if I take 4 big shootas, all the rokkits are decorative at that stage). However as I've said it's all magnetised, so if it gets confusing you can just take things off, but I tend to find things look orky with the former option. That's kinda hard to explain, but hopefully you get my meaning. I also look for upgrades such as rams, grot riggers, grabbin klaws etc, but I only really consider them if a) I really want them on there and b) if it's easy to do with where I'm going with it.

I will clarify that whilst I like to do WYSIWYG, after stressing over my recent battlewagon conversions, I would emphasise that if you have a vision or idea, let that take precedence. The WYSIWYG options are nice, and a good starting place if you don't know what to do, but they can be limiting and difficult to pull off, plus they'll never be completely correct, so whilst I would encourage you to try and achieve them, just have fun and loot how you really want to, cause it can get frustrating otherwise. You could always do similar to me though, that now I have 3 battlewagons that can be WYSIWYG, now I feel I can be more free with my conversions because if anyone does get picky I'll always have those to use, and I can't see myself regularly taking more than 3 battlewagons at the moment. Anyways...

So once I've figured out how to achieve the weapons options, vehicle upgrades, and firing arcs, I then move onto vehicle size. I don't want to have battlewagons the size of land speeders, not only does it not make sense, but it feels like cheating too. So some vehicles, like the chimeras, are fine size wise and don't need modifying. The battlewagons however are longer models, and my looted leman russes just didnt cut it size wise, so I decided to elongate them by having them pull along a wagon, to increase length and because I thought it would look cool and make more sense. Also in the case of the way I've looted my russ' (which you'll see soon!) I've magnetised them in a way that if they are being used as battlewagons, they pull along this trailer type wagon, which has guns on it etc, but the russ turret and sponson etc also have weapons to give me all the options i need to equip the batlewagon correctly. BUT if I want to take them as looted wagons, then I can just remove the magnetised trailers, and now they are just russes, with a turret mounted weapon (killkannon) and up to 3 sponsons, like the looted wagon profile can have, so I have that nice flexibility and have got 2 models for the price of 1.

Once I've done that, I then focus purely on aesthetics, For me this is the hardest point as at this stage nothing is painted, and there can be a fine line between looking good, and having so much crap on there that its too messy to the eye and doesn't look good. On top of this because my russ's are grey, I'm weary of there being too much grey and silver on some models, and not enough colour contrast (like greens and oranges) to make it clearly look looted. So for this I play around, magnetise a few options i think will look good, then I paint it up. For me having the model kinda built really helps, as it gives me an idea of space and where areas look too empty or too busy. I don't think I could envision all the magnetising I'd need in my head ahead of time then apply it. Hence why I like to half build the models first, and work from there.This is also where not gluing up the models comes in handy, because if I decide that I need more ork glyphs somewhere, or more pipes or whatever; the hulls, some tread tracks, turret etc arent glued down, so I can add extra pieces if I need to after I've painted it and can see more clearly what needs adding. (For example, the exhausts on the sentinel kans are magnetised too, but once I had the weapons and plates on there, I didn't feel orkifying the exhausts would improve the model much so I haven't bothered. However I still have that option if I want in the future).

The other thing to touch on is what to convert things to. Now obviously you can convert anything to anything if you really want, and in a way it would be orky to do so. However for me, both to help myself and my opponent, I tend to stick with one vehicle represents another vehicle. For example, my chimeras will always represent trukks, russ's with a wagon are always battlewagons, with the russ's alone are always looted wagons etc. This way everyone clearly knows what is what, and it also makes sense to some degree, a russ fits being a wagon due to its high armour, chimeras are smaller, lighter and quicker and so suit being turned into suped up trukks. This can be a problem however, as some armies have things that just don't fit easily into the orks vehicle options, for example I can't think of any guard vehicles that would make good deffkoptas. So here you either get creative, or do what I'm doing, and converting things from another army to get them (spoilers, tomb blades will become deffkoptas). It also helps that I collect my army first, then build the best list I can, so I don't mind not having certain ork options open to me (yet ).

Anyways I've rambled on for long enough. I hope that gives you some insight, and feel free to ask any more questions or anythig regarding this methodology.

In the near future, what I will probably do for some new looted models is brainstorm on here with you guys options of how to convert something, and hopefully we'll not only come up with some awesome things, but you'll get to see step by step how I go from start to finish, which I think will be alot of fun. Especially for things like more trukks, there's only so many ways I can think of converting a chimera xD

A summary for those like me who are lazy at reading:

TL-DR

Steps I used to convert:

1) Build vehicle so can be used by original faction, but most things aren't glued down so everything is accessible

2) Magnetise original factions weapon/vehicle options

3) Magnetise on ork weapon options, taking care to allow for all wepaon options and trying to make firing arcs accurate to the original ork GW kits (roughly anways)

4) Magnetise ork vehicle upgrade options (rams, klaws etc)

5) Make the vehicle accurate to the original GW kits size if needed (e.g. add a wagon onto a leman russ to increase size)

6) Add aesthetic orky bits to improve the look of the model (orks themselves hanging off is usually a good way to do this, the green just contrasts well)

7) Paint up the model, first the original factions scheme, then do the ork bits (try to weather them similarly).

8) Re-evaluate the vehicles appearance, add more bits if required. Then (if you want) glue up any bits you feel are necessary to make the model more usable (possibly the top treads, turrets etc) You can always leave these unglued if you can get away with it for flexibility in the future.

Cheers guys, expect another post tomorrow!

Fantastic Kan-tinels!

As for the purple Guard, I can't remember the name of the regiment, I just remember them having a black glass-like armour with purple fatigues. Don't have the book on hand to look for it. Anyway, keep up the great work!

Wow I'm blown away by your models. Excellent conversions, magnetization, and paint work. Really looking forward to seeing more, and hopefully we can get a full army picture at some point! I know you said this isn't a showcase blog, but maybe you should make one too, haha!

Keep up the outstanding work and thanks for sharing your models and methods!

Best,
Nukes

Very detailed description of your process! Thanks for sharing.

Looking forward to seeing what else you come up with

EDC

Hey guys!

Sorry for being quiet the past few days, been having some trouble with my laptop and photoshop, so been trying to get around that as well as been working heavily on terrain too!

Todays post will hopefully not be too long, but could use with you're guys advice on something.

First off, here are the photo's of my 30 boy mob "Da Bullz" (I know, it's a crap name but Ghazghkull stole my Bully Boyz idea! xD).



And here are my current 2 HQ's that I take along with the mob, as well as the mobs nob. (Apologies for the not so great photos, but my light box is just too small to fit large mobs in!)





You've met Warboss Treddnikka before, but not the painboy (who is yet to be named, so ideas welcome!) You may notice that the skin colours are different between the Warboss and Painboy, this is actually intentional. I will go more into my fluff at a later date, but essentially my ork force is the culmination of multiple ork tribes conquered/acquired by Kogsnatcha. To help represent these tribes within my army, each tribe has a slightly different shade of skin, and in some cases have trinkets etc in their clan colours too. So keep an eye out for this subtle difference in my other units to come

Also for anyone new to the hobby and is not confident in their painting ability, above is the proof if you just keep doing it you'll get better. The nob on the left was probably the 10th ork model I ever painted, compared to the painboy on the right which is my most recent. In my eyes the quality is leagues apart. So much so that it's making me want to go back and repaint this entire mob again, however I'm not sure my heart can take going through the dull ache of painting 30 boyz right now xD (He says as he lines up the next 30 boy mob to paint...)

I've mentioned before I'm fluff focused, and part of that is naming the mobs and giving them a bit of a theme. In the case of "Da Bullz", they're goff in origin (hence the black helmets) and like to headbutt people or gore them on horns, hence why they're all modelled with helmets. You may have noticed from my previous trukk boyz, that one squad has all hair squigs, and the other have those furry hat things too. This is not only to give them a theme but also to help me out when playing, I recently had a game where all 3 of my mobs got into the same combat and my opponent asked "whose in what squad? I don't know who I'm attacking", but it's very easy for me to tell them apart because of these differences.

With regards to my mobs themselves, I actually intend to collect them with 30 boyz and 3 nobz per mob. Why? a) so that I have the flexibility to take either a mob of 30, led by a nob, or 3x mobs of 10, each with a nob. If you couldn't tell by now I like flexibility in my army The second reason for this is whilst I do magnetise special weapons in my other armies, I prefer to just make and pose my orks (characters and nobs in particular) in a way that I want/have to if they're ebay bought. This does, however, limit the weapon options, so I thought if I have 3 nobs per mob, and give each one a weapon option (choppa, big choppa, power klaw) then if I take a single mob I can essentially choose the nob with the weapon I want. I also don't see having these spare nobs as a waste, because I currently don't have any desire to have squads of nobs, but if I played apocalypse and needed to use all my models, spare nobs can just for nob squads if I want.

Now for the question. I'm in the process of making the other two nobs, and have come up with the idea of each mob having their own banner. In the case above, its a skull with horns for 'Da Bullz'. I really like this as it'll give even more individuality to the mob itself. My issue is this, do I make each nob have the same banner, maybe with subtle changes (like maybe on has the horns facing down, etc), or do I make them have 3 individual banners that represent da bullz (e.g. one banner is an bull skull which i think is in the nobz kit). On the one hand, it doesn't make sense for the orks to be so organised, so individuality seems more appropriate, but on the other hand my force is already pretty organised (just in terms of structure, numbers and paint schemes) and if I use a bunch of different banners I'm essentially 'using up' potential banners for other mobs (and spoilers, I'm going to have alot of mobs). What do you guys think?

Finally, I've just thought that if I split this mob up into 3 mobs of 10, and they all got into the same combat, telling them apart would be difficult. Any suggestions on subtle ways to differentiate these guys into squads of 10, whilst still keeping them the same mob? Possible ideas are tattoos of various colours, stripes or colours on the helmets etc. Let me know your guys ideas please!

Anyways that's going to be it for today. I might show you guys some of the terrain i've bee working on this weekend, but I'm not decided. If not it'll probably be a battlewagon and it's cargo! So stay tuned, and see you in the next post!

Nukes4You wrote:Wow I'm blown away by your models. Excellent conversions, magnetization, and paint work. Really looking forward to seeing more, and hopefully we can get a full army picture at some point! I know you said this isn't a showcase blog, but maybe you should make one too, haha!

Keep up the outstanding work and thanks for sharing your models and methods!

Best,
Nukes

Cheers mate, hugely appreciate the kind words and I'm glad you like them! I'm for sure working towards doing a full army shot for you guys. The biggest issue I have is my lightbox is small (as you've seen above) and the lighting in my house is awful. At the very least once I've put up the individual shots of the first 2000 points I'll do an army shot, then regular army shot updates as I go This way at least you'll get a good idea of what everything looks like, irrespective of the army shot as a whole

Good news everyone! I’m not dead!

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since my last post. A combination of work, family and personal illness has stagnated not only my writing of this blog, but any hobby progress in general.
However thankfully I’m getting better and I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things.

Picking up where I previously left off, below are some pictures of the looted battlewagons I teased. I will just say beforehand that my paint job isn’t really finished as I haven’t done any proper weathering on the russ’, and only a minor weathering on the ork pieces. I feel they still look a little disjointed, as in the schemes don’t flow particularly great, but I’m not sure if that makes it seem more orky or not. What do you guys think?







As you can see I’ve used an actual ‘wagon’ style approach, using bits from the trukk and battlewagon kits as well as some ork boys. I’m really happy with the ‘wagon’ look because it feels very orky to just strap a tin box with guns on it to the back of a patched up stolen tank.

There’s a couple of reasons I went for this wagon approach:

- First is because I already had a couple of the russ’ built, so I couldn’t do anything to complex with internal magnets.
- Second; it also allows me to use these models as both battlewagons (with the wagons attached) or just looted wagons (with just the russ part).
- Third; to make things fairer from a gaming standpoint. The actually battlewagon models are fairly long and I felt just using the russ’ might give me an unfair advantage, so I like the fact that now they are much bulkier and feel more like battlewagons as well practically being more of a pain for me to maneuverer on the board. xD

I will say it is a little fiddly to use on the board because all the ork decoration is magnetised on and it can be very easy to accidently knock pieces of when trying to move the models, something I’ll look to address in future conversions.
There are many design choices that have gone into this conversion, for example a major thing being planning weapon options so that it can be upgraded to match roughly the firing arcs of the official model, as well as having the option to represent 2 of the wagons being open topped or not, but for the sake of keeping the blog posts shorter I won’t go into them, but if you have any questions please feel free to ask! 
There is also a killkannon that can be placed onto the back of 2 of the 3 wagons, but I haven’t currently got that painted up yet.

The big advantage of this build in my opinion is the cost savings I have made. If anyone is looking to use magnets to save money by making their vehicles “reversible”, this wagon method is definitely a good option, as I used a single battlewagon, trukk and ork boy kit to convert all 3 of these russ’s, plus I’ve still got a bunch of pieces left over. And in addition the actual amount of conversion work is quite minimal, as you can almost build the wagons independently and only have to worry about attaching them. Then besides some minor additions to the russ’ they are pretty much unchanged.

This has been a big splurge post of all my current guard conversion and ork work, just as a bit of a “forgive me for putting this off for 2 months” post. This does mean however that this will start to become more like a progress blog rather than the more showcase style thing it has been up until now.

As a little sneak peak bonus, here’s my next planed conversion:



I’m onto my Necron army now, which is going to mean some energy/cybork filled conversions coming up! I’m really excited about these destroyers both for my crons and for what they’ll be looted as. See if you can guess what they’re gonna be!

Anyways guys that’s going to be it for this comeback post. I hope you guys like the stuff so far, and keep asking questions and giving me comments and criticisms, they’re both inspiring and helpful! I’m looking forward to the conversions that this new Necron army will bring and I hope you guys are too!
Cheers!

Hey guys!

I’m back again, this time with Necron goodness! I’ve been working really hard on my Necrons (and their looted counterparts) over the past week and just wanted to share my progress and to finally put some WIP bits into this blog!

First off, my nearly completed Looted Annihilation Barge. I’ve converted these to become Mek Guns, and have also magnetised the mek gun weapons so that it can be used as any of guns that come in the base kit. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out so far. I feel that the left hand side is a little empty (hard to see here) but I’m going to see how it looks painted up first, then I can decide whether to add more orky bits to it.




Next is my teased Looted Destroyers, which are going to become Warbikers! I’ve been really excited about this for a long time, as not only do I love the destroyer models, but I also really want some warbikers for my orks, but I’m not a massive fan of the normal bikers. When I came up with this idea, I’ve been nothing but excited to try it out, and fortunately for me it was an absolute joy to convert so far.

I’m also very happy with how the Destroyer Lord came out and can’t wait to get him painted up.




This is very WIP and I struggled to find a good way to make the twin-linked dakka-guns for the ork bikers. So I’ve ordered some plasticard rods and tubes and going to dive into my first time using plasticard. The plan is to put the dakkaguns over the vents either side of the model, but I’m not 100% on this, I could make them underslung or even put little platform type mounts on the back of the destroyers (the smooth bit) and have them like over the shoulder. Any thoughts on this? Unfortunately my order hasn’t arrived yet, so these guys are on hold for the moment.


Now not a conversion, but I’ve magnetised some immortals to take both their tesla and gauss weapons. These were an absolute pain to do and were really fiddly, and will probably need some green stuff work to cover the gaps, but they work at least. Thought I’d just include them in case anyone wanted to do the same and to see how I did it.



And finally some painted bits; my Necron Overlord and some Warriors. Necrons are an absolute joy to paint compared to Orks and my turnaround time is so much quicker and, due to their simplicity, cleaner looking in some cases.





Next up on my workbench will be a reversible Ghost Ark/Doomsday Ark conversion, looted to be either a trukk or battlewagon (or possibly both!), and then onto looting Wraiths and Spyders!

That’s it for this week! Please let me know what you guys think, C&C’s very welcome!