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 Boss Salvage wrote:
The possessed's dong

Fairy wings are great too and the cultist is a solid little kitbash.

Thanks

Anyway just for completeness's sake, last month's contest entry, Sister Julienne:



It was originally going to be the Hospitaller set's fallen sister down on the ground giving 'birth' to a daemonette, but after Formerly Misericordia I felt like I ought to be more equal-opportunity in my abominations, and there's no reason men like old mate from the Black Legion can't give birth too. Well, no reason that can't be solved by Julienne's medkit drill attachment (speaking of, that's from Fabulous Bile, so it didn't fit into the socket on the Hospitaller backpack - I cut the ball off that side and glued it back on over the end of the new servo-arm's 'shoulder'). I was kind of undecided on whether to go with the original Black Legion colour scheme, where the trim is silver, or the modern where they've gone for bling, so the dark brass is kind of a halfway point - not my favourite bit of painting (should've just gone full retro, as always) but he's just an accessory to the main miniature, so never mind (likewise, I forgot to paint the Eye of Horus on his shoulder, but it's the shoulder facing away from the 'front' of the mini so who cares). That dais is from the old Ral Partha Slave Auction set, same as the gal serving as a targeter on my Havoc lascannoneer, I've been wanting to find a use for it for ages since the naked lady frescos are ideal for Slaanesh, but it's also not the kind of thing you'd find on the battlefield, wouldn't make sense to just have a Legionary standing on it - Julienne doesn't get out much, just stays in her 'nursery' on Eden and has victims brought to her. Fun fact about her boobs (the kind of phrase you only get when discussing Slaaneshi armies), I did the overall paintwork on her early on, including the bare breasts and (chortling to myself as I always do when I think up something fun and weird) the milk leaking from her nipples, but then took a week off painting entirely because a big update dropped for Dreamlight Valley - by the time I came back, and painted all the highlighting on her robes and all of the backpack and staff and her book, I'd forgotten I'd done that, so I didn't put her behind spoiler tags in the contest thread; luckily Nevelon or a mod did it for me after I posted the final pics. The book is Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness - unfortunately I didn't think of that until after I'd assembled the miniature and it was too late to file the covers flat, so the original Sororitas book cover sculpt is still there with the RoC image just painted over top of it, but since the best I could do at that tiny size was put blotches of colour in the right place, it's not that big a deal. She's got it open to the rules for summoning daemons - of course there wasn't anything in the book about summoning them directly into people's abdominal cavities, but the rules back then were more just guidelines for players to riff on.

So that was a chore:



Saint Valerie, known to her pals in the warband as 'the Salvation Engine', for this month's contest - taking the 'upcycling old parts' approach to Renewal, because I initially didn't plan to use the Venomcrawler at all (hence it losing various bits to other conversions), the base was originally put together for Doomrider before I ditched it to concentrate on painting Doomy himself and used a simpler base, and the fallen sister was originally going to be on Sister Julienne's base before I decided to use a legionary instead, so this is a real collection of leftovers. By the time I decided to do something with it after all the Venomcrawler had lost one of its stabby forelimbs (haven't finished the miniature it's used on yet), one of its tentacles to a Terminator, its face to another Terminator, its tongue and the piece of ruin one leg plugs into to Doomrider, and both excruciator cannons and sets of exhausts to the Noise Obliterator I've been very slowly working on in the background of other projects. Instead of the stabby forelimbs I used a pair of the large daemonette claws, and in place of the tentacles I just went with human arms, one from an Escher deathmaiden, one from the Melusai holding somebody's heart. Also the dick, which I figured was now or never since it'd be comically oversized on any other miniature - I cut up a chaos bike's front armour to make a kind of sheath for it to be poking out of, to tie it more into the cyborg look of the whole thing (and less obvious that it was just a wrong-scale dildo glued onto the model). I haven't bothered uploading an uncensored version - you're all on the internet, you know what one looks like.



Probably the aspect of the Venomcrawler I least liked was its butt-up-in-the-air posture, so I clipped off the pegs on the 'hips' of all four legs leaving them just ball joints, and glued them back in with a backward lean, as well as having it crawling upwards over the wartrakk to further tilt it back - what with the spider abdomen hanging out way behind the legs I ended up having to use the one remaining forelimb to support it, since it's not actually glued to the base (to make it easier to paint both parts), and even if it was the contact points would be so small it'd probably fall off backwards anyway without the extra limb. Maybe should've filed down the tip of the leg to get rid of the ground pad on the end of it, but it helps keep the whole thing a little more stable, and when it's based that's hidden behind part of the tank trap anyway. Valerie's upper body (not actually her original body, she had herself fed to the crawler to possess it, then mutated out a replica of herself from its head) uses a pair of outstretched sword arms - since she's got so many other limbs for attacking with, I thought it'd be fun to have her torso arms in a 'behold my magnificence' kind of pose. I went for gold on her insignia rather than the usual pink to go with her saint status.



Since I already did Evil Sunz colours on the ram bar on Pax's base I decided to go Bad Moons on the trakk - tried to tell a little story with it, with green blood splattered all over the tank trap spike that's smashed through the driver's seat, and what's left of the driver landed there. His colours and the design on his remaining shoulder are copied from an example in Ere We Go, the only one of the old Rogue Trader era Ork books I've got. You can see on that side some extra armour over the track made from halves of fuel cans - this used to be one of my Gorkamorka vehicles, all of which I heavily converted (before getting bored of the whole thing, since nobody else around here seemed to play it). The crescent on the front of the track you can see on the first photo, painted yellow as a Moons emblem, is actually the remnant of the glue I used to stick on a missile pod, which I took off again to strip the vehicle down for use as a base - convenient shape as it turned out. What with needing three or more hands to hold the crawler and its leg and the plastic cement while I was attaching the legs, they didn't wind up in quite the right place, so I had to dig into my bits box and use an old bit of stowage of a crate and a rolled up tarp, stuck onto the front of the handlebars so there'd be something for the limb to rest on there.



To replace the missing excruciator cannons my first thought was daemonettes growing out of the sides of the abdomen wielding heavy weapons, but that seemed like it'd be difficult to have their hips set horizontally into the cannon mounts while getting their torsos upright enough to not be staring at the ground (and also figuring out how to make a daemonette hold a lascannon). So instead we've got a couple of sisters, impaled on the end of Melusai tails rather than growing directly out of the crawler - Val probably could've found volunteers among her fellow chaos sisters to have a snake tail stuck up them but I like painting other armies' colours on bits of armour and stuff on bases, so I decided she's using Imperial sisters as her improvised gun turrets, with the tails manipulating their spines to make them fire their guns since they're not going to cooperate on their own. Since I've got that box of skulls around I decided one of them had been up there long enough to die and decompose - also clipped her leg off and used a couple of bits of plastic rod to make shin bones. The purple on the heavy flamers, and the gold around their barrels, is a concession to rules (not that I'm ever going to use this thing on the tabletop - my enthusiasm for playing 40k's waning in any case, regardless of how much I still enjoy modelling and painting), to pretend that chaos magic is causing the flamers to behave just like excruciator cannons. I chose Argent Shroud and Valorous Heart for the orders of the 'gunners' based on colours - I wanted to do the Argent Shroud's bare metal paintjob, and since she's therefore got red on her gun casing and the lining of her robe I didn't want red on the other sister, so it wouldn't look like they were a matching pair somehow - that ruled out Bloody Rose, I'd already done Martyred Lady on the chaos spawn's base, Ebon Chalice would've had the same white robes, Sacred Rose's white armour would be too similar to the chaos sisters, and that left Valorous Heart.

If we're being honest, I got pretty tired of painting this thing well before it was finished - its size and complexity, plus the totally different colour schemes of Val and her two gunners plus the Bad Moons stuff on the base, made it feel like a long slog to actually be making progress towards completion, and on top of that not having the crawler based meant I was hanving to just hold it while I was painting it, which was inconvenient, and slightly painful given all the spikes. (I did try putting some padding on the inner edges of a painting stand and clamping them around the rear leg, but it just snapped off given how much the rest of the mini was wobbling around while I was turning it this way and that to paint, and I couldn't see any way to more securely attach it to a handle.) I don't regret the job - and once it was done, the next evening I was happily back to painting the bunch of regular minis I'd set aside to focus on this, so it hasn't burned me out on painting as a hobby or anything - but I won't be attempting anything this size again.

I'm not familiar with the base model, but the final result is pretty cool. I can see how one would get tired of painting it, though, especially given just how much of the model is white.

The white was actually another one of those 'lazy with good results' parts, just Apothecary White contrast, then a single pass of lining the panel edges next to the trim - that took a while, but it was the first step of painting so I hadn't had time to get tired of it by then, whereas by the time I got to putting all the gold on, which is roughly the same amount of work as lining the white, I was pretty over it. I feel like the worst part was how many parts of the model got in each other's way, al the legs being bunched together, the 'turrets' making the sides difficult to get to and vice versa - while I'm fairly content with my current 'screw vehicles (not like that)' policy, I doubt a Rhino would frustrate me the same way - at least not unless I went wild converting it with extra bits, which I would, because what'd be the point of doing a Rhino if it wasn't some crazy conversion...

(If I did have to though, I'd definitely use the Night Shift trick of drilling a hole through the bottom of the tank where nobody'd ever see it and supergluing a bolt onto the inside, so it could be screwed onto my little camera tripod as a painting handle. I did think of doing that with the venomcrawler, but there's no flat 'bottom' to it that'd be invisible once based to drill a big ugly hole into, and the body's in halves cut vertically so it'd be a pain to get a bolt secured inside it anyway.)

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
. . . while I'm fairly content with my current 'screw vehicles (not like that)' policy, . . .

If it truly is not like that, you should perhaps not put genitalia on all of your vehicles?

It's a cool conversion, though. Lots of different things going on that all work together.

W H O A

Bravo on another crazy conversion giving life to a twisted mockery of Imperial morality And also putting the rather bleh venomcrawler to good use, extensive upgrades and all.

 DJJazzyJeff wrote:

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
. . . while I'm fairly content with my current 'screw vehicles (not like that)' policy, . . .

If it truly is not like that, you should perhaps not put genitalia on all of your vehicles?

It's just this one... of a total of one vehicles I've made (not counting Doomrider's bike). I did have this idea for a Rhino with a, let's say, 'fleshy' front deployment hatch that'd be literally giving birth to troops, but luckily that'd require a lot more custom sculpting than I'm capable of, so that's not going to happen.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Bravo on another crazy conversion giving life to a twisted mockery of Imperial morality

Thanks

So, getting Saint Valerie finished let me get back to work on all the half-finished minis I'd put aside in the meantime, so here's this weekend's batch:



Three of them obviously first assembled right after I put together Formerly Sister Misericordia and had spare spawn parts lying around - not much to say about them, although for the dismembered space marine arm (a leftover 2nd edition plastic arm from when they used to be used on metal marine bodies) as usual I went back to the Rogue Trader chapter gallery and picked the old logo of the Fire Hawks, who nowadays seem to have a fairly mundane phoenix kind of symbol in place of their old delightfully war punk mushroom cloud. The shoulder icon on the three-headed legionary is from Realm of Chaos's 'dictionary' of chaos runes, and does indeed mean "multiple heads". And on the far left, another of those blind-boxed marines, with my usual workaround to using loyalist minis without all the spiky trim that she's still mutating into her 'proper' armour - Lamenters in this case, I'd seen a youtube video (Miniscape, if you're curious) about how to paint a Lamenters shoulder pad and wanted to give it a try, under the comforting assurance I'd only ever have to do it once. The video actually recommended drawing on the initial grid with a fine-tipped marker, but I didn't have one handy, so I just painted the whole thing - can't decide if that counts as laziness or the opposite.

And in the middle my new field commander of the 2000pt 10th edition army list I'm working on, Eternalia the Luscious - my compromise between Lucius the Eternal being the only thing that makes an Emperor's Children army Emperor's Children nowadays (not that I'm expecting to use Lucy's Noise-Marines-as-Battleline rule, since I've only got a handful of Noise Marines and half of them are old metal minis I don't want to be carrying around to battles, but it's the principle of the thing), and Lucius's miniature being butt-ugly. So she's got a stabby thing (old Possessed arm) and whippy thing (Escher flail on the hilt of the mini's original chainaxe) to replicate the wargear loadout, and I put her up on that big skull so she stands out as the force's leader - which'll probably mean she'll have trouble getting behind cover, but nobody ever said Slaanesh was sensible. She's far from flawless, but given her status I took my time to paint her as well as I'm capable, and I'm pretty proud of the result. My favourite bit's actually the bolter on the base - an old 2nd edition one with its stock still attached, painted to match the Blood Angel captain on the 2nd edition game box.

I've been having a glance back through this thread, and noticed since I like to post groups and themes rather than just every mini as soon as it's finished, I'd missed out on a few - so here they are:



From the left, the fourth recipient of parts from that one Dread Pageant goat mutant mini, in this case the head - filed the face of a helmet flat to create somewhere to mount it on all hunched forward like that. Next, the only thing I could really think of to use that giant hair daemonette head, this was actually put together way back during the Helpers painting contest, but I got fixated on the warpsmith and decided not to split my attention, so I finished this one off later. Haven't repainted her skirts to pink yet, I've got a bunch of minis on the go (as always) so refitting old ones is a low priority. Next a couple of Noise Marines - the original (the actual metal original, not the similarly posed plastic version), and a 2nd edition metal. I really like the 'avalanche of colour' look for Noise Marines, so if we do get an Emperor's Children codex and it's Noise Marine Everything, I'll probably keep using the basic CSM list just because I can't make myself paint these things in bulk. That's a current-style resin Noise Marine head on the 2nd edition one, I saved the oldhammer head for another piece I'm working on. And lastly, a random idea I had after I got the Amazon Blood Bowl team for parts and started playing around - the Amazon head on a Legionary body looked quite striking so I painted her as an original Emperor's Child, with just the one white shoulder pad showing allegiance to the Bringers of Wonder. She'd be post-fall, obviously, with all the spiky trim, but not one of the rabid pastels-and-guitar-guns crowd - I like to see Slaanesh as the whole spectrum of 'to hell with anyone else, do what YOU want', and she wants to keep wearing purple and gold because it looked amazing the whole time.

(Incidentally that last one also shows the different between my current and old base styles - I used to paint the base dark purple then drybrush some highlights onto it before applying the sparkle paint, now I just slop on Shyish Purple contrast paint directly over the wraithbone base coat then put on the glitter.

September's contest entry, Aurora, covering all three bases: big guns, big biceps, and shooting miniature suns.



Although put a question mark on what actually comes out of the gun - since cultists can't have plasma guns I decided the gun's so busted that it just belches out unfocused gouts of plasma with the same effect as a flamer. Not that I plan to play any 40k any time soon (I got tired of 9th as it was wrapping up, and haven't felt any need to try 10th), but it's fun to have the rules as a structure to work within and find unexpected solutions to. The idea of the gun being super busted (which also probably explains why it hadn't been confiscated by a legionary) gave me the idea to go heavy on the wear and rust, which I don't normally get to do given how the Bringers love their immaculate shiny armour - I thought it'd be fun to have this gun start off as an old school red casing 2nd edition weapon that got captured and never repaired since then. Not that I'm very precise with the chipped paint and rust effects, but it was a fun little project, and also ended up giving me the idea to paint the plasma canister on the backpack blue with a little Ultramarine logo, and similarly beat up. I also painted a couple of the plasma coils (or whatever they are) dark grey after the usual white coat before drybrushing on their 'glow', to make it look like they'd burned out - went with a blue glow rather than the usual green to further reinforce that the gun's salvaged, rather than from the Bringers' own armoury. I remember the first time I painted this miniature, back in Necromunda's first run, enjoying how drybrushing picked out all the little details on the backpack, although back then I just did the whole thing brown - this time I wanted more of a 'random assortment of gear' look, and since she's a Slaaneshi cultist, the rope is red to look like bondage rope, the two cylinders above the plasma pack got painted black and flesh to look like dildos, and the spanner got red tips to look like a miniature cattle prod. Since she's got a plasma gun, regardless of how barely functional it is, she presumably has a bit of status among the cultists, so I gave her a mix of the grimy brown clothes the regular cultists have and a few more colourful bits - the lozenge 'camo' pattern on her boot is a recreation of the pattern I used for my Eschers back in the day, although theirs was black on white.

It only occurred to me while I was painting that the cables from the gun are probably supposed to plug into the end of the backpack canister, but I guess I didn't realise that when I first put her together, and since her old paint wasn't a thick coat I just resprayed her as-is rather than disassembling and stripping her. I guess the cables are all wired into the unseen side of the canister somehow instead.

You did a great job on this nifty model. I like all the naughty little details you added to tie her in with the rest of your army (warband? team?). The plasma glow is quite effective-- I can never seem to do that sort of OSL to my own satisfaction.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
You did a great job on this nifty model. I like all the naughty little details you added to tie her in with the rest of your army (warband? team?). The plasma glow is quite effective-- I can never seem to do that sort of OSL to my own satisfaction.

Thanks I tend to use 'warband' just because that's how Realm of Chaos called it, even though they were mainly referring to the WFB side of things - the Bringers probably think of themselves as a 'blessed host' or something, but then again they probably change it five times a day as the whim takes them, so no sense trying to keep up.

The glow's nothing fancy, but I'll run it down in case it's any help - it's basically just a gentle drybrush, in this case pale blue, with the plasma coils painted pure white beforehand. I've got a couple of nice brushes I use for proper painting, but for drybrushing and slopping in contrast paints and inks and so on I just get packs of cheap brushes from the local $2 shop and replace them once they get ratty - for a small area like that I use one of them that's about 2mm wide, and wipe virtually everything off before I drybrush so it takes quire a few passes before any real colour starts showing up. The 'glow' is just a matter of not being careful about where the edges of the brush are, the only part of the glow I brushed on by itself on this one was on the boob closest to the coils.

Actually got the technique, if it counts as one, from doing it by accident on Doomrider's plasma pistol - my plan was drybrush the colour onto the coils then paint the pistol's casing afterwards, so I didn't have to be careful of the edges, but after the drybrushing I quite liked the effect, and since the pistol's base colour was the volupous pink I'd done the whole mini in on step one, I figured it was fine to just leave him with a pink gun. I've got some more glows planned for this month's mini, which may need more actual painting to make work, we'll just have to see in time how that turns out.

Not technically part of the warband, but in the same sub-canon (and they'd probably fancy her anyway, skull and all) - this month's contest entry, a Sister Superior of the Martyred Order:



To recap how we ended up here in a bit more detail than I did in the contest thread, obviously I started out thinking Legion of the Damned, but I couldn't find a suitable mini - the new set of blind-boxed loyalist marines aren't being sold at GW stores (apparently they're intended for newsagents and third party stores, but I don't think anyone's told them), and aside from the old 2nd edition monopose plastic tacticals I don't have unpainted non-spiky marines just lying around, so I got to thinking about alternatives, and 'Order of the Damned' popped into my head, which seems a lot more me anyway. The skull-headed sister corpse on the Venomcrawler is the obvious inspiration for the conversion - since the skulls don't have necks I just used a krak grenade I'd clipped off something or other from the bits box, since it's small and basically round; probably could've done with clipping it a bit shorter, but 40k mini scale is so wonky anyway I think it's fine even with the head a bit higher than it ought to be compared to a regular Sororitas mini. The original plan for painting was to go classic LotD, with bones painted on the armour - I filed off the fleur-de-lys on the knee and backpack to make room - and the flames on the skirt and sleeves, but I had second thoughts: since the weapons are so much more prominent on this mini than a marine's boltgun I wanted to try something a bit special for them, and the memory of JoshInJapan's Burning Men from a couple of months previously popped up, so I painted the sword and gun (and the various holy icons and the wings on the left shoulder) got upgraded to 'made of hellfire', following roughly the same technique I used for the glowing hot autocannon a little while back. Having done that I thought it'd be a bit much to add the flames on the cloth pieces as well, so they got ditched - and then looking at the mini it occurred to me that it'd really only be her shin that could have a decently-sized bone painted on it, since everything else was either covered by skirts or so small and obscured that it'd just look like bone-coloued lines of paint - so I left her alone, on the basis that having a bare skull is close enough. For the belts and holster and scabbard I used whatever that charcoaly black paint is, just so I could say I'd painted them something other than the base coat, and the metal that's not glowing - buckles, buttons on the skirts, and the pistol hilt - I did in dark copper, since I didn't want everything metal on her glowing hot. Back when I was planning a more classic Legion of the Damned look I went through the PDFs I definitely don't have of old White Dwarf issues and printed out the original LotD article with its art for inspiration, and their Rogue Traderish punk graffiti look, with things like 'born to die' written on them, inspired the 'no rest' on her backpack (since I'd filed it flat and had to put something there); originally I was thinking 'no respite' but I can't paint that small.

I haven't really nailed down the lore of how we ended up with the Martyred Order exactly, but given the miracle wackiness than normal Sororitas get up to, it's probably just the result of a bunch of them being outnumbered a zillion to one in battle and praying really hard while in a bad mood during their last stand, and became kind of daemons but on the Emperor's side, they just appear out of nowhere in the middle of battles that have already degenerated into raw butchery (even by 40k standards) and get stuck in. I won't be painting any more, since it'd just be doing the same thing over and over (and I can't even be bothered playing normal games of 40k, I'm not touching that miracle system with a ten foot space pole) but I fancied the idea of painting this one as if she's part of an army, so she got a different base style to the Bringers - no glitter, and blue drybrushing over black to look suitably midnighty. The little terrain piece was left over from the Venomcrawler, used to be attached to one of its legs - having the Sister with one foot up on it meant her boots weren't quite flat to the base, but that was nothing a whole lot of plastic cement couldn't sort out.

This is a really cool army. Love the use of space hulk terminators!

The Damned Sister looks really good-- I think you nailed to red-hot glow on the accessories. I feel like the bolter and sword might benefit from a more extreme gradient- close to black- as you get away from the hottest section near the core, to really sell the internal heat.

 PaddyMick wrote:
This is a really cool army. Love the use of space hulk terminators!

Thanks. Space Hulk was my first GW game, so naturally there's a lot of nostalgia there. I don't know if I'll be adding any more of the old plastics to the warband (unless I think up some new way to use one, besides just 'paint it chaos like the last one'), but I've got a squad of five unconverted gen one plastic Terminators waiting for paint at the moment, which I'm planning to do as classic Space Hulk v1 Blood Angels just for old times' sake.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
The Damned Sister looks really good-- I think you nailed to red-hot glow on the accessories. I feel like the bolter and sword might benefit from a more extreme gradient- close to black- as you get away from the hottest section near the core, to really sell the internal heat.

Thanks. Yeah I think you're right about the weapons - the bolter in particular, if I had it to do again, I'd drybrush up to orange then repaint the outer shell dark orange, crevices and all, and start drybrushing darker from there. Never mind though, live and learn.

As usual for completeness's sake, November's contest entry, Terminator Lord Obsidia:





Based on, initially, finding one lonely issue of Warhammer Imperium in a newsagent with a single Kataphron Destroyer - I hadn't thought of doing anything with any Mechanicus parts, but no way I was passing up a sprue full of interesting parts I didn't already have, and fond memories of an old 80s B-movie called Eliminators featuring a tank-treaded 'mandroid' naturally led to this. Given the bulk of the thing I decided this'd fill a 'Terminator Lord' spot I had open on my 1500 point 'goal list' (I've kind of abandoned any intention of playing games - a mix of it being awkward to move minis around on public transport, and honestly I don't enjoy the actual gameplay much anyway - but the list is a nice bit of structure to work with), which in turn meant the weapons would be a combi-weapon and chainfist. I decided to take 'chainfist' literally, using a chainsword arm from the old Possessed set, and for the combi-weapon it occurred to me that now they're all just 'combi-weapons' there's no reason one barrel always has to be a bolter - so this'll probably become illegal once Codex Chaos rolls around and GW backtracks on that dumb idea, but like I said, not playing anyway, who cares. I tried a bit of an orange-red-purple gradient on the melta barrel for heat damage, but it didn't really show very well - I was using contrast paints, I might try it again just with regular paints next time I have a meltagun.

I'd recently gone through the Chaos Rhino set (I decided I couldn't be bothered painting a vehicle, so I kept the bits I thought I'd find a use for - leaving enough to still credibly decorate a Chaos Rhino - and donated the set to my local games group to be someone else's problem) so those parts were handy - I actually didn't notice the Mechanicus symbols on the sides of the tracks until I'd glued it all together, so those got hastily filed flat and had those hound heads stuck over top of them, which turned out to be decent mounting points for the Rhino trophy spikes I'd been having trouble finding somewhere to attach. The skulls on those are actually a bit chunkier than the ones on the regular Terminator spikes, but maybe those are Astartes skulls, and the smaller ones are from Guard colonels or whatever. The Tau helmet didn't turn out the way I'd hoped - obviously I wanted the classic 3rd edition Tau but I haven't needed that faded orange in my palette yet, so I tried to improvise using brownish skin tones and brighter highlights, then since it wasn't really working decided to just call it a different colour scheme and did the 'eye' and antenna white in case that looked interesting, then gave up and just slopped some purple 'blood' over it hide it a bit and moved on. It's not very clean but I'm happier with the marine helmet, done as a Rogue Trader era Raptor Legion (back before they became massive Halo fans, I assume from their 'modern' look).

Given the way the 'waist' of the Kataphron's sunk down between the front of the tracks the mini actually ended up a bit short compared to regular Terminators, so I decided to cheat my way out of that problem by bulking up the base - after a quick look around I remembered the leftovers of the box of Necrons I got to do chaos androids (squad of six, naturally, so four left over) and went for a kind of reverse James Cameron look of a human (technically) rolling over a pile of machine skeletons. Speaking of the treads, I decided to paint the inner wheels with grey rims, which I gather is what actual tanks have (from watching Night Shift videos) - bit silly to be going for realism at this point, but hey, why not? The tentacle was added last, both to fill in the visual gap left by the chassis rearing up over the Necron pile (and obscure the boring underside), and because I hadn't used it on the Venomcrawler, since the other tentacle had already been used in a prior conversion and I didn't want to have half the pair there. The pointy tip, plus the horns on the helmet, got painted as flesh because, well, Slaanesh.



And of course the Botticelli on the shoulder - that wasn't planned at all, I just needed to think of something to put there (since the Bringers of Wonder don't have a standard warband symbol, they all have their own individual thing, because they're all raging egotists) and 100+ minis in I'm low on ideas for doing the Slaanesh symbol in different ways, so the first random idea that pops up is what I do; in this case I've got a Birth of Venus action figure (yes really) still waiting for me to unbox her, so that was in my line of sight. Like the cover of Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness on the Hospitaller's book, it was really just a matter of getting splotches of roughly the right colours in roughly the right place, but given my ability I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The only thing I'd prefer to have different would be for the background to not be so close to the grey-white armour colour, so it's more a case of edge-to-edge art on the shoulder pad, but that's (roughly) the colour the sea and sky are in the painting; I went over the sky with a pale blue but it's very close to the grey armour, and for the sea I just sketched in some hints of the shadows of the waves in a darker grey. I like the idea of classic art on the shoulder pads - it seems a very Emperor's Children thing to do, in hindsight I feel like even their pre-Heresy colours should've been less 'purple and gold' and more 'entirely covered in fancy artwork', so that's something I'll do more of (which may or may not end up looking a lot like I'm recreating the gallery from Animal Crossing).

nice

Smart conversion, I want some destroyer tracks to mess with the more I see them used for nefarious chaos deeds. ...

Thanks folks

Finally finished the gen one Obliterator, so I took a family photo with its descendants:



I don't know that the 'just made of flesh and bone' idea worked that well - sound in theory, but I feel like the sculpt was really fighting me the whole way, with all its obvious riveted panels. Still, I think those things look rubbish painted as metal (even the old Eavy Metal photos, no matter how good the painters were) - I kind of wound up liking the detail-heavy sculpt, once I'd put some contrast paint on and could actually see the detail, but I think the only way to really bring that out would've been doing the whole thing non-metallic metal, and I'm just not up for that on a sculpt that's so complicated and that, honestly, I still only half-like. So yeah, she looks like she's maybe made of a combination of wet sand and play-doh, but never mind, one thing it's not is normal, and that's good enough for me.

very nice

Thanks

He's not technically a member of the Bringers of Wonder, but I imagine he works for them on occasion (I first put him together back when 'mercenaries' was among the voting options a few months back, but left him unpainted since it didn't get up) - from 1987's Space Pirates line by Iron Claw (they were a kind of boutique offshoot of Citadel that eventually got re-absorbed), Dambo Kweltz:



My idea for the base was that this guy's survived all ten editions by being 40k's answer to Chuck Norris - and hence, the reason he'll even work with Sylelle and her mad little carnival of degenerates is that he's seen so much dren that every horror the 41st Millennium has to offer is just another paycheque to him. So naturally I dug into the bits box (both old and new drawers - it's a little makeup organiser set of clear plastic drawers) for parts of fallen foes. Since I used to have a Dark Eldar army back in 3rd there's naturally an abundance of their odds and ends: the jetbike fuselage (just the top part, it's hollow at the back, but this guy's just to go on a shelf so I don't have to worry about what it looks like from the back) got the black with gold edges of the default Kabal in the original 3rd edition Codex Dark Eldar, while the bike-mounted blaster cannon's red colour scheme is kind of extrapolated from an Archon with a red bike in that codex; the underslung weapon was actually black on that model, but I wanted a variety of colours on the wreckage, so I changed it up. Just peeking out from behind the barrel-spikes of the blaster cannon you can see the tip of a jetbike scythe, in dark silver with the housing painted purple, from my own old Kabal, the Lost Souls, and failing anything earlier (they seemed to only have one Incubus ready to be photographed in that first codex) I went with the ghostly green colour scheme GW seemed to settle on for the Dark Eldar later in 3rd. The old shuriken catapult's likewise one of my armies, the craftworld Zaran, whose farseer is Syl's recurring nemesis and does not fantasise about her, thank you very much, stop asking. Most of the other junk is just a random assortment of armies - the Venomcrawler leg painted to match the box photos, the chainsword in a dark red scheme I saw in one of the chaos codices (I forget which now, probably 3rd), the old metal Terminator banner pole in Ultramarine blue, and the Falcon antenna from Iyanden (it was originally Saim-Hann, but I decided there was too much red on the various pieces). The Necron big gun's a new one, yet another leftover from that box I got to make chaos androids, but I tried to paint it similar to the original Necron scheme from that issue of White Dwarf that came with a free Warrior, so the tip of the barrel's glowing green as well as the bits on the side, and I did the red light in the bayonet to echo the red targeter on the Warrior's rifle.

For Dambo himself I pulled out the White Dwarf Compendium and looked at the colours on the original Imperial Guard in that, copying the brown spats over black boots (his feet got kind of sunk into the terrain, but the toes and heels are black - not actually intended to have spats like the Guard, but the boots are so wrinkly that there were folds to use as the 'edges' of the spats), gold armour (shoulder rather than cuirass though), bare metal helmet with a coloured stripe, and the red coat I took from the red jackets worn by the Penitent troopers; my backstory for Dambo is he deserted, got captured, wound up in a penitent brigade, but managed to relieve himself of his explosive collar and deserted again, properly this time. Since his autorifle is so obviously just the M-16 that was every schoolboy's idea of what a soldier carried back in the 80s, I went full retro on that with a wooden stock and grip. The base is the usual Shyish Purple, but I deliberately left off the glitter paint - he fights alongside the Bringers, but he's got no use for sorcery, just cold hard cash. Along with the RTB01 marine now serving as a legionary, Dambo's the oldest mini in my warband - for the moment, In my 'waiting for paint' box I've got a modern daemonette riding a chaos steed that was actually Elrond's warhorse from Citadel's 1985 Middle Earth range.

So after that Terminator Lord with the Botticelli, and the earlier Sister Dialogus with Slaves to Darkness kinda counts as well, I've been having fun with this whole 'tiny art' thing:



If nothing else, it keeps me from having to think up yet another variation on the Slaanesh symbol for everyone's shoulders, or trying to do lines thin enough to look like text on a scroll.

First up, my Balefire Tome bearer (the actual book's nothing to brag about, but it was a free mini of the month, so I was doing the conversion in the GW store and lacking the bright desklamps I have at home to help my tired old eyes see fine detail I didn't fancy trying to file the pages flat without ruining the piece outright, so I just painted the runes as best I could; the main thing is it stands out on the tabletop), with that Berzerker Terminator from 2nd ed Codex Chaos that's now the Warhammer+ gift mini. Why would a Slaaneshi Legionary have a Khorne worshipper on her shoulder? Pick a fetish where one partner's aggressive, any of them could apply. As usual, since I couldn't get rid of the Imperial eagle on the chestplate, I just painted it as if it's the Legionary's former chapter - the original Minotaurs in this case, with their super-Rogue Trader quartered and striped red and yellow.

Next, another of those Blood Coven witch elves or whatever they are, refitted as one of my chaos sisters - that head's the one meant to be pulling a grenade pin with her teeth (which I remember reading is a really stupid thing to try to do and will likely just result in losing a bunch of teeth, but I guess if Battle Sisters believe hard enough that they can do it, it works out fine), so I attached the tip of a spare milliput tentacle to hide the shape of her mouth; didn't quite manage to file off all of the grenade pin, so I painted what was left as if it's a stray bit of hair, it's okay at tabletop distance. I actually had this one fully painted except the scroll for ages since I wasn't sure what to do with it, then having done the Botticelli Terminator I was in an art mood and decided there can't be any holier relic (or unholy, works both ways) than the book that created the universe. Normally I paint any purity seals that end up on my minis black with purple seals, but Rogue Trader gets a proper seal.

Next, what was supposed to be my Balefire Tome bearer, because I swear I checked the data card to see if the Tome replaces the boltgun or is an add-on, but on double-checking (after doing the conversion), yeah, it replaces the boltgun - so this book's just a Chaos Icon now. I went for The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (y'know, the lady with the octopuses) - the original, or at least the one on wikipedia which I assume is the original, is spread across two pages as well so it seemed appropriate, although with these pages being much squarer, and the bookmark or whatever taking up a chunk of space, the woman's torso actually wound up a lot longer than it should be, but never mind. Fun fact (I only learned this while looking it up for reference), according to the text on the artwork (which is way too small for me to try replicating, but it's all over the 'black' space on the pages) the lady's not unwilling and in fact is super enthusiastic, so that's good I guess, but the octopus duo are a father octopus and son octopus, which... does that make it more weird, or is having an octopus go down on you already across some threshold of 'weird' where any further kinks just don't move the needle any more? Also wondering if Hokusai knew they have beaks, that seems less than ideal. Anyway, I hadn't really planned to go fancy on the shoulder as well, but it was blank and I was on a roll, so on a whim I googled up the cover to a volume of Paolo Serpieri's Morbis Gravis, which isn't very recognisable since the monochrome-with-yellow-highlights background is hardly distinctive at this scale, but regardless it's a naked lady, that's appropriate for a Slaaneshi Legionary. (Druuna, the protagonist, isn't actually naked on that cover, but there's no way I could paint a skimpy g-string at this scale, and it's not like she doesn't get naked constantly anyway.)

And finally a flamer Legionary (who was actually a plasma gun Legionary but I've already got a plasma gun in the ranks and I didn't think just putting a different Legionary head on was enough of a conversion to count as 'changed'), whose shoulder is the Nintendo Switch home screen icon for Gris, a five-stages-of-grief platformer I've just recently been playing. By which I mean, the areas you progress through are themed after the five stages of grief, not that the games makes you experience the five stages of grief just by playing it - that'd be Celeste (which is also wonderful, but hard).

Heh that "subtle" tongue on the girl, you really seem to be having fun making all your colorful creations.
I think thats the most important, to envision something and make it work.

I'll never understand people that just build something the way its shown on the box and then color it the way its shown on the box.


Anyway, you using any tyranid parts?

Particularly well painted set this time around, tiny art for sure but also in general. Blood Coven conversion aka Tongue Girl takes it for me

Wow, these are superbs ! And the art recreations are really well executed, congrats friend !

Do you have other tiny artworks in mind for future projects?

I would be interesting to see how certain works would translate down to this scale. Like how would pointillism work? Impressionist and expressionist works should do fine. Would you be able to get a Rothko or a Pollack though? I know those hit completely different in person on canvas vs. the small images in art textbooks.


Always fun to see what you are painting. Keep the the great work.

 Leopold Helveine wrote:
Heh that "subtle" tongue on the girl, you really seem to be having fun making all your colorful creations.
I think thats the most important, to envision something and make it work.

I'll never understand people that just build something the way its shown on the box and then color it the way its shown on the box.


Anyway, you using any tyranid parts?

Twice so far, not counting genestealer bits - I've never collected nids myself so I don't have parts spare, but since I started converting the free minis of the month, whatever they are, I've wound up with these two:


No idea what that Termagant-Steed would count as - Accursed Cultist possibly, and just pretend it's too insane to aim the pistol so it counts as a melee attack because that's the only time it'd hit anything - but I'm quite fond of the Hormagaunt-Daemonette (I've named her Hormagaunt Replacement Therapy), I like the sense of motion in her pose, like the old Juan Diaz daemonettes. Plus I keep the leftover bits - the termagant head's on a spike on one of the Chosen's backpack, but there's still the hormagaunt head and torso and its little abdomen-limbs in the bits box which could turn up on something. And the termagant's lower legs come to think of it, wouldn't be difficult to graft those onto a daemonette or a cultist or something.

I used to do a little 'canonical' painting back in the day - I've still got an Eldrad Ulthran and Kharn the Betrayer (the first versions of them) that I followed the Eavy Metal colours on, since they're specific people and that's what they look like (apart from Kharn, I had blood gushing out of the mouth of the skull on his belt; didn't really look that good though) - and last year I did an old metal Terminator just like the box art for Space Hulk first edition, for a retro painting contest. Special characters aside I did always do my own homebrew armies though, and I feel like chaos really invites it. Plus everything being plastic makes it so easy.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Particularly well painted set this time around, tiny art for sure but also in general. Blood Coven conversion aka Tongue Girl takes it for me

I'll let her know

 KernelTerror wrote:
Wow, these are superbs ! And the art recreations are really well executed, congrats friend !

Thanks

 Nevelon wrote:
Do you have other tiny artworks in mind for future projects?

I would be interesting to see how certain works would translate down to this scale. Like how would pointillism work? Impressionist and expressionist works should do fine. Would you be able to get a Rothko or a Pollack though? I know those hit completely different in person on canvas vs. the small images in art textbooks.

I wouldn't say I really 'plan' anything much, but since my fine detail brush is still cooperating (until it degrades to the point where I have to get a new one, and then spend time getting used to it) and chaos marines have blank shoulder pads to fill, I'll keep doing mini-art. I don't really have a very comprehensive art background, beyond completing the museum collection in Animal Crossing, so the choices will remain just a random selection of whatever first occurred to me, or popped up when I started googling random words, when I got to that part of the mini - for instance yesterday I finished off a Havoc Aspiring Champion, and decorated her shoulder with a teensy recreation of a publicity photo of Vasquez from Aliens with her M56 smartgun, because obviously a Havoc would revere her, and my plan for the loincloth on my second plastic Obliterator (converted to a Noise Marine) is to try to recreate the cover of Oblivion by D-Rok, as best I can with the cloth being narrow and tattered and folded over. But I've also got Leda and the Swan saved in my ipad for reference next time I have a marine on the table and don't have any other ideas, so there's really no telling what'll crop up.

I hadn't planned to, but this weekend I turned out another part-Tyranid Slaaneshi, so I figured I'd gather them up for a family photo:



That's the torso of the Hormagaunt (arms and legs on the left), forming the head of my newest Possessed, who incidentally completes the squad of five. And since it's the first time I cracked open the new Possessed box, she's the only one with the right size base, but I never pay attention to base sizes anyway. Pretty happy with how the eyes (from the Spawn sprue) turned out, I tried to speckle them to give a suggestion of compound eyes, and at tabletop distance it's not bad.

This month's contest entry, and the founding member of whatever my gals' bikie gang will be called (some pun based on either Raven Guard or White Scars, haven't decided yet), although I suppose in a pinch I could add in that legionary riding a Steed as well:



So that began life as yet another random issue of Warhammer Imperium I found at a newsagent - looks like the full sprue for three Outriders was split up across two issues, but the parts I had were enough for one complete bike. Even though the whole point of this is 'the chaos bikes are crazy old now' (the sprues are stamped 1999) I got sentimental and reused what I could of the old rider - torso, backpack, right arm (except the hand, the outriders have the hands moulded into the handlebars), and both shoulders; the head and left arm with mace came from the Chosen. For the bike itself, you've got pieces of the chaos bike 'windshield' plate stuck on either side of the front wheel to give it some of the old spiky metal trim, and a Warp Talon 'wing' between the bolters - I didn't realise those things came in pairs, with the spikes on top leaning off to one side, up until I came to paint this and the contrast paint showed the detail clearly I thought they were symmetrical. The 'sight' is also from the Chosen set, it's supposed to have one of the four little chaos symbols plug into it (as the squad's Chaos Icon, I assume) but I liked it open, and behind that, since the top of the Outrider's kind of sparsely detailed, I stuck on one of the plug-in plates from the Legionary backpacks. The tusks either side of the front wheel are from a spare Chaos Terminator head - what with there being extras in the set, and my doing a lot of head swaps as conversions, I've got a whole lot of spare Termi heads - and of course then there's all the trophy racks, which along with the rock outcrop on the base come from the Chaos Terminator Lord/Sorcerer set, which I've actually downgraded to just a regular Terminator (with the basic trophy racks) since I've got both my army list's Termi Lord slots filled already by conversions. I took the opportunity to paint the rider separately - the 'opportunity' being that after hacking off the Primaris torso, the waist wasn't a very clean join for the glue so it popped off when I accidentally knocked the bike over after priming it. Whatever works.


Didn't do anything much different with the paint, although for the bike I basecoated it with Apothecary White, rather than Space Wolves Grey then drybrush back up to smoky white as I normally do - I figured it'd be next to impossible to drybrush through the trophy racks on the sides of the bike, and they're so big and flat (under the spikes) that they'd stand out a mile if I just left them dark grey. As you can see there's a bit of a difference between the final hues between bike and rider, but I got to wondering if it's really that significant, so at the moment I'm painting a Terminator (the former Lord, in fact) using Apothecary, to see if that winds up close enough that I can skip the drybrush step on future Legionaries. It's not really obvious that the tyres are made from flesh, but even though the brushwork is a bit blotchy I like the effect I got from adding veins to the exhaust pipes. For the Tyranid head I tried for the default 3rd edition codex colour scheme, the skin part of it came out a bit more bone than GW's colours, but the caparace is the main thing (and you probably do lose a bit of colour from your cheeks if you get decapitated and stuck on a trophy rack on a bike). Speaking of trophies, have they ever canonically addressed why the Terminator trophy racks have those little satchels on them? I assume they've got random trinkets from fallen enemies in them, like Eldar soulstones or whatever, I just wonder what GW had in mind specifically. (Naturally my headcanon is that, on my troops, they're actually foes' scrotums - bit oversize but we all know GW scale is wonky.)



Two bits of freehand on this one - the shoulder pad is White Dwarf #5, colourised, and that's me adding the pixellation there, the actual issue just had whoever-she-is with her boobs waving about for all to see (I assume some kind of vampire lady or something?). For the tactical screen I'd already used the pornhub logo on Doomrider's screen, and couldn't think of any other way to indicate in tiny form that she's watching porn mid-battle (aside from just some random naked folks, but they'd be barely recognisable), but I randomly had the idea to do Baywatch instead (I've decided Emperor's Children are fans of the Hoff) - still a very rough approximation, even just with a single vertical line of flesh tone as each 'person' (with tall or short blobs of red to suggest trunks or swimsuits as appropriate) I still wound up with room for only six lifeguards, rather than the seven in the image I was working from; I think the beach/sea/sky colours behind them carry it well enough though.

I've still got most of two chaos bikes left though (after using one for Doomrider) - just the windshields missing, since I also used one as extra armour on Saint Valerie. I'm kind of torn between fixing up a replacement for the windshield and just having an old-style chaos bike in the warband for nostalgia's sake, or throwing the two bike chassis together with the bits from the Slaaneshi Daemons boxed set to make a bike-drawn daemonette chariot.

As great / ridiculous as the freehand art is, I can't get over the veiny exhaust pipes Great / disturbing eye for detail there!

EDIT: Looks like I never complimented you on how well the gaunt legs work for that daemonette, or how kaiju-tastic the gaunt body is as that possessed's head