Dark Angels genesis vol 2.

Although I liked the darkness of my original attempt at Dark Angel power armour I was never fully happy with the quality and it felt like I was cheating. Essentially the paint was only applied at the edges, something most paint guides advocate now but back then it was shadows, midtone highlight [work your way up].

My mate James's Ultramarines were a 'duck egg blue'. They looked cool so I thought the same principle would work on DA's green. They've ended up far too pale but I still like them in a way and can't bring myself to strip them, not yet anyway.

Old school Space Marine devastator squad! Like I say not recognisable as true Dark Angels. Wow, folks that's a Conversion Beamer, when you didn't have to be a forge master to get one and they converted mass to energy, the bigger you are the bigger the bang! NOT the further away you are the bigger the bang, that makes no sense?! Spot the Advanced Space Crusade scout heavy bolter, I have the lead standard ones, I just wanted the massive ugly plastic one instead.

Circa 1992.

Old school Space Marine Chaplain, on a bike! Brother Infernus to the rescue. This was before the 'Ravenwing is all black' info came out, hence the green bike. This guy was supposed to zoom around the battle field dropping Vortex grenades like the easter bunny.

Old school Dark Angel mole mortar! Now no longer available to Space Marines [just Death Korps of Krieg] although the Thunderfire cannon has similar rules to those of the Rogue Trader days [although they're not in the DA codex!]

Old School Tarantula sentry gun from Advance Space Crusade. I've 3 of these babies and was gutted there was no rules for them until I saw Imperial Armour 2. 15pts each for twin linked heavy bolter. BS2, but 3 of them stacked together, you can do some damage on a gaunt swarm!

 

Adeptus Titanicus

Although Blood Bowl was my first foray into Games Workshop's games and Rogue Trader appeared somewhere along the line it was Adeptus Titanicus that was my first choice of game I wanted to persue. My friend had shown me Blood Bowl and RT but when Adeptus Titanicus came out I was the only one to get it and although we went on to play Epic and Space Marine extensively no one ever got Adeptus Titanicus except me.

So I have quite a large Titan force. I also got hold of the Titan expansion box, a further 6 warlords not to mention my Reavers and Warhounds. Hopefully I'll get to showcase my entire Howling Griffons, Ultramarine, Dark Angel Epic battleforce. Meanwhile here's the White Dwarf teaser advert...

Dark Angels genesis vol 1.

For some reason I've chosen Dark Angels as my Space Marine chapter. I think it goes back to that first Epic boxed game - 'Space Marine' they were on the front of the box all dark and moody. Funnily enough I did most of my epic figures as Ultramarines but with a contingent of Dark Angels as allies.

Anyway I started these guys around 1990/91. I may even have been using enamel paints in some parts. I was never 100% happy with the finish, I mean the colour is awesome but the quality just isn't there. If I could get such a deep green/black finish now I'd be happy but at the time I wasn't which is why there is another volume to this saga...

Milliput bases, what was I thinking?

Cheap terrain materials

Cheap alternatives to some of your usual terrain building materials are available at your local hardware store – B&Q, Homebase, Focus etc.

For instance sand you could purchase GW’s own basing sand £5 for 100g or you could get one of the many sacks of sand from B&Q for £2 odd. The difference being GW’s is probably graded  and cleaned, the sharp sand is probably damp contains many grades, which can be frustrating but I used a selection of sieves to get exactly the grade I wanted and left it outside in the sun to dry. I managed to grade some very fine sand, some medium grade, some chunky granular sand and even some pebbles for rough terrain – particularly useful when basing Hormagaunts. They mostly advance through cover/difficult terrain anyway, why not base them with a lot of gravel to offset that annoying tendency to fall flat on their gnashing teeth!

Here's an example of how the sand is graded. Clearly the basing helps pick out the variety but it's there in spades!

You can build plenty of hills with this sort of polystyrene for only £2! Not quite as good as the denser pink, peach or blue insulation foam but it'll do in a pinch. I got some peach foam from B&Q [honestly I don't get commission]. It's not on their website but it is available from the larger 'trade centres'.

Space Hulk freebie

Rooting around in one of my many treasure troves of 40k stuff I found White Dwarf issue 120 December 1989. Aside from the fact this magazine is 21 years old there was a complete article on rules for using Space Marines in Space Hulk. Complete with mission, extra board pieces and army lists.

As far as I'm aware the recent reissue of Space Hulk was exactly the same and included the Deathwing supplements [if I'm wrong let me know and I'll see what I can do about that]. So I've scanned the rules so anyone wishing to try out their favourite marines against genestealers give it a shot and let me know what you think. 

Get the Space Marines in Space Hulk rules here.

Terrain is everything - modular hill overview part 2.

In much the same way that GW’s battle terrain can split and rotate I wanted a hill that did the same. A hill big enough to support my largest building but offer a split so it can be positioned as corner pieces or board side ridges.

I sourced some pink insulation foam from B&Q. It was about £7 and 50mm thick, twice what I wanted but the 25mm foam was out of stock. I think the sheet was about 5’ long and possibly 3’ wide, big enough for a table on it’s own and after producing all my hills I have half of it left.

Firstly I had to split the foam in two to get it down to 25mm. I used a normal wood saw to do this. It made a really rough surface but I figured that would be the base so wouldn’t matter. One down side to this is that the foam did start to warp a little so if you can get 25mm thick foam, get it! I then traced my hill, with split and a number of other hills, a roughly circular hill, oval and a long ridge. I think all of them can fit on the modular hill in some way to get that double height cover.

The hills were all cut out at an angle. I used a thin bread knife for this as the serrated edges were finer leaving a smoother finish on the slopes. This is really difficult to do and takes a lot of care so you don’t lose a limb. Cutting the hill on the edge/corner of a table allows the knife to cut through without destroying the furniture. I did mine vertically on the wall outside so I didn’t make a mess from the polystyrene.

The hills had bases made out of mounting card, less durable than MDF but I had loads to hand and it’s easier to cut/bevel edges. Obviously the downside is that the PVA used to mount the hills and board together warped them but eventually you can bend them back straight. Around the edges builder’s sharp sand from B&Q was stuck on with PVA.

The hills were painted with a black interior house paint, bulked out with Early Learning Centre art paint, some Polycel ready mix plaster, some fine sand and a good dollop of PVA glue. I wanted a nice impervious coating, like you get with surfboards, a foam core with a hard outer fibreglass shell.

Once this was dry I sprayed a red oxide primer paint [another advantage to red planet battlefields] onto the hill. I’d also managed to pick up some Vermillion artists acrylic paint from Quality Save for 99p. Amazingly this colour matches the base map perfectly. A series of successive drybrushes really picked up the sand and texture.

Below are all the hills I made in one go, as you can see there’s plenty of variety to their deployment which means we won’t get too bored with our terrain. Later on as I present more examples of my red planet terrain, once I've prepped all the .pdf templates to go with them I'll show how the terrain all fits together.

Terrain is everything - modular hill overview part 1.

From day one my primary interest in getting back into gaming has been the fun I had making scenery. Admittedly I’m not talking some of the hyper-realistic sort that some terrain artists can do but functional, eye-catching, game-worthy scenery. Added to this, given our limited gaming table I wanted the scenery to be versatile. Terrain created in such a way that, where possible, it can be used in a variety of ways for maximum effect.

So I started with a list of typical terrain:

• Hills
• Trees
• Walls
• Fences
• Buildings
• Ruins
• Scattered objects
• Rock formations
• Bunkers/defences
• Containers

As you see first on the list was hills, you’re defacto standard terrain. If you’re using a felt sheet for a battle mat these can be as simple as books under the sheet! In this case I drew up a quick sketch for my modular hill.

So, for part two of this overview tomorrow, I’ll go into detail how I went about making the hills.

A freebie - Battlefield Mars

Way back when I went to a Games Day or Golden Demon and I fell in love with a Chaos battlefield. This thing was bright red and the were lots of little mounds of 'difficult terrain' that were made out of massed piles of pure white skeleton warriors piled up on these red ash hillocks [that's hillocks]. Of course you could do that then because skeleton box sets were THE go to army if you wanted to game on the cheap, are there any cheap starter options anymore?

Anyway, I always wanted a red battlefield, if and when I did my own terrain but back when we were gaming as a group of mates our table was made of plywood and we had a big sheet of green felt. Cut to today and considering the large interest in Adeptus Mechanicus armies I found very few Mars/Red Planet terrain tutorials.

So my first option was to look at red felt which I was going to 'distress' a bit. This would have cost somewhere in the region of £15-£20 and although I've since looked at a couple of alternatives GW's own Realm of Battle Gameboard [too expensive], Zuzzy Miniatures awesome looking Terra-Flex System battle mats [a third the price of a gameboard, easy stowage but not as versatile], a big sheet of B&Q insulation foam carved up and ready to game [V.cheap but hard work to make and a pain to store without damage], I opted for the cheapest option available to me - a big laminated print out of aerial photography!

Of course you need access to a large scale printer and laminator for this sort of thing and if you even look at high street printers who offer such a service you're better off with the felt route, or even the B&Q foam route if you have the skills to model such a board and store it. However if you can access such things here's a copy of my red planet battlefield to print out. It'll easily cover 4'x2' at 144dpi so you could blow it up to do a 6'x3' with only a little loss in quality. It's just over 2MB if you're worried about filesizes.

You can download the full hi-res version here [using Shift+D] https://photos.app.goo.gl/wVvX3TIZ3veLDuS53

40k future container scatter terrain

Here's a little tutorial on some 40k future containers that I made. Get a Mentos Cube Chewing Gum box [currently available in most Home Bargain/Quality Save in the UK for 59p]

Remove all labelling and take the lid off without breaking the sea;
After emptying the contents, preferably into your mouth, slice off all the protruding parts on the lid.

Add cereal box card reinforcements and undercoat. I've .pdf templates for the reinforcements if anyone wants to give it a go. All you need do is print them out, pritt stick or spray mount them to your card and then cut out with a craft knife or scalpel [watch your fingers].



Turn them upside down and add granny grating to the top, brass picture hooks can work as crane pick-up points, but you won't be able to stack them directly on top of each other if you do.

Stack 'em high. Probably big enough to hide a Tervigon!

Currently trying to paint them with some nice rust effects, will update when they're done. Note that some have extra reinforcements in the corner for variety. The .pdf template has these extra pieces, they're the centre reinforcements cut diagonally along the dotted line, good for half your container being ultra-strong.
Also if you take the lids completely off most poster tube end caps make ideal liquid-tank lids. Perhaps some of that square mesh often used as railings wrapped round and you could create something like these.

I'll get round to the half height .pdf at some point and updates of the finished painting as and when it's done. Hope you get some use out of this.

A freebie - wound markers

Here's a little thing to be going on with. If you've got plenty of high wound characters, or if like my son you are running Tyranids then sooner or later you're going to have to deal with recording wounds. There's a number of options, put a dice down [preferrably a small one], buy wound markes or note it down on a piece of paper. The first two cost money, or are annoying if you're using all your lucky dice just to keep track and the last one's also a pain in the hive mind.

Alternatively you can make your own, so I did. All you need to do is print them out, attach to mounting card, cover in sellotape for pseudo one sided lamination and then cut them out, voila!

You can use the blue markers for your Doom of Malantai, thanks to his Spirit Leech having a maximum of 10 wounds! There's also a few 3-5 wound markers for you Tervigon, enjoy.

Usual step-by-step:

1. Print
2. Apply double sided tape to back
3. Stick to mounting card
4. Carefully apply sellotape to top if you want them pseudo-laminated
5. Cut out with craft knife/scalpel
6. Amaze your friends and enemies with these cards
7. Tell them to visit 40kaddict.blogspot.com for their own free markers.

I've really fallen of the wagon now!

OK, so no ones reading this because I'm a new blog that's not going to be advertised but I wanted somewhere to store all my newly rediscovered passion for all things Games Workshop [the passion that dares not speak its name]. I started my interest in little toy soldiers before high school in 1985. Round about that time I was frequenting a local newsagents that sold Citadel miniatures but I'd also been to an independent gaming store called Game in Liverpool and proudly returned with my first lead miniature that cost about 50p!

Anyway I'll maybe spare some time over my history with this hobby over the course of the blog but I'll state that from 1997 to 2009 I was 'clean'. I'd managed to kick the habit and was firmly on the wagon for 12 years despite an increasing amount of occasions where the family would wander into a GW and I would make the store personnel regret ever sidling up to me with the classic "so what brings you here today?"

Still when the kids reach the age where massive super-powered space warriors and space aliens capture their imagination and a downturn in your other passions converge it's easy to suddenly fall of the wagon and indulge your passions. The fact is I always loved the creative side of GW, the painting and model building. I wasn't too bad at it either, just not very prolific, until my college years when I had more time to develop a painting style I was comfortable with. So that's what I'm going to focus on, the bits and pieces that I can collect together that I've made. Hopefully there'll be things people can benefit from, the shortcuts to managing your addiction instead of your addiction managing you. If you end up following me, huzzah, that's a bonus I hope I don't waste your time.

Stay frosty

dwez

PS a random image to start you off. Here's my Harlequin jetbike, painted in the style of the Joker from Tim Burton's Batman. Along with the rest of my 'quins he was sold off on ebay in 2004. Altogether I made a pretty little profit on these guys, more will follow over time.