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Hey Dakka.

A quick introduction. I left the hobby (and Dakka) around 2012 and came back a few years ago, around 9th. But I fell out of the hobby again, partly because I couldn't find anyone to play. I've moved cities and in the last year, I keep meeting people who paint little men, so here I go again

This particular journey started when I randomly popped into a comic shop near me, which also stocks tons of preowned Warhammer. I picked up these adorable 2E plastic terminators for a fiver. A nice little weekend project I thought. Not like I'm going to start collecting an army...


I stripped them in Biostrip 20 and then re-primed them with Colour Forge Raven Black with an (attempted) rattle can zenithal of Matt White.


I decided to go with Sons of Medusa, mostly because I really like the old school bright green colour scheme. And partly because I've been into the Badab War since reading about it in the 4E Cities of Death expansion. I had a small Star Phantoms army before the IA books covered it. But yeah I thought bright green space marines would look rad.


This test model is the first mini I've painted in a couple of years. It was more challenging that I expected. And I only had a size 1 brush. But all told, I'm relatively happy with the basic colours and the scheme. Different art and lore has a lot of variance for the chest aquilas and markings. I went with a warm brassy colour and bone as I think it works well against the green.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And here's the finished squad. I had to wait for a few supplies (I got rid of everything last year!). Drilled the barrels, added some sponge chipping and finished the bases. For my first minis in a while I'm fairly proud. The edge highlighting is a little chunky, but they're done and that's a good thing!







The plan is to continue picking up cheap, second hand models while I get my painting skills and confidence up. The plan will be to build up a small Sons of Medusa army, as fluffy as I can, with the aim to field a small model count army. Since painting these and wanting to explore the hobby some more, I've stumbled into One Page Rules. OPR feels like the system I will build for, as it means I can field whatever I find second hand lmao

The green is striking, well done. Looking forward to see you rescue more old models!

 Flapjack wrote:
The green is striking, well done. Looking forward to see you rescue more old models!

Thank you so much. The green is achieved with AK's Nature Green from the new "The Inks" range over a rattle can zenithal. It's really poppy! As for rescuing old models: I went back to the same shop, and right on the bottom shelf I found a long-neglected RT-era beige plastic Rhino. For a tenner! It was thick with paint and I forgot to photograph it before stripping, but here it is after cleanup:


A few parts broke, but luckily it was superglued together so it came apart fairly nicely. It does suffer from some fairly extensive glue damage, which I will utilise as free weathering.

It was missing the hand rails (not surprising) and the bolters on the top hatches. These go for a tenner each on eBay, so there's no way I'll be paying that!

I bought a full set of the new Deimos pattern Rhino top hatches, and hoped that the "inner" hatch (without the cupola ring) would fit. With a little trimming and some 2mm styrene rod, it looks the business!


I didn't take many in-progress shots of the tank being painted. The old beige top hatch needed a little modeling to match its newer companion:


Once painted, they look great next to each other:


I built a new rear hatch, so I could keep a few parts from this kit for future projects, and sponge chipped and weathered to obscure any damage on the model:


And here's the finished thing:


I think I want to work more into those grills on the sides, but generally speaking this is a nice little transport. Using the green ink over large, flat surfaces causes a lot of pooling. Which isn't ideal. Weathering and chipping goes a long way to camouflage the worst of it!

I've since been mucking about with the OPR army builder and I'm looking at a force which is mostly made up of Terminators and Devestators, led by a Techmarine. OPR units have very high points costs, so 1000 points would look something like:
1x Engineer Master (Techmarine)
3x Destroyers (Terminators), 2x storm bolters 1x heavy flamer
3x Support Brothers (Devastators), 2x Lascannons or ML, 1x HF
1x APC (Rhino)
1x Exo Suit (Centurion)

This feels like a great little fluffy list. But it's 9 models lmao. I'll get tabled no doubt, but it feels apt for the army choice and I'll be focusing on the P&M anyway, I'm not much of a gamer.

The devvies will be in the classic RT desert camo:

Updates. I've been buying random grab bags of Space Marines, and I've managed to piece together a ramshackle group of Devestators. Support Brothers in OPR have the option for a heavy flamer, I don't know if Devvies do. But I wanted one because HF are awesome. The old metal Devvie models are too good, and surprisingly compatible with far more recent kits.


Now I'm getting my eye in, I'm getting a bit more confident. Very slight leg conversion on this one. The Lascannon Devestator might be my favourite unit in the whole game. There's something so cool about a super-solder hoisting an enormous laser gun like it was a rifle.




Really starting to get to grips with the painting again. I painted the heads separately for the first time ever, and that was a game-changer. I'll be doing this where possible from now on. I didn't expect it to make that much difference. But wow!

Looking good! Nice execution on the desert camo.

Wow, that is an old Rhino kit. I had a whole bunch of those back in the day. Mine are all buried in Orky conversions now. I love the desert camo. Great execution.

Flapjack wrote:Looking good! Nice execution on the desert camo.

Thanks, Flapjack! And thanks for returning. The Heavy Flamer guy was the test model and I think the camo was every so slightly too dense, so I pulled it back on the ML and LC guys and I'm happy with how it came out. More of these on the way

Warboss_Waaazag wrote:Wow, that is an old Rhino kit. I had a whole bunch of those back in the day. Mine are all buried in Orky conversions now. I love the desert camo. Great execution.

Yes indeed. The beige plastic RT rhinos went on sale in 1988! I remeber buying them during third edition, but they were in grey plastic by then. What a legacy! Thank you for the compliment on the camo.

I went scouring eBay for a Techmarine (the comic shop didn't have any preowned) and ended up buying two!


A classic Copplestone RT-era TM on the left, and a Jes Goodwin 90s sculpt on the right. Love them both for different reasons. They were both about a fiver, pretty much the cheapest TMs I could find. The Goodwin sculpt will get a melta pistol (I've had a BA Infernus pistol in my bits box for 10 years now), and the beakie will require a servo-harness. The 80s TMs didn't have anything that fancy, so I bought an aftermarket one from Anvil Industries


Here he is painted, unbased. I'll add some more pics of him once he's based up.


Oh and lastly, I repaired the broken banner pole on the terminator armour, and I made and freehanded a banner! It's a little ropey, but not bad for my first attempt at freehand in over ten years

The banner is made from a cut up metal toothpaste tube. I got that from an old Blanchitsu article, I think it was in one of the old codexes too!

These look fantastic - loving the bright green, looks super slick. Currently starting a badab war Lamenters army and this is great inspiration!

Lovely green, great job on the banner!

That green is neat, I find these bright colours are all a bit hard to get about right. And I loove to see older armies, moreso old armies with such a theme. Keep it up!

That Anvil Industries tech harness is really cool. I have one of them kicking around somewhere. I love the bright green. You've done an excellent job with these.

muette wrote:Lovely green, great job on the banner!

Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:That green is neat, I find these bright colours are all a bit hard to get about right. And I loove to see older armies, moreso old armies with such a theme. Keep it up!

Warboss_Waaazag wrote:That Anvil Industries tech harness is really cool. I have one of them kicking around somewhere. I love the bright green. You've done an excellent job with these.

Thanks, all! I'm really happy with how the green is coming out. The only downside to using ink over a basecoat is that I don't have a midtone green that I can use in case I need to do cover ups. It's an all-in paint scheme. No wiggle room!

Hobbit wrote:These look fantastic - loving the bright green, looks super slick. Currently starting a badab war Lamenters army and this is great inspiration!

Oh hell yeah, I wanna see those Lamenters! Good luck with all that checkerboard!

No progress as-yet. I'm trying to think about how a Centurion would look in this force, given that the Centurion models are a little newer than most of these. I'm thinking a RT-era dreadnought would work as a good counts-as. Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome. I recently picked up 20+ RT-era beakies which are going to look great alongside the force.

Here it is so far:

This is the start of a great little project here. Very excited to see your progress. The scheme is super iconic and striking. Still wishing I had had the disposable cash to purchase the old big FW Books on the badab war instead of just settling for the PDFs.

Never even found pdf's for fw stuff, did you buy ebook copies from fw or find them on the internet?

blockade23 wrote:This is the start of a great little project here. Very excited to see your progress. The scheme is super iconic and striking. Still wishing I had had the disposable cash to purchase the old big FW Books on the badab war instead of just settling for the PDFs.

Thanks! I wanted a really bright chapter to get some of that 2E/3E vibe. Sons of Medusa seemed to fit that bill, and there's some potential for flavour, conversions and kitbashes down the road! Yeah I'd love to stumble over those two Badab books in the charity shop...

Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:Never even found pdf's for fw stuff, did you buy ebook copies from fw or find them on the internet?

I have found some scanned PDFs on some of the darker corners of the internet...

Right, some Friday updates! Here is a sample of the Beakies as they arrived. They're caked in super-thick paint, I bet some kid was super enthusiastic about painting these, and I love that! I don't know what the feeling is called, but I love seeing old models, badly assembled, haphazardly painted. It's nostalgic I think, as we all remember being young and wanting to make all our poses "dynamic" and usually they just looked terrible! I love these boys:


There's a real mix in here. Only about five or six have bolters. The rest have the pistol arm, various CC weapons, a couple of HB / ML guys and about 10 of them have these really mysterious shields. I have no idea what they're from but I actually like the idea of assault marines with shields? I believe there's something in the HH game, so I'll file that away as a possibility.

Anyway, here they are stripped. I was surprised to see a mix of beige, navy blue and green plastics in here. Quite the collection! They were superglued together, too. So most of them came apart meaning I can be in control of (most of) the posing.


I'm now slowly putting them back together into two tactical squads. You can see the glue damage, which is just the reality of working with these sorts of models. It's free weathering, I'll work with it when I paint them! I want to learn to do some simple two-part casting so I can make sure I have enough arms and guns for 20 fellas.






A newer Devastator head _just about_ works on this old RT body. I can't decide whether to paint all of the HW guys in the camo scheme or whether I should have a few in green so they can hang out in tactical squads!

Ooh! Very nice Terminators and rhino. God, I love the way you painted those devvies too. Love the Techmarine as well. Exalted, I will be watching this blog with interest.

Are you planning on doing the bigger 'current' bases or sticking with the older ones?

bullisariuscowl wrote:Ooh! Very nice Terminators and rhino. God, I love the way you painted those devvies too. Love the Techmarine as well. Exalted, I will be watching this blog with interest.

Thank you! The early green models were a good exercise to get me back into painting. But I'm very pleased with the step up that the devvies represent. Here's hoping the painting continues to improve.

blockade23 wrote:Are you planning on doing the bigger 'current' bases or sticking with the older ones?

Hey! I did decide this would be a firstborn only army. Partly because it's fluffier for the Badab War, but partly because I would be rescuing and recycling older models. I am mindful to keep the bases that these models come with rather than more modern, bigger bases. I don't think I'm ever going to play a game of 10E, so I'm not looking for this army to be legal in that way. Most likely I'm going to be playing 1PR, or there's been some talk of getting the 3E rulebooks out and playing with that ruleset. Which sounds fun!

UPDATES:
Here's the Jes Goodwin TM with his melta pistol, alongside two new recruits into his force:


I picked up these dreads nice and cheap from Facebook Marketplace recently. I have no use for a Deredeo, so he's going to be completely overhauled in a fun way. A little mini-project which I can't wait to show you. I also picked up a Contemptor which I'm going to proxy as a regular boxy dread. I wanted to magnetise the right arm so I can switch between an AC and a second CC arm.


I had to do a little styrene modelling for the second arm


Needs a little more green stuffing, but the concept is solid and the magnets work!


Thanks for the support. Next update will be the my new custom pattern dreadnought and hopefully slinging some paint on these lads!

That rescue blog is golden, such a pleasure to the eyes!

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
That rescue blog is golden, such a pleasure to the eyes!

Thank you! I really enjoy the rescuing aspect of this hobby. And it feels apt for the Sons, to be scouring the battlefields for lost or recoverable units. Clean 'em up, paint 'em green and press 'em into service for the Emperor!

I've hit a wall with the RT plastic beakies. I bought about 20 of them but only five had bolters. I've done what I can, but I'm looking at my options for making playable units. I thought about casting new RT arms using Blue Stuff and Milliput. I've had reasonable success with that before, but only on bigger parts.

As a test, I've tried gluing on some arms from the much newer Heresy kits. And although the firstborn in those kits are actually way bigger than nearly any other firstborn plastic Space Marine, the arms actually don't look bad at all! What do you think?

Need to see that painted, but to be honest that doesn't look nearly as "off" as I would have feared.

I used blue stuff to duplicate tiranid bits for a scenery project, but while it was enough for trash terrain, I wouldn't have been exactly thrilled otherwise. Probably just me getting below average results through some unknown error in the process though.

I think you're right. I've got to get them painted before making my mind up. I've got some fun modelling updates but I I think a bit more paint is needed!

Lovely updates! the group pic looks good and the freehand on the banner is inspiring.

YESSS!

Love seeing the Sons in the OG armor types!

Great work on the camo stripes too. I loved doing my Desert Support Squad. That scheme ended up being on of my favorite parts of my entire SoM army.

Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:Need to see that painted, but to be honest that doesn't look nearly as "off" as I would have feared.

Here they are undercoated and after two coats of ink. If you heavily scrutinise them, you can _just about_ spot that the line between kits. But I've got different heads, different power packs, different arms and I'm happy with it

Flapjack wrote:Lovely updates! the group pic looks good and the freehand on the banner is inspiring.

Thank you Flapjack. The banner needs a little matt varnish but I'm pleased with it.

grey_death wrote:YESSS!
Love seeing the Sons in the OG armor types!
Great work on the camo stripes too. I loved doing my Desert Support Squad. That scheme ended up being on of my favorite parts of my entire SoM army.

Thank you mate. I've done a couple more devvies now, so I have the options of Lascannons or ML, instead of taking a mixed squad.

The first major update is for my counts-as Centurion suit. In OPR these are called Heavy Exo Suits and have slightly more options for loadouts. The cheapest, OOB unit is a single suit with flamers and nothing else. So that's what I'm aiming for in my initial 1000 point list.

I mentioned in a previous thread that I wanted to find an old RT Dreadnought to stand in as the scale wouldn't be far off and the lore for Centurions is kind of similar to the lore of the old dread. But damn, they spenny! I'm not dropping £50 on an old model, especially when the ethos for this project has been about rescuing cheap, unwanted miniatures. But I couldn't get the thought out of my head, so I got a guy up the road from me to 3D print me this guy:


The dread is scaled to be about 44mm to the top of the head. I added bigger goober shoes so he looks a little more intimidating. And I clipped and converted the dreadnought fists to include authentic-looking flamers.


I moulded an old flamer tip in Blue Stuff and pressed some Green Stuff in, trimmed it up and added it to a load of styrene pipe and rod. Added an underslung fuel tank so it sort of echoes the design of the Contemptor flamer fist.


I'm dead happy with this guy. A weird, obsolete old model being kept in shape is so fitting for the Sons. I'm painting him right now and I can't wait to show you the finished result.

Nice dread! Really, those arms look good once colours are uniform. Great!

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Nice dread! Really, those arms look good once colours are uniform. Great!

Yeah the arms look alright! Definitely good enough for me. And thanks for the compliment on the dread. I've spent today getting him painted up. And here he is!


Really pleased with how he came out. And really pleased with the paint job. I've not attempted to do these sorts of blends before. There's definitely room for improvement but I'm proud of this little fella


I'm especially happy with how the flamers came out. I think they use the established visual language and sell the idea of flamers.

Man, those bright colours are just so well suited to these early era designs... Absolutly lovely!

Quick update! I caught Covid so I've been out of the game lately. Also working on other projects of mine. But I have made a start on my 2xDCC Contemptor Dread. I have been _loving_ exploring the surfaces of this dread, working on blending and so on. The details on the chest are just right for my skill level. Obviously there's lots of scope for improvement, but if these were any more detailed I really would have struggled.



I could have mentioned before, but it's really worth clicking through the images in the Dakka gallery. The resized-for-forum images are a little soft. Details are a little crisper in the gallery.

Both fists will get yellow and black hazard stripes as this has been echoed from the Terminator PF and then the RT dread fists. There is VERY little detail on the legs. Partly as I don't really want people focusing on the legs and partly because I'll do some chipping and weathering powder work so it feels a little redundant to work too hard on these areas.

I'm yet to play a game but I've really enjoyed painting up this force so far!

Wow, high quality highlights on that one pal!