Dark Angels - Ravenwing bike squad

Well this is unusual - I'm not sure if a seed of advice about creating a test model has flourished but I'm beginning to focus predominantly on this one Ravenwing Sergeant. I have added extra highlights to the metallics and a subsequent additional Soft Tone [sepia] wash to warm them up. I actually managed to do this on all the bikes before I focused on him. You can see my first pass on the black highlights, this is with my own mix of Anitas Turquoise and Black. Note in particular the contrast between the highlight and black on the rear mud guard, wings and shoulder.

I actually thought this was too much contrast so I will be adding more black in to smoothly blend the colours and reduce the black/grey delineation.

This is actually two steps on but most importantly you should be able to make out the 2nd and 3rd stage highlights. The 3rd stage is the 'pin' highlight, which is a mix of white and Bahama Blue, this adds a little something to the greeny blue of the Turquoise. What is more interesting is the 2nd stage highlight is made upp of Citadel Dark Reaper. Now it's hard to pinpoint just where this begins and ends, I've added many coats of thinned black to try and smooth the transitions, although some are still visible. But the point is if my highlight mix was darker and I was shocked by the contrast then Dark Reaper is a lot lighter. Bearing in mind GW paint guides have Dark Reaper as their first highlight colour I think I'd just about keel over if I'd applied it in the first instance!

Happy with my Ravenwing Black I decided to block in my other colours. I'm a little apprehensive here as the bonewhite and Ravenwing symbols in white really stand out, which is why I don't have the white wings on front. It feel like I;m breaking my own rules.

At about 12:20am I've completed all the purity seals and then sepia washed them, added all the bonewhite and white highlights and even added some litanies!

All that's left to do on this is:

• Verdigris [nervous about this for some reason]
• Red headlamp and OSL [v.nervous about this for obvious reason, my test so far has not gone well :( ]
• Name on shoulder pad
• Company symbol on shoulder pad
• Bonewhite chips on base
• Base edge
• Varnish
• Orange weathering powder on tyres

I have to say I have conflicting emotions at the moment, mainly due to the process not the result. I'm really chuffed at my progress, this guy is almost done and this last push has really blown away my concerns with the black and the colours overall [mostly]. I think I have the process down, which I think is due to treating it as a test model. However, I'm now looking at those five remaining bikers and feel frustrated I didn't batch them alongside. Now there's no way they'd be verging on completion, batching doesn't work like that, but I'd be much further on instead of feeling like I've got to go back to the start. Mind games yet again.

So, next up after the above - 1st highlight on the black for the remaining five...

No MOAR tears! A public information message

You are welcome, should you feel the need blue tack affixed to the spill pot [or is it a moat, or a bund, or a berm?] will help guarantee you can knock neither over. Belt and braces!

Deathwatch Overkillin'

As the dust settles around the 40kaddict Terrain Competition and I try and marshall my thoughts, deal with my neck/arm pain and cope with the new IT regime I thought I'd just share the highlights of a couple of Deathwatch Overkill games PeteB and I played the other night.

It's embarassing to admit that this is our first game since we played Dark Angels Vs his Daemonkin back in December and you may not be surprised to learn [given he's had about seven or eight armies in the five years I've known him] that Pete has since offloaded much of his 40k in that time.

But he was well up for trying this game out and so I subbed in my painted Genestealer and Chaos Cultists for the Hybrids and swapped my painted Dark Angels for the Deathwatch characters.

We played the first mission which is really the Deathwatch have to kill 25 Broodkin, who in turn have to kill just two Deathwatch [those are the odds...]. I'd already seen Luke's review [sorry can't add a direct link due to the IT policy, grrr!] so I knew it heavily favoured the Deathwatch and you really needed to gang up your models

Luckily I had a couple of Ambush cards that allowed me to pick another 3 cards and deploy all ambushes so now I potentially had a lot of bodies to swamp the Marines.

Anyway you can see that didn;t work very well and as my Cultists with Autoguns have no armour save I quickly decided the 6+ save on assault cultists was better than nothing, not to mention they're more likely to hit in short range.

I managed to get another card that helped speed up my brood and managed to get close up with the Astartes.

But it didn't really do me any favours and Pete continued to rack up kill points.

I played a card that allowed me to ambush in any tile, bringing some Aberrants on to surroudn the Frag Cannon wielding Rodricus Grytt, I managed ot put a owund on Jensus Natorium, the Librarian.

Pete followed up by reaching his kill target of 25.

We then played out my last turn and I was able to bring down Jensus and Rodricus, so although I was outgunned it was only just. In a normal game of 40k where everyone gets their turn this would have been a draw. So, although the Genestealers are completely outclassed ultimately if you cna get them in close then their is a possibility to make things more equal.

We then swapped sides and it was obvious my 25mm bases did afford me an advantage compared with the 32mm bases the marines are now supplied with. It also made me start to consider options for rebasing... [incidentally the Watcher is the teleport homer for Garran Brannatar [the Terminator Salamander].

I managed to get forward quite quickly and make some quick early kills leaving the Cultists thin on the ground.

Mor earrived and I was able to continue to push forwards with Garran protecting the rear.

I was able to reach the final room and take the fight to the cultists. Thanks to the Space Marine ability to heal themselves by forgoing an attack any wound inflicted was quickly recouperated. This ended up feeling too easy so I then chose not to restore any wounds.

I went on to make the 25 kills and again we played on with Pete's turn and without restoring any wounds he was able to kill Garran and Cassius. This confirmed that although it doesn't seem balanced initially there clearly is a balance between the opposing factions. I thin k it's marginally skewed in favour of the Marines and the restoring wounds is a bit much, at the least a roll to restore a wound would add some challenge, aside from the price of failing to attack. Even a 4+ would make it less easy for the Marines. We'll definitely add a house rule in for this.

And in a flurry of effort I actually finsihed basing, rewashing the resin dust off the bases and priming all the cultists. I'm hopeful if the rest of my current projects progress as planned this hobby season I may get chance to do Red Planet BASE! on them all before the end of the season.

I'd be pretty chuffed if the Ravenwing, Imperial Knight, Genestealers and Cultists bases were my only remaining successes this year, although there's still scope for more if I get a wiggle on. Anyway, hope you liked to see something a little different, I'll probably get some more games on and I'm sure Pete will be up for more games.

40kaddict Terrain Competition 2016 winner

The end of the month and voting is now closed on the 40kaddict Terrain Competition. Firstly I'd like to make a few 'thank yous'. I'm not sure who should take priority but in no particular order:

• thanks to all those who find something worth clicking on your support really made this a reality
• thanks to all those who took part, there was a moment where I thought I wasn't going to get any entries but I think 11 for a first time, untested competition was really good going. Not to mention the inventive ways everyone interpreted the templates. Hardly any of them were 'stock' recreations they all added something unique from the builders perspective which I absolutely loved.
• thanks to all those that voted. I was a little apprehensive about the poll, but poll-maker was super easy to use and its streamlined nature has made all my concerns disappear.

So all that's left to do is announce the winners, as was mentioned in the rules the first prize was for an Imperial Knight [or equivalent value model] and the second prize was £10 in vouchers for a local independent game store

Second prize goes to: Alun Heseltine and 'awww!'

First prize goes to: Marc van Holst and 'Thermoplasma Generator'

You can see all the voting here, it has made me think next time it may be wise to combine voting by all entries, as combined it looks like Alun might have won by one vote. Although I don't know if both pictures together might have reduced the cute factor of awww! on it's own, hopefully he won't be too disappointed with second prize, but please feel free to comment on whether you're happy with separate votes or would prefer combined, I know a couple of entries were specified as separate...

Now hopefully Marc wants the Imperial Knight because GW only went and released Imperial Knights: Renegade this month. Liam had asked me to go halves on a box, which initially I said I couldn't really afford at the moment as I was thinking of the Knight for myself. Then I remembered I'd promised one in my competition, duh! Anyway I agreed to go in with him and got dibs on the Warden in the set, because that's what I'd kind of been promising and Liam's got 5 knights anyway so he's probably got all the load outs.

Initially I'd thought to shop locally for the winner and have it delivered direct but everyone knows Australian prices for GW are insane and this worked out better all round for everyone. So the order is in with Wayland games, when they have new stock in they'll be sending it out and I'll then forward it on. Anyway I'll be sorting all the details out with both winners individually but I think everyone can consider themselves a winner, as they've got a cool piece of terrain out of it.

As for the other reasons for holding the competition I think I've proved AdSense competitions can work, within only 9 months I was able to reach the goal that previously had taken 4.5 years. Now it's doubtful that momentum will continue as I won't be holding a competition this time round and I won't be updating the blog with the totals each month, which usually prompted a spike in clicks. But then the quicker I reach my next target the quicker I can get round to running a new competition.

That said it will be more useful insight to see how the clicks have evolved compared to pre-competition. One interesting aside was that I did manage to link my YouTube account to my AdSense and last month made 13p from YouTube alone, so for all those bloggers with AdSense and YouTube videos it may be worthwhile joining those up.

Hopefully there'll be less stigma involved for bloggers using adverts in the future and we'll see more people taking them on and more people clicking. I'm regularly clicking on From the Fang and The Burning Eye's adverts that are relevant to me. Interestingly this last month I got this 'achievement' in my AdSense account celebrating over a million impressions on the adverts. If Google are telling me this then I'm guessing its a big deal so I'd recommend if you've got a blog just add an ad, it's not difficult and it may take four or five years to make anything from it but you never know...

'nids part 197 - Deathwatch Overkill update

Not much to see here I did make a spray stick though - a small piece of wood I had in the garage for years, some double sided tape and the Aberrants, heavy weapons hybrids and a few other first and second hybrids.

So much easier to spray, although next time I'll ensure I don't put one so close to the end as being able to hold it from both sides helps with the spraying.

Since this I've managed to build all my other Hybrids and the Deathwatch team members. All I need to do is base them ready for undercoating and I can have them all ready and waiting - put them in a box until I have chance to paint them that is!

Dark Angels - Ravenwing update

Painting the feathers on the Ravenwing should not be my priority. I seem to be saying that a lot actually. The bikes themselves are but the wings should really be done after I've finished the metals and the black because I'm clearly going to screw it up in places. However I'm having a lot of fun with it so I just carried on.

I'm playing with the paint in places. The 2nd generation Anita's turquoise looks quite opaque but goes on almost transparent so it's almost like it's been pre-thinned. I apply it and then do a second pass which makes the colour more pronounced and a third pass really gets the highlight. I also chose a different technique on one bike and subsequently applied it to two other so if there was a difference it could be contained within units. For this I did a first highlight using Army Painter Hydra Turquoise. Now this is slightly darker and bluer meaning when I applied second and third highlights with the Anitas I got a subtle shift in tonal range. Then added a black wash and a final pick up of highlights. Whether it's noticeable now and therefore worth doing I'm not sure but it was enjoyable at the time. Metals and black next...

I also moved on with the resin base for the Nephilim/Dark Talon, washing the Red Oxide Primer with Army Painter Strong Tone.

Then it was Vermilion craft acrylic for the highlight.

Followed by my first pass Vermilion and Pumpkin highlight mix, just about evident from these pics.

2nd pass highlight and then pure pumpkin edge highlight and bonewhite chips to do and then I can varnish this.

Denied

This happens regularly and I usually find a work around but this time nothing works. It seems the 'powers that be' have manged to deny access to any sites that are related to 'games'. So I will not be able to keep up-to-date on some of the things I normally would. I can currently still make blog posts but I can't review them afterwards or cross reference older posts or other blogs as I would normally like.

Its really very frustrating but there's not much I can do at this point and I'll try to continue on within the confines of these limitations, thanks for your patience.