PeteB's Eldar Warhost

Alongside the Eladr terrain pics PeteB sent me he also had some updated shots of his Eldar and wanted to share those with you too. It's amazing to think this army has been just three months in the making!

Second post in the space of a week (hopefully!!), that's probably it for the next 5 years!

Anyway, I fancied presenting some pics of my latest and hopefully last Eldar Warhost.

The pic of the Autarch is just for show. He isnt going to blog wars, but was made for the last battle I had with Dave. In all took about 2 hours to convert, paint and base.

Karandras leads the field, with some funky new rules that combined with the scorpions make them an absolutely lethal fighting force that can take on just about anything, as Dave's Tervigon and Carnifex found out.

The quartet of Fire Prism, Wraithknight (magnetised for sword or suncannon, no dirty D here!), Fire Dragons and Dire Avengers can take and hold the vast majority of positions against any opponents, with the Warp Spiders finishing off as a bridging unit between the quartet and the scorps. The Rangers act as a spearhead, with their new shrouded rule they are extremely durable as cheap obj sec units and to be honest, if anyone is shooting at them with everything else breathing down their neck, well........

The real star for me is the Hemlock Wraithfighter. It is now as it should have been. Level 2 psyker with spells from Rites of Battle, Sanctic Daemonology or from the insanely good Telepathy. To round it off 2 heavy D scythes, which although not as good (in my humble opinion) as the previous version (no instagib) are still extremely effective against both multi wound models and vehicles. It is still a paper plane and will fold with massed bolter fire, but is not well worth its points for it's buffs and offensive capabilities.

Regarding the painting, only fire prism and the Wraithknight are anything near finished. I wanted an effective paint scheme that looks good for tabletop gaming, but can be worked on further.

Get your hands off my junk!

Dark Angels - Dark Vengeance Deathwing Terminator conversion

Another micro-blog. PeteB gave me some left-over bitz from his Space Wolf army so I was finally able to complete my Dark Vengeance Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield conversion.

I removed the head from this guy ages ago and slotted in a hooded Dark Angel Veteran head.

His Storm Shield also came from the upgrade sprue and the Thunder Hammer just had a couple of wolves on the side and a wolf tail to remove. There's also a rune on the back hammer head, I'll try and fill that in with liquid green stuff.

I'm going to consider putting this guy on some slate because if there's one thing he needs to be is taller! I'm already struggling to work out how to transport these but no doubt I'll find a solution - takeaway tubs?!

Terrain is everything - PeteB's Eldar Scenery

PeteB emailed me the other day with a batch of pcitures of his latest hobby enterprise so I thought I'd share with...

Hi All

Seeing as I have once again succumbed to the disease known as plastic crack (or fast divorce) I reckoned it has a good time to give Dave a helping hand with his blog.

What I really wanted to do was showcase the amazing bit of scenery I purchased from ebay. As I haven't got the time or the skill level of some of my more esteemed (and gifted) compadres, I needed an easier way of finally getting around to building a decent table.

Searching on ebay under the heading of 'eldar buildings', I found the fab buildings of one wargame-model-mods. After a quick browse I paid the measly sum of around 20 quid for the snapily named 'Alien Building Forwards Bases terrain scenery warhammer 40k wargames eldar'. To be honest my 5 year old could have done the search and I reckon even she would have found it with such a title! (url below....)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121630175458?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

I apologise as the pics start about half way through the build, but I mainly wanted to give an idea of the scale and detail on the building. My wraithknight struggles to see over the top!! I put on a marine, a tau commander and also a termie for scale.

Build wise, I found it to be a lot easier than I first imagined. The kit arrived as flat pack, which would have put Ikea to shame. Due to some very clear consise rules, myself and my 10 year old put it together in about 1.5 hours, over 2 days to allow some of the more fragile bits to set. It even came with 4 lenghts of aegis defence line which have their own bases to keep them upright.

This is a cracking centre piece for any table and to complement it I reckon some watch towers and a webway portal are in order, there are even some bits for the monkeigh's out there too!!!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/wargame-model-mods/m.html?item=121630175458&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562

'nids part 169 - Deathleaper - TO DONE!

It's taken a while but Deathleaper has finally been added to the Hive. He'll get his chance to kill at Blow Wars, all I need is some more Lictors for this so-called 'Lictor Shame'.

I have to say I'm not happy about this moniker the Las Vegas Open winning list was saddled with. I don't know if the originator coined it or someone else thinking 9 Lictors is somehow cheesy or overpowered. The fact is we have a Formation that has 6 Lictors straight off the bat  and another one that has 5, so adding anymore isn't exactly overkill. I don't see these as anything worse than Necron Wraiths and you can take bucketloads of them!

Lictors had already proved effective winning Throne of Skulls a good nine months or more before LVO and in both lists it's the addition of Genestealers and Mawlocs that make an OK formation into an effective table controlling force that can appear all over the shop - perfect for Maelstrom missions. Ultimately we've got enough to contend with in list building I don't see why we needed the addition of  'shame' to our choices for something that's just 'difficult to deal with' as opposed to 'impossible to deal with'.

Anyway, you can see the completed Blog Wars banner, the lettering came out OK and you can just about make it out thanks to all the creases in the fabric, shading and highlights. It is a 'shame' that I couldn't fit the number 9 on it but I still stand by it obscuring the banner too much. So I added some blood splatter, although it could have done to be a bit darker.

I also finally used some of my Secret Weapon Miniatures weathering powder to represent the dust of Ferron Proxima. I mixed it in with some Lahmian medium and it went on fine. I struggled with the idea it might look like rust [well it is Orange Rust afterall] but it is rust anyway. The reason Ferron Proxima is red is the high ferrous content of the rock, essentially the whole surface is rusting! So it's not the tyre that's rusty it's just coated with rust. Anyway, this is what I'll be adding to my Ravenwing wheels at some point so I'm really pleased with the results.

I'm not 100% happy with the piece of broken bronze detailing he's standing on, I think I'd have been better off just doing it red/orange liek the rest of the base but we can't win everything.

You still can't see the bits of blue corrugated steel under the platform but I like the sandbags, the cross-hatching giving the illusion of roughly woven sacks.

Just some close-ups of his face. If I'm honest the six eyes don't really do it for me, the single eyed standard Lictor looks far more menacing because I can get a little more detail in each eyeball.

But I do think this is a particularly effective image.

The sharp end of the stick!

So there we go, another completed model another big red stamp of approval. Granted not on the list but it was something that had to be done, even 9 months behind schedule. I've another Lictor somewhere to start, I wanted to change his pose a bit but right now his Chameleonic Skin is working to good effect and I can't find the little fella should he ever reveal himself I may consider eventually securing the three remaining Lictors to complete the brood of 'shame'. Until then I'll share some pics later on of both 'Death' and 'Deathleaper', I should probably think of some other nicknames for the new ones too.

What's on my palette?

Bless me readers for I have sinned, it's been nearly three months since my last confession. Before I begin did you notice the picture? Unfortunately it reveals my dirty little secret - this is indeed my palette...

And for a good long time I've been introducing these articles with the same palette, when it looked like this! I guarantee there may be some who are aghast at how I manage to paint like this, well you haven't even seen my brushes! I actually think the biggest problem with this desire to see how my palette ends up is that the dried paint is a little more porous than I'd like so paint does tend to dry out quicker than it should. I can indeed fix this in an instant as I have a couple of these 25p palettes, unused and unsullied going spare

 

Anyway, now I've shared my shame what am I up to? Well I made these - my own Maelstrom objective markers. I'm sure monkeychuka or someone else did this recently. The original plan was to leave the nodes unmolested and just put Adrenal Glands scuttling over the nodes in the correct numbers but in the end I just hacked my way through. Once again I was reminded about how brittle the Deathstorm plastic is, literally fracturing every time I used clippers on it. I also recently saw on Facebook some amazing markers using a variety nid components and a lot of hot-melt glue. The most impressive one featuring just Spinefists [impressive because it found a use for Spinefists!]. I'm just waiting for a couple more of these bases so I can prepare another 2 and 3 node marker for the mixed VP objectives in the Scouring - Eternal War Mission [remember them?]. But these will be done for Blog Wars.

Also this curve ball - Genestealer Cultists. These are actually on my To Do List so I don't feel bad about dragging them out of stasis. With talk of Genestealer Cult upcoming I thought I may as well get my headstart on it. They may be completely inappropriate but I just thought I'd crack on with them and see how frustrated I'd get as the last lot of cultists weren't particularly trouble-free. It's both very exciting but also a little worrying I may kill my new found mojo and momentum thanks to the recently completed models.

Yep, more random. PeteB had some Space Marine Scouts going spare. They've been converted with Space Wolf heads but were easily to retrofit with some of the spare scout bits I got from way back and even a few of them were OK with the mohicans and pony tails as I can see Native American references - Mohican obviously so Dark Angels should really own that look instead of the dog boys. Just some removal of side burns makes them less Norse. I also need to sculpt a cloak on Missile Launcher. But these are just another 5 models to add to my undertakings but they're DA so I can forgive that. I'll have fun doing the Urban Camo cloaks at least! 

Just some random bits, teleport homers, Macragge Force Field Pylons, random objective markers to add more flavour to the DAs

And the Dark Vengeance TacticalSquad, as represented by the Sergeant. I finished his tabard, so I was very pleased with myself. I really just need to crack on with the green armour on all these boys but it requires motivation and a concerted effort for me, even just working on a couple a night. Still they're back on the table so that's a statement of intent.

I've also got a few other things on the go but I'll leave those for another time this is clearly sufficient to keep me busy over the next couple of months.

Terrain is Everything - photo frame underhive

I'm just throwing this out ther, my wife got this picture frame about five or six years ago [it could even be more] and I've never put the pictures in that she wanted. To say she's miffed about it is an understatment so I finally stripped off the packaging and started to sort it out but as soon as i put it down on the table I just saw the perfect piece of terrain to base an Underhive or City Fight table on. There's definitely scope to put all sorts of creating and mesh layers as walkways. Fill some of the openings with industrial waste or rubble then build up some of the other frames with GW building walls. Now the chance of getting this again is practically non-existent, but I'm sure there are similar examples. This was about £13 from Dunelm Mill [or the Range] it's geat because you have three layers thanks to the stacked plastic framework. It's also two identical rectangula pieces joined together to make the square, so there's additional scope to look for something similar that may be rectangular.

Sadly I'll not be able to create the vision that popped into my head as soon as I placed it flat on the table, but I had to share the concept in case anyone else would similarly inspired. I just found the whole epiphany of an item that has been loitering in my house for ages suddenly took on a whole new perspective.