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So, hello everyone I've decided to set up a P&M blog to showcase some of my painting that I do for mainly Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar. I also have an external blog which I run with a friend and we try to post daily on it!
As of yesterday I decided to undertake the Hobby Progress Challenge for the 2016/17 season, so I thought I would set this up so I could blog about my progress on here as well as on the external blog, hopefully I can get some more feedback which will allow me to improve my skills as I go along. I'm not the best painter, having only been in the hobby 2 years, and not really painting that much, as well as being a teenager with school etc. I would like this blog along with the hobby progress challenge to paint a lot more than I did last year, and slowly get better at painting.
I collect Chaos Space Marines (hence the title name), and Vampire Counts in Age of Sigmar. However I have quite a long hobby achievement list for this next year including a club painting project that I have already started, which you can read about here and here. This is aptly named my 'Box o' Tricks' project which I'm sure you will understand in time!

2016/2017 Hobby Achievement List
Chaos Space Marines
- 5 Chosen
- 3 Bikes
- 1 Helbrute
- 1 Chaos Lord

Vampire Counts/Death
- 2 Necromancers
- 10 Dire Wolves
- 1 Lord on a Zombie Dragon
- 20 Crypt Ghouls
- 20 Skeleton Warriors
- 1 Corpse Cart
- 2 Morghast Archai

Dark Vengeance Dark Angels
- 10 Tactical Marines
- 1 Librarian
- 1 Company Master
- 5 Deathwing Terminators
- 3 Ravenwing Bikes

Box O' Tricks ongoing project
- Necrons - 1 Overlord, 7 Warriors, 3 Scarabs, 1 Triarch Stalker - 5 Warriors Completed (28/08/16)
- AdMech - 10 Skitarii with more to come?
- Orks - 1 Warboss, some Boyz, 6 KillaKans, 1 Trukk Gun
- Stormcast - 1 Lord Relictor, 3 Prosecutors
- Anything else that the club likes to give me to paint!

Some Ideas for the future!
Just putting down a few future ideas? Also this guy here gets much respect from me and if I had unlimited monetary suppplies, I would be doing the same! Ah, maybe one day...

30k Death Guard - I've always wanted to dabble into 30k, one of the main things that has put me off is the price. However with B@C and other things such as kitbashing the entry level can now be quite cheap. I'm planning to make this completely out of this world with different armour marks, good painting, lots of conversions, as well as some cool bases.

40k/AoS Daemons - Daemons have the advantage to be used with both AoS and 40k, so I figured that it may supplement my Chaos Marines quite well. I particularly like Khorne and Tzeentch so that should be interesting if I decided to follow through with this.

Bolt Action Germans - Deviating from Games Workshop can never be a bad thing, and Warlord are just as good a miniature company, and Bolt Action seems like a cool historical game for WW2.

40k Dark Mechanicum?? - Possibility to bolster the forces of my Chaos army, just a very basic idea at the moment.

Anyway, thanks for reading (hopefully someone finds this interesting and reads it) and hopefully I can try to improve my painting and complete some great models!

Ok so you might be thinking, that was a bit quick surely? Well I got these guys finished yesterday and so there is no reason not to share them right?
Although Necrons are notoriously the easiest to paint in 40k, I thought I painted these guys well to a solid TTS. This crosses off a bit off my list and I can turn my attention to some Chosen which I need to have finished by tomorrow for Combat Patrol at WHW. When they get done I will upload some photos of both them and my whole Combat Patrol list, with any luck!
Thanks for reading!

Got some pictures together of my completed Chaos Chosen that I did for the Combat Patrol event I attended yesterday. I'm pretty happy with how these guys turned out, and they performed pretty well in the games (I came 36th overall out of 62 people). This completes another one of the units on my to do list and so I might tackle some of the Death models next!



However, there is always room for improvement and so any comments and ideas to help me with my future painting would be welcome!
Thanks for reading.

Looking cool. Are they Khorne CSM?

You've certainly got plenty to be getting on with.

EDC

@EDC Yeah thats what I run them as in game - Chosen with the MoK.
Unfortunately haven't made many inroads into that yet, what with school term just starting, and it being a bit hectic. Hopefully I can get time to sit down and paint a bit more later this week.

Right.
Enough messing about let's get this thing up and off the ground properly. I need to get my bloody act together, I have so much hobby to do and yet I spend all my time pissing around on Facebook and crap like that *stops making this post to check Facebook*

Anyway, I have a lot of things to get on with and since the last post back in September, I have painted one Ork Warboss, planned a new army for this years School League and bought a load of bits for it, built painted a box of Crypt Ghouls, built 3 Crypt Horrors, a BA M4 Sherman and half an American infantryman. Not exactly much...
I tried unsuccessfully to motivate myself to paint by signing up to the Dakka tale of many gamers painting challenge and promptly missed my January target. This won't happen again. So basically I need to get myself painting more, and this Dakka P&M blog is going to help, well hopefully if I can get some nice comments it will keep me motivated. I'm not the best painter in the world, but I want to improve, of course I've not really helped myself by not practicing

I also run an external blog with my best friend, and because he has a pet hate for forums, he won't ever interact on here. Although he paints much more than I do (partly because he doesn't do half as much other gak as I do), he still fails to put blog posts up. I tried to do both at the same time for like what 2 days I found it too much hassle to keep updating both with different interesting posts, and no one wants to read copied posts from one blog to another. So as a result, I've decided that from now on I will do most of my posting on here, that way I can get more opinions from the community, rather than in sitting on a blog thats only occasionally frequented by Russian bots. I'll still post like showcase pieces on the external blog, but keep it mainly for that - this is where the main lot of ideas and WIPs will be posted.

I have just over 30 days until the March internal tournament at my club to buid up a new army. Granted this is only 450 points, but I have decided to built a custom deathwatch army based on some of my own fluff. They're called the Chaos Corsairs, and they're basically chaos veterans from the Horus Heresy. So I have to kitbash and paint up 10 Veterans, a Librarian, a Drop Pod, and 2 Terminators. I only ordered the Drop Pod last night and so it could be a while in coming. I'm going to make this my priority for the next month or so to get my motivation back up.
What do you think?
Watch this space, more progress coming very soon.

DO IT!
we beleive in you colin.

I've been working on some bits over the week, not much mind, but it has really set me in good stead to do a lot more over this next weeks holiday!
First of all I sorted out all the boxes I had my hobby stuff in because they were a mess. This included sorting all the different unbuilt models and other bits into labelled boxes. These can be seen below:


I've also been working on a Necron Triarch Stalker, which is something I'm painting for my club. It's still fairly early days, but I think it is coming along quite nicely:


Finally, I received the rest of the MKIV marines from my friend, and so have begun assembling them for my Chaos Corsairs army:


I'm trying to find bits on bits sites and the general Internet, but I'm not having much luck as most bits sites don't have the required quantities I need. If anybody knows of anywhere on the Internet that may have these bits in stock, or personally have them and would be willing to sell at bitz shop sorta prices, just let me know:
11 Deathwatch Veteran Shoulder Pads
2 Stalker Pattern Boltguns (or DW Veteran boltguns, they could be converted)
5 Deathwatch Veteran or SM Scout Shotguns

Over the next few days, I'm going to buy some 40mm bases and try the instant mould I bought a while back to make some custom dead marine bases and objective markers, using greenstuff. I'll be sure to post up some pictures when I do, and I will also try and get these Corsairs as fully built as possible, maybe start writing the fluff for them. If anyone has cool name ideas, as I would like to individually name the different marines, then again let me know. I was thinking perhaps if people wanted to I could name them after members of dakka who frequent my P&M Blog. Wouldn't fit in with the background that well, but would be completely awesome. I also have a drop pod that got delivered on Thursday so I might tackle that in a couple of days, once I have looked thoroughly how to properly assemble them. It is my first and I have heard it is a nightmare kit to build
Thanks for dropping by!

EDIT: Agh the pictures don't want to work - fixing this!
EDIT: All sorted!

Today I tried out the Instant Mould that I got for my birthday, by trying to create a dead marine for a base, made out of greenstuff. It didn't go particularly well, because I don't think that I pressed the instant mould enough around the dead marine and so consequently I lost a lot of detail from it. Anyway here are some pictures from the process:





As you can see it needs a bit of refinement, but over the next day or two I'm going to try out another one, and see how it comes off.
I also visited a local club last night, which I had been invited to before Christmas, but the chance only arose that I could go yesterday. However, they were awesome people and I had a great time there. I managed to have a game of magic, 40k, and bolt action (starter set), all within four hours. I've attached some pictures of the tables for your viewing pleaure, including one of my game(of 40k). It was against Space Marines, and I managed to win 5-2:






Also I saw this cool game being played there which is called Battleground. Basically the two players set up miniature forts with working elastic band cannons and catapults etc. They then have to try and shoot each other literally off of the board! Looked like carnarge:


Now, I'm going to try and assemble that Drop Pod I have around. I was thinking about a paint scheme earlier, and I had trouble coming up with one. My Chaos Corsairs unfortunately do not follow one colour scheme or legion, and I though that painting it plain black and silver would be quite boring. As there are 5 doors, I'm thinking of doing one door 'dedicated' to each god, having one door represent Chaos Undivided. I'll get the pod assembled first and then give it go - whats the worst that can happen?
Thanks for reading, and all comments are welcome! (hint hint )

Come on Colin, let's see some more painted goodness!

How did you find bolt action out of interest? I'm supposed to be trying it tomorrow

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlnt-Yk6oi4
Really good tutorial on press moulding

Good idea focusing your hobby updates in one place.

A good solid win in your 40k game too by the sound of it.

Looking forward to seeing more painted stuff!

EDC

@JamesY Revision is hampering my painting time at the moment, I will get some done today though! Bolt Action is the best, if you've played 40k for any length of time it will be super easy to pick up. Awesome 'random' unit activation for turns which imo is better than 40k. Have fun, just don't roll 1's on your To Hit rolls for a bazooka team for 3 turns in a row like I did!

@STG Actually that was the one that initially gave me the idea - it is completely awesome! Thanks

@EDC Yeah I thought I needed to get back into this and I get very little interaction on the external blog, so here was the best place! The game was good fun, and the score doesn't reflect how close the game was at all.

Should post an update later - stay tuned!

I'm completely useless at keeping this updated, lets just admit it. However, I've not been quiet at all for me when it comes to the hobby. I've played 2 games of 40k and 1 game of fantasy, which I duly lost all. However, on the hobby side of things I have done a lot more. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:





I've been busy, to say the least. I bought all the bits I needed and assembled all of the models. The veterans are kitbashed from mk4 suits and deathwatch bitz, the terminators are just normal chaos terminators, with the powerfist converted to have the auxiliary melta on the bottom. The terminators started out life as an Ebay squad I won in a tournament, and so I had to strip and rebuild them to make them fit for purpose.


I'm really enjoying cracking on with the painting of these guys, however I'm under some serious time constraint. The tournament I need them ready for is next Saturday (11/3/17), so I need to get them sorted ASAP. Should be no problem providing I can get in an hour or two each day and I'm efficient with it. Let me know what you think of the paintjobs so far, I know the pictures are not the best quality, but I hope you can appreciate they are better than my previous pics.
One last thing, I'm going to need to give these guys all suitable names, for my fluff section. I'm useless with names, so if anyone wants to come up with any, feel free to leave them on here. I've included a list of models and their legions, so let me know which one you would like to specifically name. I don't get many people reading this, so if you want to do more than one or even all of them, feel free, because they've all got to have names, and I'm crap at thinking of em :
Librarian - Word Bearers - ??
Watch Sargeant 1 - SoH - ??
Vet - Night Lords - ??
Vet - Emps Children - ??
Vet - Death Guard - ??
Vet - Thousand Sons - ??

Watch Sargeant 2 - SoH - ??
Vet - Alpha Legion - ??
Vet - Word Bearers - ??
Blackshield - World Eaters -??
Vet - Iron Warrirors - ??

Terminator - Death Guard - ??
Terminator - Iron Warriors - ??

Thanks for reading!

Nice update.

Surely all the Alpha Legion dudes will be Alpharius?

EDC

I got something finished!! Sorry for the lack of updates, but I did get my Deathwatch finished for the tournament - only just though mind! I'm really happy with how they've turned out, and I think it shows how much I've improved.




I decided to put them on 40mm bases, which I personally think look good, although my friend said he thought the bases were stupidly big - what do you think?
The tournament itself was quite disappointing for me, I came 6th and qualified for the School League semis, however people who come above me I know I could beat. I think the system personally was quite flawed as the three games were random, so some people managed to play inexperienced players, and I came up against 1 very experienced player and two not so. (meaning it was easier for some people to win all games than it was for others - I won 2) There was a nomination for 'best general' each round, where the TO asked players who won to describe how well they had tabled their opponent. I wasn't a big fan as it rewarded players for tabling their opponents rather than playing the objective. I might be complaining about very little, yet I got what I really wanted and that's to go to Warhammer World with a team in April.
I'll detail some more projects I'm starting now when I get back tonight.
Thanks for reading

Looking good.

I'm not sold on the 40mm for standard marines personally, but whatever works for you. It's your hobby after all!

EDC

@EDC Thanks for the advice again buddy, you're my number 1 fan at the moment! I thought as Deathwatch marines they need to stand out as characters in their own right if you get me? I mean you can't please everyone but I'm quite happy with them

You might think woah two posts in one day what are you doing with your life? But I said I would, and I just thought I would have a talk about some of the future stuff I'm going to be painting and modelling. With the Deathwatch out of the way, and no immediate deadlines to hand, I've got a few things that I'm going to slowly work my way through. I also want to talk about a league I might be setting up at my local (school) club and ask for some advice really.

So first, I've decided to convert up a nice Blood Bowl team, as I've played a couple of games with the starter set, and been really enjoying it. I had 10 Beastmen I traded with someone a while ago which are built and primed, so its just been a case of cutting the weapons off, drilling the hands through to get rid of the weapon handles, and then refilling them with LGS. I should also be receiving 2 Chaos Warriors as well, and in case you haven't worked it out I'm doing a Chaos Chosen team. I'm currently working on a test model, which I should be able to put up by the end of the week.

Next, I've got some Bolt Action to paint. I got a build an army set of Americans for Christmas, and right now only the Sherman and the HQ team are actually assembled. I'm going to start building those as soon as I've finished the Blood Bowl team, and try and get them finished before exams roll around (middle of May?)

After those two endeavours it will likely be the summer, and my exams will be over, so I've had a couple of ideas for what to do in my extra long summer holiday I get . I'm going to hopefully get a job, which should mean I have a little more money to spend on plastic crack. Over the past few days, I pulled out my CSM codex again, and I've been reading it. I guess you could say I've fallen back in love with them - like they might be complete gak competitive wise, but they look cool and they were my starting army after all! I've realised just how little of the CSM units I have, and so I'm going back to do the faction justice. You might think why have I not bought Traitors Legions yet? Well thats because 1) I dont have the models to make use of the formations at the moment and 2) I've got a bad feeling about what GW might to 8th edition 40k in the summer. I don't want to buy anymore books at the moment because I have a gut feeling that they're going to make them all invalid come 8th edition (also I've got no money but shhh!)
So to sum up, I want to expand my Chaos collection over the summer!

Now onto this League I'm planning at the club. When I say 'club' its a bunch of schoolkids, that play Warhammer at my school.
So anyway, I had this idea to start a 40k League, to try and promote competitive and good play between all the members (especially the younger ones). This is what I propose to do:(please leave some feedback, if you spot any problems!)

Charge approx £2-£3 to enter (the League would last about 3 to 4 months)
You have to play at least 1 game a month, otherwise you're kicked off
All models must be fully painted and based (to encourage painting and basing)
No Unbound armies - all armies must be CAD or formation detachments (unbound pisses me off, and I think it's important for members to learn how to build good legal lists)
At least 750 pt games of 40k either Eternal or Maelstrom missions
Points go as : 10 for a crushing victory (Double VP of opponent), 7 for a victory, 5 for a draw, 3 for a loss, and 1 for a crushing defeat
The league points would be calculated by taking the points and dividing them by the number of games played, which would give an average points score
At the end 1st 2nd and 3rd would get a choice between 3 wargaming related things (not necessarily 40k) worth a certain amount.
The league would then refresh

I would like to hear some thoughts on this, whether you think it would work for secondary school kids (11-18yo)?
Thanks for reading