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.

I've lately been painting more minis that aren't part of any larger army or grouping, so let's put them here.

First cab off the ranks is the original 1991 Eldar Avatar, who's been sitting in my old bits box for many moons. I decided to fish him out in a cheeky moment, since the painting challenge my local gaming group is doing over summer awards Painting Points (which do nothing) for number of minis completed (troops in groups of 5, or 3 for large bases like Terminators, characters and monsters and vehicles per model) and their in-game points value, on the basis that a high-points mini is probably going to be more work to paint than a cheap one. There are edge cases of course, like the Cultist Firebrand (45pts and technically a character) who really isn't worth painting any more carefully than any other cultist (5pts apiece and you need to paint minimum five), and the Callidus Assassin who's 100pts and no matter how much care you put into her she just doesn't have that much detail that needs painting. Somebody else recently painted their Avatar - the current one - and that reminded me I had this, and I thought it'd be hilarious to paint a single barely-larger-than-infantry-sized mini for 280pts. Of course, I took care with the paint - I like the comedy of min-maxing a painting challenge with no prizes, but I don't want to actually do lazy paint jobs - so while this wasn't as much hassle as the gigantic current Avatar, it was still a fair bit of work.



This mini's also got a special place in the collection of nostalgia and pop culture that passes for my heart, since it comes from the first time I set foot in an actual Games Workshop store. Back when I first got into the hobby - late 80s, WD105 in 1988 and the original Space Hulk in 1989 were my initial points of contact - there were no GW stores in Sydney, so as best I can recall minis came from Hobbyco, which is a general hobby store so Citadel had to share shelf space with aircraft and tank models and model railways and jigsaw puzzles and all those sorts of things, and consequently the selection was limited. Then we took a holiday in 91 or 92 to the UK, to visit distant relatives and see a castle in person and those sorts of things you do in the UK, and the one thing I specifically wanted to do was see a GW store - the Oxford Street one, as it turned out. You can imagine how overwhelming it was to walk into it, with its bright red and yellow deco (I'm not a fan of the modern corporate-monochrome look) and be surrounded by walls of blister packs and boxes; I walked out with a pair of Cyclone Terminators (the original sort, with trapezoidal launchers; one's in my old marine army, the other I only noticed when I opened it up had a miscast which left the front of the helmet flattened, so it got left in the bits box, and eventually a couple of years back I sawed off the launcher to add to a Chaos Terminator, yes I know they can't have Cyclone launchers, I don't care it looks cool), an Eldar warship from Spacefleet (don't still have that, sadly), and the Avatar.

Mind you, I was young, so when I got home the Avatar got an awful paint job, and subsequently - since I gravitated away from collecting Eldar once I got more into the game proper, rather than just painting standalone minis - donated parts to other conversions. The cape went to my very rudimentary first attempt at a Chapter Master (stuck on the back of the old Space Hulk: Genestealer plastic Terminator Librarian), but that got replaced by a much fancier one based on the lovely modular 3rd edition Tactical marines, so the cape returned to the bits box. The right hand and spear ended up on my Hierarch (who was mainly the original Morathi mini), who's still intact; the left hand I don't even know where it ended up. So besides stripping the old paint off, I had some restoring to do. The new right hand's from the Blood Bowl Amazon team, while the left is from some elf or other, I forget exactly what, I just hunted through spare sprues until something caught my eye. Since the left hand is lowered I got it into my head to have the Avatar dragging its sword, kind of like Pyramid Head with its giant cleaver - I don't see the Avatar as an elegant combatant, but rather a brute force monster more like a Balrog just barely held in the shape of an Eldar by the wraithbone shell it's summoned into.

I took the same approach with painting, to try to really play up the unrefined heat of the thing - started with an all-over application of yellow contrast paint, then worked up the armour through orange to red and dark crimson, with a few dabs of dark grey on the bumps on the thigh plates where they've cooled off the most. The replacement left arm was bare, so for that one I left it yellow and highlighted up to white, to make it look like that's the Avatar's bare skin, maybe it helps it wield the sword better. The 'lighting' on the base is nothing fancy, just gently drybrushed red and orange, but I'm pleased with how it worked out - I also added in dark grey scorched footprints at the back of the base, with little specks of orange around them, which was supposed to be the heat from its feet causing the dirt around it to break out in tiny spot fires, but that came out a bit vague. The bloody right hand got the same paint treatment as everywhere else (including the Blood Bowl vambraces painted gold like the rest of the armour), then just some red contrast paint over the top - nothing fancy in the paint job there, but I did my best to control how heavily the red went on, so as not to just render the entire hand a single flat colour.



I didn't want to take attention away from the magma look, so I kept the rest of the colours pretty neutral, with plain white hair and a black cape - little bit of red drybrushing on the underside for lighting, and on the back I drew on (as neatly as I could, my detail brush is edging towards the uncooperative phase) the Avatar's rune, painted in wraithbone since it's got such good coverage, then yellow ink to colour it, orange on the tips, and painted pale yellow at the junctions of lines as if the rune's also burning from the inside and cooling towards its extremeties. For the gold I did an orange wash over the base gold to pick out the recesses without looking too shadowy, then put on a fairly heavy highlight in pale yellow and pure white at the tips - I googled up a bunch of photos of molten gold, with the idea being that the gold around is just barely staying solid as the Avatar's body has it on the verge of liquifying.

So that's one more to my new Eldar army, for a grand total of three miniatures, this plus the Fire Dragon and Striking Scorpion who've been free minis of the month; I've got the old metal Farseer coming, whenever made-to-order gets off their butts and finishes it (it's in a set with a few old metal Warlocks, which I'm splitting with the local Eldar player; I've still got two metal Warlocks from my old collection, I don't need more). Since I'm using these pre-painted bases (this one got undercoated and repainted, but with the Dragon and Scorpion I've just sprayed them separately then glued them to the base) it'd get expensive to try to do a whole Aeldari force, so I expect they'll remain just display pieces, but Eldar were the first faction I really collected (not building an army, I just chose them because they looked cool) so they're nice to have.

Looks lovely! Great work.

Thanks



Last November I went to a second-hand event and picked up various odds and ends (including the hulls for the Whirlwind I recently finished, in the Empyrean Crusade thread); amid a whole heap of firstborn space marines, and some old metal chaos minis that were the kind of thing I was legitimately looking for rather than just buying things I remembered from my childhood because firstborn are going cheap nowadays, I spotted this Steel Legion Sentinel - actually one of the more expensive items on my purchase list on the day (by which I mean it was like $25 or something, so not actually expensive, only compared to getting 40 marines for $20), but amid the more-or-less grounded look and feel of the Imperial Guard I've always liked how they had Sentinels lurching about to remind everyone this is the future, but still kind of dorky and clunky because they're just the Guard, they don't get cool tech.





Judging by the paint job when I bought it it'd been in the service of a genestealer cult, but I wasn't interested in that and went for a full respray. Normally I'd have gone for a full retro look as well, but the original Sentinel (the 'egg on legs') was just done a flat grey in GW photos, which honestly is really dull, so I went instead for the more vibrant camo decoration given to the second metal Sentinel from 1998. My version ended up more vibrant still, with a richer green and brighter yellow than the drab green and pale orange in the GW version - not really something I planned, but I often launch into paint jobs without really considering which paints will result in what overall look, especially when it comes to highlights where I tend to go bold just because it looks more interesting.



Not that I mind the variation, since the GW paint job was with a bunch of Cadians, and I decided this would belong to the Xenonian 70Xth regiment I made up a little while back, as an accessory to the 696th who, if I ever get around to painting them, will be the Traitor Guard squad in my warband; I've got a box of Eschers plus the Eshcer special weapons add-ons waiting in the pile, it's just a really big pile. The Xenonians appeared back in the 3rd edition Codex Imperial Guard, on a double page of dozens of little illustrations of different regiments - they had their own look, but I always felt they were there for the benefit of anyone who wanted to make a regiment out of Escher miniatures. The 70Xth I made up after a rewatch of Apocalypse Now, as a regiment who's gone full Colonel Kurtz and were just massacring their way across the galaxy, theoretically hunting the 696th because a Xenonian serving chaos is an insult to all Xenonians and they take honour dead serious (they're 70Xth because when Xenonia learned about the 696th they insisted on the Guard immediately raising a pursuit regiment, rather than waiting for the next scheduled raising which would've been the 705th), but in fact just seeing everyone besides themselves as either 'enemy' or 'collateral damage' - the joke being that while the US wanted Kurtz dead to avoid bad publicity, the Imperium's just put an execution order on file for the 70Xth to have their paperwork in order, but without a due date since they're perfectly happy for them to rampage around slaughtering civilians so long as they keep racking up heretic kills at the same time.



(And because I always suspected 'Xenonian' was inspired by Xena, I made their ID marking - the three stripes Guard vehicles have to identify their regiment - the middle stripes of the lesbian flag.)

The missile is a bit of an oddity, since it's based on the missiles on some Epic-scale Imperial Guard missile tanks or something that I think I remember from old White Dwarf, which were predominantly white, but all the ones I've been able to find in google were more colourful, so I just went for a plain white paint job since it feels like what I'm half-remembering even though I can't be sure. Hunter-killers being one-shot weapons I like the idea that it just got bolted onto the already-painted Sentinel and nobody could be bothered adding camo to it since it'll be gone as soon as the next battle starts anyway. I like to imagine '2+' is some regimental slang used for luck.

I don't see myself collecting Guard, just because of how expensive it would be to keep buying boxes of Eschers - not so bad for the pure infantry, but I'd want tanks and transports and gun crews and all that, so that's a lot of Cadian minis I'd be buying just to replace. So for the moment the 'regiment' is just this Sentinel and the single soldier I painted up for the painting contest a while back, but I've always been fond of the Guard (they were even among my first minis, some metal Guard cavalry on plastic horses, and a couple of human bombs), so I'm glad they have representatives in my cabinet.

Bangerang! Love seeing the original Avatar. Great job on the rune.

Thanks

May as well put this here, I'm not going to start a solo thread for Sisters. Besides the Sororitas boxes I picked up for use in chaos conversions, I also got the old Combat Patrol (the one with the Rhino in it), from a guy in the local gaming group who'd decided not to do a Sisters army after all and offered it cheap. At the time I snapped it up just for possible use in future chaos conversions, but having already done a few Chaos Sisters I never got around to more - it's not like you can use Chaos Sisters on the tabletop in a chaos marine army, there's no reason to build them en masse (I guess unless you do an entire Chaos Sisters army, using the Sororitas codex, but I don't plan on that). So they sat around doing nothing for a while, until I was randomly looking through colour schemes and saw one I liked, a kind of dark slate-grey armour with burgundy cloth combo, close to the stock Martyred Lady look but with a bit more colour interest than just plain red and black.

I have had a Sororitas Order since they were first sold during late 2nd edition, the Order of Our Lady of the Rose - tangentially relevant to the whole War of the False Emperor lore that all my armies are in some vague way connected to without having been directly involved (it's a whole other story I'll get into some time). I bought the original Sisters box due to an unfathomably long queue - there was a Star Trek convention down at the opera house with Patrick Stewart appearing, and besides predating the 'Sir' this was also before you always got tickets online, instead mostly just rocking up on the day and taking your chances. I got down to the quay and saw an enormous queue stretching out, and decided I couldn't be bothered - I love Star Trek, but I don't really make a big deal of the actors, they're great but it's in-universe Trek that I obsess over, so while it would've been nice to see P-Stew on stage, I don't really regret turning around and doing something else with my Saturday than standing in the sun for hours. That something else turned out to be popping into the Games Workshop on the walk back, and I had the ticket money spare now, so...

My first paint scheme for my order was influenced by Bloody Rose - I like Martyred Lady now, but at the time they didn't have the white hair and their cloth was red on the inside lining and black on the outside, it made them pretty monotone. So red armour with grey cloth - looking back I don't love the look, although it doesn't help that my highlighting game was very poor back then. Still, I painted up the full squad, added the Seraphim and Retributors and a Canoness, it was a decent little collection (and as you can see, I gave them all names). I never rounded them out into a tabletop army, since I didn't like the Frateris Militia (I've come around to the idea a lot more now, but at the time there were like two poses, so mobs of them looked pretty bad), and the Sororitas list back then was pretty reliant on Militia doing Gretchin duty (as seen in the original Sisters/Necrons battle report, where they hadn't yet painted any Militia and the Sisters got trounced; it always used to bug me when that happened, I know we can't always afford to have every unit we want so there was value in battle reports featuring less-than-perfect lists, but I always felt like surely the WD folks could've shown some discipline for the sake of the reader while still being able to pursue some themed army ideas, rather than always just being stuck with the studio team having painted just a single one of each unit).

The dark blue with black cloth scheme is something I tried out a while later on, near the end of 3rd when I'd started to manage basic highlighting and wanted to do better than the flat red paint jobs I'd done - I do still have a few Sisters in their original colours, but the bulk of the force got repainted.



So that brings us up to the present, when I decided to paint up the Combat Patrol box - not with a view to building an army (the whole miracle dice thing seems too fiddly, I like my chaos army where they just rush up the table and charge anything in reach), just to have them on display. Being small high-detail minis they reminded me of Eldar, who I've painted a couple of from Free Minis of the Month, and liked but couldn't see myself doing in bulk - I've already got my conversion-heavy Chaos and lots-of-painted-detail Astartes, but unlike both of those there's no real variation to speak of with the Sisters, and painting the same high-effort paint job over and over, without having wacky conversions to liven them up, or changing chapter every unit for variety, seemed like it'd be a bit of a chore. So I decided the Sisters would just be my relax army, painted to a decent table-ready state, but no further - basic drybrushing and highlights on the armour, basic cloth, contrast paint skin with no dotting the eyes or colouring the lips, no additional symbols or anything, just a respectable paint scheme that'd look good as a group but not drain me.



Besides the Combat Patrol I picked up one Warsuit from an issue of Imperium I spotted - no reason, it just seemed a cool mini to have for $20. Since it's a big fancy piece, and there's only one of them, I put a bit more effort in than I do with regular Sisters - not so much the painting, but in modifying the mini as I built it. It's always bugged me a little bit that the lore goes on about how devout Sisters need to be to properly attune with a Warsuit (sounds like Godannar without the slapstick), but the actual minis are just standing in generic poses, like Spunkmeyer from Aliens awkwardly piloting the Power Loader so we can see how much better Ripley is at it. So I added a chunk of tank (left over from the Heresy Predator) and had a go at the limbs to get a more energetic pose. It's a bit vague how the Sister's legs are fitting into the Warsuit's legs anyway, and it's anyone's guess how her hips are coping with the new pose, but 40k's always been style over practicality so that's fine - the arms were more of a challenge, in modifying the Sister's arms, plus the very fiddly control linkages attached to them, to mirror the pose of the Warsuit arms, while also getting the power cables from the back hooked up. Worked out okay in the end.

As I said I didn't try anything fancy with the paint, just a basic quick table-ready job so it'd be consistent with the regular Sororitas minis it'll be displayed alongside. I did go look up some old sources for the tank piece though, taking the camo pattern of the Heles 57th from the White Dwarf article introducing the then-new Leman Russ kit. Don't know whether that means my Sisters are fighting against the 57th, or alongside them and the enemy was the one that trashed whatever tank that was, but either could be the case.