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.

Not sure if there were any 40k armies named after episodes of Space: 1999 already, but there's one now; although 'army' is perhaps overstating things a bit, this is currently purely a hobby project, I haven't even looked at an army list to see how much of this is legal (although the Terminator with jump packs is a definite 'no', I know that much). Also it's been 20 years since I painted anything, so we're not talking Golden Demon here - but anyway, may I present the denizens of Daemonworld Eden (so far), old, new, and in one case from inside a chocolate egg:

I love 'em! I admit that I've never seen space 1999 but the colors are wild and fun.

 krijthebold wrote:
I love 'em! I admit that I've never seen space 1999 but the colors are wild and fun.

Thanks! Yeah I wanted to avoid the 'black with pastel trim' that GW keeps using for Slaaneshi renegades - ended up remembering an old Eavy Metal feature where several artists had taken a crack at the same miniature and one had done the armour as if it was marble, which is a bit too fancy for me, but got me on the path to that smoky white base as something I liked and wouldn't get annoyed having to do again and again (it's basically just grey, blue ink, then escalating layers of drybrushing to white, minimum effort). As you can see several of them have got random bits of coloured trim on them (just because chaos shouldn't be big on uniformity IMO) but the overall white and gold scheme reflects these lunatics' lore, that they genuinely think they're the pure-of-heart holy paladins. That's actually where the name came from, on a tangent, as well, I went looking for something that'd sound like an old testament description of angels - it was just coincidence that 'Bringers of Wonder' popped into my head, but it had the right sound.

(Space: 1999's a fun show, if you're in the mood for some pretty eccentric 70s sci-fi - amazing model work, supremely haphazard writing, threadbare-if-any connection to actual science; it's the one where they're riding around the galaxy on the moon, having accidentally blown it out of orbit. Inspired the 'pre-cap' sequences in the main titles of the Battlestar reboot, and the Millennium Falcon, in a roundabout way.)

The music and pageantry update: the proceeds of one of those Noise Marine upgrade sets. First one I did is on the right, all Noise Marine aside from the legs (because the upgrade pack doesn't have legs), which came from the Possessed set because they still have the old ball joint waist that the NM torso fits onto. I wasn't really feeling the paint job until - pretty much at random - the idea of painting his sonic gun as a Van Halen guitar popped into my head, and then it all came together. On the left, Noise Marine #2, just the head and arms/gun on a regular CSM body, but I feel like the paint job sells it just fine - since I'm getting a little bit more comfortable with fine brushwork (what I think of as 'fine', anyway) I did patterns on a few of his larger flat surfaces, just to set him apart from his comrade; it's kind of a personal goal with this warband that nobody's just 'same as the last one', they all have something unique going on, whether it's a conversion or trying something new with paint or whatever.

In the middle, I had some parts left over, so he's got a Noise Marine head and left arm - I'm not intending him to be a NM, they're just representing random Chaos embellishments - on top of the legs from goat boy from the Dread Pageant set. What with the hacking job I did removing those from their torso his gentleman's area was a bit messy (not in the way Slaaneshi troops like messing up their genitals, probably, best not to think about it), but luckily I'd recently cut a Sister Novitiate in half (not fatally, she's just snake from the waist down now) so I covered up the mess with the bottom of her skirt cloth.

Didn't expect to have more finished this weekend, but there wasn't much else to do while watching election coverage, so yet more nostalgia for the Bringers of Wonder - this time an original 2nd edition marine. Not an eBay pickup, he's been sitting all these years in the big colourful game box that was my introduction to the Warhammer 40,000 world as anything other than 'where Space Hulk happens', formerly in the red and black of my first army, the Furies, as modelled by his former comrade beside him who I pulled out just for the photo. Didn't bother removing the paint, I just swapped his backpack for a period-appropriate Chaos Berzerker pack, hit him with the spraycan, and got to work - dark gods only know what mix of acrylics and enamels I was using back then anyway.

(Since I was getting out old miniatures anyway, I thought I'd prove that I did, at least, learn to paint a little better back then than the old marine would suggest, so that's the commander of the Furies chapter on the left. Look I was young and impressionable and Xena had just started, of course female marines.)

Those mounted troops make my tail wag. So good. Thanks for posting.

 Shrapnelsmile wrote:
Those mounted troops make my tail wag. So good. Thanks for posting.

Thanks! I've got a third cavalry mini basecoated at the moment, where I jammed a chaos marine onto a Steed to recreate (somewhat awkwardly) an actual Steed-riding CSM I used to have back in the old Realm of Chaos days. Given how much chunkier chaos marines are now, the poor Steed looks pretty overburdened - hopefully 'having a bad back' doesn't infringe on Nurgle's territory.

Okay so, GW minis are fine and all, but the daemonettes have always bothered me - and not in the way daemonettes try to bother people (much), they've just never seemed like they really had much on the 'alluring' side of 'disturbingly alluring'. I know I know, they have to sell these to kids - still, while I'm happy to have the GWmonettes in my warband, I wanted something a little more, well, Slaanesh, so I hit up etsy and got some similar-but-legally-distinctmonettes to serve as the elite (which incidentally is why I've been painting all the regular daemonettes with all their clothing and adornments and spikes just a uniform gold, so these with their more varied colour schemes would stand out a bit), so may I present the Six Daughters. Slightly NSFW, on the basis that they've got their tops off, and some of them have just regular boobs rather than horrific mutations, which is apparently scarier.



I'm breaking my 'no named characters because they all die routinely' rule, since these are specific daemonettes rather than interchangeable army builders, and Syl keeps them around out of maternal affection. Don't think about that too much. From left to right: Humility, Innocence, Charity, Tranquility, Temperance, and Clemency - not ironic, that's how Sylelle genuinely thinks of them. (While also being fully aware that they, like their mum, are horrific crimes against sapience - she goes out of her way to cultivate cognitive dissonance, since to her mind with Chaos it's a feature, not a bug.)

Along with more Sororitas who may not have taken their vows to the Emperor as seriously as they should have (or maybe they just found their armour a bit stuffy), I got around to another of my old timers this week, a 1988 Chaos Warrior. When I was first trawling through the 40k 2nd edition box that at some point in the distant past became my 'dump everything I'm not using here' box for retro miniatures, I thought maybe I could add a few techno whatsits to him to make him look like he belonged in a 40k army and maybe just had a bit of an old school fashion sense - but then I decided to be much nerdier, and decide that he is a 1988 Chaos Warrior, from the Warhammer Fantasy Battle world that's actually a lost colony planet in 40k on the edge of the Eye of Terror, which I know has been written out of the lore long ago, but it's the Eye of Terror, a non-canonical planet's hardly the strangest thing you'd find there. So this guy was wandering the Chaos Wastes one day when he stumbled through a portal and now, well, he doesn't understand most of what his new comrades are talking about with their 'bolters' and 'dropships', but they march under the banner of Slaanesh and that's good enough for him.

Noticed a funny thing while I was painting him (which, since step one was stripping off the old paint job, is the first time in decades he hasn't been caked in a thick layer of paint obscuring all detail) - is it just me, or is his hammer the one used in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition logo? The way it mounts on the handle is slightly different, but the head looks just like it, so I painted it as if it is, and now consider this anachronistic idiot to be the most canonical miniature in the army (besides Sylelle, or course), since he's wielding THE Warhammer.

(I don't know where the hex base came from - based on an old catalogue page I googled he'd have originally come with a square base, but as long as I've had this guy he's been on that hex base, so I let him keep it, and just built it up a bit so he's not literally shorter than the marine I shortened to kitbash a Chaos Squat.)

...and while I was on etsy looking for daemonettes to make the servants of the Emperor uncomfortable, I found this other set (originally called 'Spider Maidens'), who aren't quite as disturbingly Slaaneshi as the previous lot, but they are huge - pictured with a normal daemonette for scale, insofar as any daemonette could be called 'normal' - and you know what they say, quantity has a quality all its own. Besides when She-Hulk is both your superhero crush and gym goal, how could you not? (Spoilered because, again, boobies - and these ones don't even have the decency to have horrific mutations instead of regular nipples half the time.)



They weren't supplied with bases, so I had to improvise for the one with her foot up on something invisible - luckily all those Chaos Sisters have left plenty of holy relics and whatnot on their sprues, since they don't want them; then that turned out to be a bit too tall, so I had to build the other side of the base up as well. You'll probably have noticed for their skin I just slapped on the contrast paint and called it a day - I like them, but since they're all basically the same thing just with variations in armour I didn't want to go to town painting them and get bored, so I took the fast and easy route. Still, it gave me enough time for my imagination to get going, which is always a worry, so these are now known as The Emperor's Granddaughters, because what Sylelle did was round up a bunch of Emperor's Children from her followers and implant daemonic embryos in them - she didn't bother giving them birth canals as well, but if they didn't enjoy their 'babies' tearing their way out of their stomachs they obviously weren't devoted to Slaanesh enough, so they deserved to suffer - and this is the result. Lest she seem like some kind of Fabius Bile mad science understudy, I should clarify Syl wasn't trying to breed super-daemonettes or anything, she just thought it'd be fun.

Finished my sixth Terminator, making a proper Slaaneshi squad (is there still a bonus for using holy numbers in army lists?). Left to right: heavy weapon Terminator (with an Obliterator head, since I didn't use it on the Obliterator) being guided by daemonic forces in a very literal sense; Syl's old armour, which misses its wearer so it prowls around capturing victims to 'wear' it until they burn out; a Space Hulk Terminator taking 'the long war' very literally (but unlike every other v1 Space Hulk Terminator he's still got his banner pole); a plastic Librarian from Genestealer, who didn't even need any chaos spiky decoration painted on because he's already got spikes and skulls all over his armour (but that's Librarians for you, can't trust them); the squad leader who doesn't care what the rules say, she wants to fly; and the most recent one who's a big fan of John Woo movies. All the trophy helmets are drawn from Rogue Trader - a Space Shark on the v1 Space Hulk Terminator, a Marine Errant on the Librarian, and double-combi-bolter gal has managed to find (and decapitate) a member of the Space Marine Field Police.

Okay so these aren't chaos marines, but they're part of the Bringers of Wonder's story, both in the lore sense, and in the sense that I was running out of room in my little painting corner for already completed miniatures, so I got a cheap display case from Ikea, and relocated all the old minis I still have into spare shelves; also it seemed a waste to make a new thread just for some ancient armies I'll likely never add any more to anyway. But for posterity's sake, and just because I like typing, here's everything.

First image, my original 40k army, the Furies - red because I played Space Hulk before 40k so in my mind Space Marines wore red armour (I was quite young). I started collecting during 2nd edition, but the vast majority of what you see is 3rd edition, primarily those outstanding poseable plastic marines GW did for the boxed set, which I've seen made fun of nowadays for having 'hundreds of ways to make basically the same pose over and over again' but their modularity and the ease of modifying plastic parts made every marine feel like my own work, and I'm still very fond of them. Fun fact, the one in the black Sororitas armour in the front row is Inquisitor Vail - no relation to the Ciaphas Cain one, just a coincidence.

Second image, everything else; I did used to have a whole Dark Eldar force (I know, 'Drukhari', whatever - the guy at the GW shop tried to argue that they wouldn't call themselves 'dark' eldar, but my feeling is that, have you ever met the Dark Eldar, of course they would), but most of them were just those plastic infantry which, well the marines got the better end of the deal in the 3rd edition box, so they were eventually discarded, leaving just the named characters (of which I had more than I ever needed, but inventing Dark Eldar personalities seemed very fun after all those stolid marines), the Wyches, and oh yeah, their colossal death engine; I recall there was a conversion in White Dwarf based on combining a Dark Eldar Raider with the frame of a Falcon, and I thought cool, but let's make one bigger, so if memory serves it's made from a Falcon, two Vipers, and two Raiders, one of them the heavy weapons version whatever that was called. More enthusiasm than common sense. Scattered about, my other odds and ends: Eschers repainted as the officers of the Imperial Guard army I never got around to collecting, Sisters of Battle (Order of Our Lady of the Rose), a bunch of random non-GW miniatures that I can't even remember where they came from, the Spice Marines (not a typo, it's the Spice Girls in power armour, shut up it was the 90s), Xena and Gabrielle, and my Craftworld army, which I never really got around to doing more than one of each type because I just wanted to see what their colours would look like; back then Ulthwé were still wearing bright yellow helmets, so the bone helmets weren't copying anyone. They're technically on-topic for the thread, since Syl has a mad crush on their leader; if you ever thought you'd had an awkward date, imagine explaining to the Council of Seers why a chaos sorceress keeps trying to chat you up mid-battle.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
... so may I present the Six Daughters.

Awesome troupe of daemons, really enjoy seeing your paint scheme applied to so many different sculpts. Shout out to your converted daemonettes (?) earlier, using Escher as the base, those are rad as well. And is that a pregnant daemon?? *golf clap*

Lots to love here, looking forward to more white armored chaos weirdness.

EDIT: Added props to that Oldhammer mini on the hex base, nice touch with the white fur!

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Awesome troupe of daemons, really enjoy seeing your paint scheme applied to so many different sculpts. Shout out to your converted daemonettes (?) earlier, using Escher as the base, those are rad as well. And is that a pregnant daemon?? *golf clap*

Lots to love here, looking forward to more white armored chaos weirdness.

EDIT: Added props to that Oldhammer mini on the hex base, nice touch with the white fur!

Thanks! It has been a lot of fun working with so much variety - as you saw my prior armies of any size were loyalist marines, for whom it's really only the scouts who are 'different' (I mean Terminators are honestly just a different shape of the same power armour), and I used to have quite the horde of Dark Eldar but they were all just the same purple armour or skimpy purple armour (Wyches), it's been a new experience bringing together such a wide-ranging bunch of weirdos with the shared colour scheme.

That is indeed a pregnant daemon - I forget where the idea came from, it just kind of popped into my head one day. Very rudimentary 'sculpting' of the milliput (I really didn't achieve much in terms of smoothing out the sides, and wound up positioning her arms to hide the join lines) but I'm fine with it. You'd think she shouldn't be going into battle like that, but one has to imagine that daemons make pretty bad parents in any case. The Eschers have been a lot of fun to work on - I actually bought the box before I decided to work on a chaos army, just out of nostalgia for my old Necromunda v1 gang, but they've turned out to be a good source of cultists (I do have some boys in the pipeline for the cultist flock, including a couple of oldhammer types - I'm not deliberately trying to do an all-girl army, it's just kind of where my head goes first).

As I like saying to Gandalf I was there three thousand years ago, and I have a lot of sentimentality for the old minis, so I was very pleased to recently spot a trio of 1994 metal daemonettes for quite a reasonable price on ebay. Honestly I didn't mean for the claws to be that red, I was going for more just adding a reddish tinge to the purple contrast paint I'd slathered them in overall, but I'm a bit absent-minded on which paint does what and instead of using a nice gentle ink I reached for the Flesh Tearer Red, forgetting it has all the subtlely of, well, something that'd call itself 'flesh tearer' - but I don't regret it, they turned out very striking. I'll say this, I know a lot of folks (myself included) have a chuckle at the goofy old sculpts of the metal era, but I had so much fun painting these, discovering all the details of their bodies and costumes, so respect to the Marauder Miniatures days, the Lobster Trio can be my modern daemonettes' wingmen any time.

Also, may as well add them here, the improvised totally-not-Necrons Chaos Androids I whipped up for this month's painting contest.

Boxes full of high-detail modern chaos marines sitting around my workspace, and all the effort's going into a monopose Berzerker - but the dark red (heavy red contrast paint followed by heavy crimson ink) and brass colour scheme was a nice break from all that cloudy white and gold, Syl can seduce anything, and enough time has passed that I kind of like having these basic old guys around just as a reminder of where the hobby was back then. And you know what, he doesn't look bad - sure a whole squad standing around identically was less than impressive back in the day, but just this one guy mixed in with the rest of the army today, I like him. If you're wondering what's on his mouth, my (poorly-formed) attempt at a ball gag - should've figured out some way to add straps, it looks more like he's developed a bubblegum habit, but that works too. I didn't intend to give him a legion icon but his shoulder looked a bit plain when I'd finished the rest of the painting, so I did the best I could with my smallest paintbrush to turn out a corrupted World Eater logo, where instead of chomping the planet it's sucking on it like a lollipop. Not that Khorne and Slaanesh are friends anyway, but this sort of thing probably doesn't help.

I don't feel like I really need to do any other ex-Khornate troops - I've got an old Kharn, but he's intact and painted, and it seems like a shame to lose some of my old work just for one more random trooper now - but I think I will look into rounding out the set with a corrupted-to-Slaanesh Plague Marine and Thousand Son one of these days. Maybe start tossing in little hints that other troops have been co-opted from other warbands, like part of a leg or gauntlet still showing the colours of a Night Lord or Word Bearer or whatever under their 'new' paint job.

So I got the current Callidus recently, without any specific plans, just out of fondness for the original, and as it happened the day I went to collect her from the store they also had their stock of Leliths on the FOMO 'while stocks last' shelf, so I got her too, also out of fondness for the original (moreso actually, since despite the bulk of the metal mini I kind of prefer the feel it's going for to the current one). Naturally she got decapitated and kitted out with daemonette parts, and helpfully that left an angry lady head with a swooshy ponytail lying around when I came to wonder how I was going to chaosify the Callidus, along with replacing her weapons with leftover daemonette parts - a tail on the left arm (and another tail on her butt), and the right is actually a daemonette leg for a couple of extra joints, tipped with the lash from that chariot thing in the Start Collecting Sex Daemons box; that took a lot of careful work to get glued on without falling off again (you can see the join's not that tidy, but never mind).

(And my original, just for fun - who's also not actually Lelith in-universe, poor girl never gets to be herself.)

Finally got me some Juan Diaz daemonettes. Funny thing, I wasn't that impressed by these gals back in the day - felt their dancing poses looked kinda awkward - but looking back now, I think maybe that was because I was always seeing them ranked up in WFB regiment blocks. Or maybe just now that I'm doing my oh-so-very-overdue chaos force I'm more into the weirdness than I used to be back then. Whatever the case, I totally get what everyone was always going on about now - don't think I really need to go scrounge up more of them from ebay, but I'm delighted to have this trio in the warband.

(And as luck would have it I recently bought one of the very first daemonettes - the ones who had individual names - going cheap enough, so that'll be the entire lineage of sexy lobsters once she arrives.)

Following on from the above, I like how their toe claws turned out (same contrast pink as the claws, pre-drybrushing), and I haven't really been loving my regular daemonettes having gold claws as well as gold outfits - limiting their colour palette was a choice I made back when I was starting the warband, so the Six Daughters would stand out more from the 'normal' daemonettes, but since I've now got the muscle daemonettes and the second and third gen ones and have been painting all of them just however the sculpts seemed to dictate, there's so much variety it doesn't matter anyway - so I hauled the gals (or wherever they want to come down on the gender spectrum) into the nail salon to get matching pink put on. Since I had them all off the shelf anyway, I also got the ones who already had bone-coloured claws by virtue of still being roughly 50% human and got them all to smile for a class photo.

Back when I started putting them together I figured there were daemonettes and there were Escher-based cultists who had some mutations, now I don't even know which is which anymore. Possibly they don't either, and any given 'daemonette' may or may not be an actual daemon or a mutated mortal, but their minds are too frazzled to keep track.

Without really meaning to I realised I've developed a theme of wetware-assisted Havocs, so that's a thing now.

On the left, I was recently reminded that the naked ladies I've got lying around the bits box are from the Ral Partha Slave Auction set, although I don't recall ever having any guards or auctioneers or anything like that, so presumably one of them got parted out at some point and I got the Ral Partha Nude Bondage Enthusiast set, which honestly I can live with that. That said they're not great sculpts, but I do keep an eye out for opportunities to use them to add an extra touch of Slaanesh - initially I was thinking, what if one of the Havocs had a naked cultist holding up the barrel of the cannon, like you used to have on those old Skaven jezzails, but the slave girls being metal nixed the idea of moving their limbs about enough for that, so... I don't want to say 'impaled by lascannon' is an idea that just comes naturally to me, but that's where we ended up (although conversion-wise she's in one piece, I cut the cannon in half and glued it to her front and back). Look on the bright side, she's a Slaaneshi cultist, so maybe it was consensual.

And on the right, I found a conversion beamer - had a look at the wiki for the current lore and discovered these things are perishingly rare now, but genestealer hybrids used to be able to get their hands (or claws) on them, so I separated the weapon from the plastic hybrid (from the first edition Space Hulk 'Genestealer' expansion, the same one that did plastic Librarian/Grey Knight Terminators) and got to work. Since apparently they need a Master of the Forge (whatever that is) to keep them operational, and I don't have one of those - this was before I got the Warpsmith - I made use of a spare old servitor, leaving off his right-shoulder-mounted heavy weapon (that's supposed to be just uncontrolled flesh mutating out of his shoulder due to all the chaos sorcery rocketing around inside him; it's actually a Sigmar murder elf ponytail) so that 100% of his brainpower could be slaved to stabilising the beamer. Allegedly also nobody but the Adeptus Mechanicus can calm the machine spirits of these things, but come on, you telling me Slaanesh can't seduce a machine spirit? Please.

(Since the weapons-to-people ratio of this Havoc squad is kind of getting out of whack, I promise the next heavy weapon marine I'm working on will skew way off in the other direction.)

Finally got my first generation daemonette, so that's the lot of them (unless I've forgotten an incarnation) - 1988 original (she's called Fiendthrob, that's not me that's canonical, this was back when even rank-and-file miniatures got individual names), 1994 claws-for-days, Juan Diaz, the current plastic gals, and a couple of daemonette-adjacent versions I picked up off etsy.

(Spoilered because boobies, as usual.)



I really need to go back and repaint that plastic one - she was the second mini I painted in this current delve into 40k, after decades of not picking up a paintbrush (apart from that time I painted a Siege Thundercracker black and lilac because Amazon can go to hell with its exclusive Skywarp), hadn't even got my painting corner set up yet so I didn't even have a proper light to see what I was doing, but she's the only modern daemonette I've got that isn't a conversion, so I felt like she was the only one suitable for the history line-up.

Congrats on completing the family! My favorite will probably always be Juan Diaz' (and yours looks really excellent here, even if her claw isn't red ), but the Bestiarium one is my second. I'm not sure I recognized the far left one as a proto-Daemonette before but she totally is.

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Congrats on completing the family! My favorite will probably always be Juan Diaz' (and yours looks really excellent here, even if her claw isn't red ), but the Bestiarium one is my second. I'm not sure I recognized the far left one as a proto-Daemonette before but she totally is.

Thanks! Yep, they're the real deal - I remember them in the catalogues from back when I was first getting into 40k, before the 'new' giant claws ones came out. I may go back over those claws at some stage, I intended the bold red to be exclusive to the '94 gals (with the pinkish tinge on the Diaz claws showing it 'evolving' towards the neutral tones of the modern ones) but then I ended up using it on the Realm of Chaos one as well (mainly to distinguish the claw from the tip of the tail also sculpted into the same area), and now I'm low-key rethinking the whole flesh-toned-claws thing I've been doing with regular daemonettes from the start. Need to get better at blending though, the hard join between colours works on the earlier ones where there's a hard line in the sculpt, but I don't think it'd look so good on the Diazzes and the moderns where the claws are growing much more organically out of their arms.

The whole 'design lineage' thing is something I've really gotten attached to working on this warband - I've always been fond of that kind of thing, like the various starships Enterprise, all the earlier-version ships in the Star Wars prequels, that sort of thing. I've got one each of the v1 and v2 Obliterators waiting for paint (even though let's be honest they both kind of suck) for the same reason - I'm busy with the second plastic one that came in the Start Collecting box currently, I wanted him to be different to the first I just painted up as a regular Obliterator and it's turned into quite a project.

Oh wow, you are totally right! I have quite a few 1988 Chaos Renegades but I guess I never spent much time looking at the fantasy daemon pages of ye olde cataloges

Nipples!

 Boss Salvage wrote:
Oh wow, you are totally right! I have quite a few 1988 Chaos Renegades but I guess I never spent much time looking at the fantasy daemon pages of ye olde cataloges

Oh I used to spend so much time just looking through the catalogue, and the gallery pages they'd put in White Dwarf - the first issue I ever had, 105, had these full colour spreads of chaos daemons and warriors (promoting the first Realm of Chaos book, I think - I got Lost and the Damned when it came out, but only picked up Slaves to Darkness many years later second-hand), plus Harlequins, and Dark Future of all things - all neatly displayed like catalogue pages, but fully painted, they looked glorious. The battle scene photos they do in codices nowadays are cute and all, but I still prefer the solo photos just for poring over every detail.

 FeindusMaximus wrote:
Nipples!

Well, as close as I can manage I think the modern minis where they're sculpted - which is to say, the etsy ones - turned out half decent, I just gave them a dab of ink and let the sculpt do the work, but the old metal ones just don't have fine enough detail to 'guide' the ink - or the ones where I'm dotting on 'nipples' to minis where they're supposed to be clothed - so I just have to steady my hand as best I can and dot on a bit of paint, and as you can see it's a hit-and-miss process. Luckily to the eye it's all so small that it doesn't bother me. One of these days though I'm going to have a go at rolling out some super tiny beads in milliput, then using my smallest drill bit to create a tiny indent and popping the beads in to create a bump - I feel like it's a viable idea, but very dependent on my ability to be precise at very small scale, and, well...

So I feel like I kind of messed that miniature up, but you live and learn, so I'm not upset over it. I just happened (not intentionally) to wander into the local GW shop on their anniversary, and figured I could probably make something out of Inquisitor Erasmus Catamaran here - quick head swap with one of those murder elves from Sigmar (which necessitated leaving the backpack off, but that's fine, a giant Inquisition symbol wasn't going to be the look I was going for anyway). Pretty quickly in the painting process I realised the resulting conversation wasn't really speaking to me - looking at the Eavy Metal art of the original, I feel like the sword is really the focal point, and everything I'd done had been to inadvertently draw the eye away from it, with the big hair shifting the mini's centre mass, and the Bringers' bright white overshadowing the blade, where the Inquisition's black colour scheme really made the snazzily-painted sword pop. So I did kind of find myself half-assing the painting - didn't bother doing any shading, or picking out the lettering, on the back of the coat. But never mind.

I was glad to find a use for the old Asdrubael Vect prisoner mini I'd been saving for decades, though - she's the one hiding a snapped-off spike behind her back ready to shank the first elf that comes near her, I always liked her moxie. As I vaguely recall there was an oblique mention of her in some fluff in some codex or other, and it didn't sound like she fared well - I mean, Vect's still alive, I guess - but that's vague, so I worked her into my own canon to give her a different fate, involving my Archon in a rare sentimental mood and some 19th millennium archaeotech. So this isn't her, obviously, she's probably another one of my chaos sisters - still chained up and hiding a knife behind her back, but that doesn't mean she doesn't want to be there, she might just like bondage and stabbing as a form of foreplay.

This month's painting contest entries - I've decided rather than just 'havocs' like everyone else, the Bringers of Wonder call their heavy weapon contingent Death Blossom (they haven't seen The Last Starfighter, they just came up with it by themselves), which yeah sounds like a bubblegum metal band, but that's totally in character for Slaanesh.



Starting on the left, I was thinking of the old metal havoc with his heavy bolter supported by a chain over his shoulder, then got to wondering if there was a left-handed heavy bolter in any of the sets I had. There wasn't, but that's no reason not to pursue a wholly impractical idea - I cut off the hand and hilt from a power sword arm to create a grip to attach to the back of a spare heavy bolter (the one from the regular chaos marine box) in place of its original right hand, and for that and the belt-fed one from the havoc box shaved off the hands holding them on top, et voila. Had to remove one of the shells from the ammo belt on the right to get it to match up to the belt piece extending from the backpack, which left it with a little kink in the middle of the belt, but nobody around here's bothered by a little kink... I was thinking about doing something fancy with the backpack - possibly some kind of jets or legs to stabilise him when he's firing, like the old havocs had those ball vent things on the sides pointing backwards instead of down which I always assumed was so they could stop the wearer being thrown backwards when they fired, but back when 3rd edition came out I went with the multi-melta on the plastic land speeder and the heavy bolter's just been sitting in my bits box ever since, and caught my eye - I feel like the supporting arm (from one of the missile loaders) is a bit thin, but I'd gone and spray primed it before I thought of sticking on some extra parts to bulk it up, and what's done is done. The head's from Warhammer Imperium issue one - I'll be turning that marine into a renegade which'll probably mean using a chaos helmet anyway.

Next to him, I finally thought of a use for one of the Dark Apostle's little minions - originally I was thinking replace the lectern with a naked cultist to turn it into a mobile porn couch, but I don't have a naked cultist (not in the right pose, anyway), and somehow the idea of a missile launcher got into my head, which quickly became three missile launchers, because when has chaos ever been about restraint? Fair bit of clipping and filing to remove the arms attached to those launchers, and the extra cables and decorations are mainly there to hide the mess that left. Since I had the Apostle out anyway he donated his arm, since the actual marine obviously didn't need any more weapons - he/she (Sororitas head) also got that whatever-it-is decoration from one of the Necromunda Escher dog herders, which I'd cut off so the Escher could be holding up a Necron's skull instead - I'm picturing it as kind of like an over-the-top and chaotic version of the braids you get on dress uniforms, and between that and making a member of the working class do their actual job for them I'm really getting a 'posh officer' vibe from this one.

Next up, a gen 2 Obliterator, which I wasn't especially looking forward to since I never much liked the look of them, but you can't ignore the bits of history you don't like, so I picked up a gen 1 and gen 2 just to have the complete set. I really wanted to avoid the 'covered with bubblegum' look of the official paint jobs back in the day, so I tried to bleed the colours into each other via the 'stretched' parts of the sculpt, like the different materials of the armour are blending into each other as it mutates - so-so result, but I'm okay with it. This boy came incomplete off ebay without a head, and I was originally going to use the Possessed head on the terminator on the far right, but after cutting the back of the head/neck so it'd fit into the collar I just wasn't feeling it, and randomly used the Escher shrouded face instead - compared to the much bigger Possessed head, that tiny thing really sells the bulk of the Obliterator. The base is an old Vyper canopy, which I've had left over ever since I used the rest of the Vyper for my Dark Eldar megatank - it's old enough that the plastic had become a bit brittle, so I just crushed it into shape by hand.

And on the far right, a chaos Cyclone terminator - if you're aghast that I mutilated a gen 1 Cyclone to get that, don't worry, Citadel did it for me, these were sold two to a blister pack when I got them, and while one of them was painted up for my Furies, the other had been miscast with the front of the helmet badly flattened, so don't feel too bad that it's had its launcher (and hand targeter) cut off now. Heavy flamer just because - the Obliterator's blade is in the way in the photo, but the armour panel on the flamer is painted dark blue with lightning, to suggest that the Bringers nicked it off a Night Lord (possibly by just tearing the whole arm off and emptying it out later). I'd had a plastic power fist (from the 3rd edition terminators, the multi-part plastic ones) in my bits box missing the shoulder for ages - I forget why, from the look of it I specifically cut off the Crux Terminatus but it's not on any of my other miniatures, maybe I just had an idea to use it but it didn't work out - so I did a little hacking at the elbow to make it look torn-off and painted it as Deathwing - just to put the boot in, I painted what Google assures me is a Lakota symbol for 'contrariness' (it apparently refers to some trickster deity figure; seemed Slaanesh-appropriate) on the chaos terminator's left shoulder, hinting that he may once have been Deathwing himself before falling to chaos and hunting his former comrades.

So I know I said when I started this army that I wasn't going to get sidetracked inventing personalities for every damn miniature like I used to, but it's happening anyway.

Great line up of heavy weapon enthusiasts

They're all great characters, but I'll give my single shoutout to the Oblit's head. It's kind of dumb that GW made models that you have to headswap to make them palatable, however you've chosen a very cool one here. I actually wasn't sure what it was until reading the description, smart stuff that really works.Plus you've nicely minimized the bubblegum flesh situation

 Boss Salvage wrote:
They're all great characters, but I'll give my single shoutout to the Oblit's head. It's kind of dumb that GW made models that you have to headswap to make them palatable, however you've chosen a very cool one here. I actually wasn't sure what it was until reading the description, smart stuff that really works.Plus you've nicely minimized the bubblegum flesh situation

Thanks I'd love to say the Escher head was a deliberate choice, but it was really more that it was the first thing in my line of sight when I decided the Possessed head wasn't working. Handy that it's got no visible flesh though - when I got the two metal Obliterators my plan was to go all-metal on the armour of this one, and then go all-flesh on the gen 1, with the 'armour' completely made out of mutated bone and flesh just to get as far as possible away from the 'made out of scrap girders' look the sculpt has. Haven't started that one yet - he's out of his blister pack (I took him out very carefully slicing the card from behind, so from the front the pack looks good as new, apart from not having a miniature in it (and the dent it already had when I got it) just because I'm all sentimental about blister packs) but since he's so relatively tiny I want to make a fancy tall base, which I'm currently planning as being a whole dead and crushed chaos marine (Alpha Legion possibly, I feel like the turquoise colour will be fun), so I need to build that, then work out how to securely fix the Obliterator onto it so the whole thing doesn't fall apart. Which I was going to do last night, but I got sidetracked making a super-possessed marine with genestealer hands for feet and a steed neck.