Painting, Painting, and Painting some more.

Anyone who knows me can tell you the two following things in regards to Warhammer 40k and other miniature gaming like Fantasy, Warzone, etc.

#1. I play a damned good game.
#2. I never paint my miniatures.

I'm not here to talk about #1, but instead #2.

I hate painting miniatures, I have hated painting them for years, which is why I have done it so infrequently. I mean, sure I have painted miniatures, my collection of old stuff I've done over the years proves it, as does my collection of old paints. That all aside, I never finished an army. For example, the Dwarves (Because I spell it like I want) that I have had for... phew... uh... almost 20 years are not fully painted. Sure, some of the squads may be fully painted, but that is mostly because those squads are like 10-20 in total. And truthfully my painting abilities back then sucked as much as the typical 12-15 year old gamer.

Not to knock gamers of that age, but truthfully I was horrible. I knew I was horrible, which is why I never really finished stuff, because while what I could easily visualize in my head was great and awesome, what I could produce on the miniatures was terrible.

So, because of that, as I got older I never bothered to paint. Sure I would convert miniatures, sure I would assemble them, I would play the various games, and I always did it with an army of either a various spray primer, or of just plastic/metal. I did paint the old Iron Warriors army I owned, but that was a labor of love, and in retrospect, while they may have been decent, they were far from good. The fact that the army was stolen was probably a blessing in disguise simply because it gave me a chance to not only rebuild them and get to actually painting something I wanted to paint. And lo did I discover, that I was actually a bit better than I used to be, at least better enough that the stuff looked good and received compliments. While I will never ever win a painting competition, I will be happy with how my stuff looks.

That said, I have more armies than just the Iron Warriors. For example, I own a collection of old and new Blood Angels, I own the afore mentioned Dwarves, some Empire, and a lot of Brettonian knights. But, other than my Iron Warriors, I love my Imperial Guard. Some of them are ancient enough to have once been named "Imperial Army". But the majority of them are bog standard Cadians. And most, if not all of them have been flat plastic in color save for a few individual pieces. That includes the tanks. But all that changed about a week and a half ago.

Despite over 20 hours of overtime in the past two weeks, I have somehow gone from no painted Imperial Guard, to 101 individual guardsmen, 6 Chimeras, 6 Leman Russ, and 1 Hell Hound, and this week I plan to paint my first Vendetta. So, somehow in less than 6 months time I have gone from no completely painted armies, to 2. The Mayans were right, the world must be ending.

What makes it worse, is that I have decided other than with the current Cadians I have, I will paint the rest of the guard, and convert the guard in full to be a heresy style army also. Which means... yep, say hello to the Olympian Planetary Defense force. Gotta keep up with the Iron Warriors theme don'tcha know.

Results

So, at Adepticon my Iron Warriors managed to go 9 wins, 2 draws, and 1 very narrow loss. That's counting both the Team Tournament where half of our army was the Iron Warriors and the other half was James's Pre Heresy Space Wolves. It looked really awesome to have two fully converted pre heresy armies fighting it out at one of the gates to the Emperor's palace, and it felt really really good for our team to take 4th place overall and only suffer 1 draw during the team tournament. 7 wins and 1 draw there is awesome.

In the championships however they did not perform quite as well as I had hoped. I drew Reecius from Frontline Gaming and had a very narrow loss to him, won my next two games against an all Death Wing army, and a 90 power armor body Iron Hands list with massive amounts of Lascannons. Then I got a draw with my buddy Mike in the final round of the Championships. Still I pulled off 47th out of 200+ there, so that leaves me a happy man.

And now, on to work with the ATC army, which will either be the Wolves with a bit more work added to them, or my Imperial Guard who are either going to be styled as the Olympian 7th, or the Caintuk 7th. Either way, there will be gray, there will be red, and it will hopefully start getting converted like crazy.

Because I've been bitten by the conversion bug, and it won't let go.

That does mean of course, that I will have to keep working on my Iron Warriors, because while having 6 full 10 man squads of regular marines and 15 missiles is nice, I want more.

I want a throng, a hoard, I want to be able to show off a full company level or more of marines, and by god, I will have it. So that's the goal, a full grand company. Minimum 100 power armor bodies, preferably closer to 150-175.

Best get cracking.

Iron Within, Iron Without.

Adepticon 2012.

So, we made it to Chicago. Sitting here in line, waiting on the registration line to open. I rode up here with the rest of Team Scabbard. When we first got here, it looked like there were around 4-5 people in line. Once we got unloaded and into line, it turned out there were about 20 people in line. Now when I look behind us, the registration line is wrapped around the wall and turned the corner to where I can't see the rest of the line. Looks like I will be lucky enough to get both the Adepticonstruct, and the Battle Foam Shield Bag. Huzzah!

Lets see how the Iron Warriors do at my first Adepticon.

Iron Within, Iron Without.

All done

4 Rune Priests/Warsmiths with their targeting servitors. Done.
All bases. Done.
Display board. Done.
Army pamphlet, will be done tomorrow.

Adepticon, here I come!

Finished my Razorbacks.

So I got overtime. It happens, not really a huge problem except when it comes down to time crunch.

Luckily, I managed to hammer out all three of the Razorbacks last night, then I got their turrets, hazard striping, and shading/dipping done. All done, in fact so done, that I discovered that my dip can is just about done. I'm fairly certain that after one or two more miniatures in total that the dip will be 100% done. It's starting to congeal, clump, and become almost as thick as mud. Which makes it kind of hard to dip anything into it.

But, as I said, I got the dip for the Razorbacks and their turrets done.

I also got a chance to redo a bit of work on my banners for each squad. Previously I wasn't at all happy with them, and now, while I am still not 100% happy with how they look, I am much happier that I redid each of the banners with black outlines on the edges of the banners, a yellow center, and finally over that yellow center I managed to get some of the Iron Warrior transfers that matches exactly the Skull that I have on my shoulder pads and on my Rhino hatches. So I put those on my 6 banners, hit them with the nearly last bit of dip, and then I did manage to use the very last of my antishine coat.

Looks like it's time to get more dip and more antishine. Hopefully I can get by with just the antishine and make this can of dip last through the final 3 miniatures I have to get painted. Depending on how this goes through tomorrow night and the weekend, I will try to get squad by squad pictures done (If I complete their basing for everyone).

So... other than finishing 1 Rune Priest, 2 Choosers, and about 10 bases in total, I'm done.

Wow. Holy crap, this has been a huge load of work, a lot of fun to do, and it's really nearly finished.

I feel like I just completed my siege lines around the Emperor's Palace, now it's time to open up with the beginning of the bombardment.

Iron Within, Iron Without

Custom minis order arrived.

As you may know, I have ordered a lot of custom bits for this army. Heads, backpacks, weapons, and shoulder pads from across the third party vendors have all gone into this project.

Well, yesterday I got my latest bits in. Custom Rhino top hatches from Custom Minis. They are the same people (Sandman Mike from the Heroic 28s) who have done my custom shoulder pads.

Heres a few of the finished hatches on top of their rhinos. All I need to do now are get their stormbolters done and I'll be good to go.

In the past 6 days...

I have been a busy little Warsmith recently. Other than the updates I already had to the army, I have converted 3 LasPlas turrets. I have also gotten the Rhino chassis for those Razorbacks built and base coated. Hopefully if I don't have to work crazy late hours tonight I can get them painted and together. I also built another Warsmith, got him painted, but haven't hit his Chooser up yet, I'll probably put that on the list for tonight also.

Then I went about and converted 6 combi meltas from some spare melta guns, then I put those and more power fists on a few Sergeants that I had the bits for thanks to my Maxmini order coming in finally, and then I got those 6 Sergeants painted. Now, while those 6 Sergeants work perfectly for the 6 line squads if I feel like using them that way instead of going with just a powerfist and bolt pistol, there is a problem of my Devastators/Long Fangs not having Sergeants done at all.

Well, last night I put together three Sergeants just for them. Since one of each of those squads in addition to his missile launcher has either a hammer, a sword, or an axe held in his hand, I built the three Sergeants to combine with that squad. One has a rather bitching sword, one has a rocking axe, and the last has another Maxmini hammer that I got in that last shipment.

Oh yeah, and I got them painted as well.

Need to get the last vehicles and Warsmith done, along with the two targeting servitors, but once those are done it's all cake, everything will be done, and my half of our Team Tournament team will be done, and my own championship army will be done. Adepticon here I come.

Iron Within, Iron Without

After almost 20 years I finally have a painted army.

When I got into playing Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, some time back in either 1992 or 1993, I played two different armies. In Fantasy I played Dwarves (Not Dwarfs because I, unlike GW know how to spell the word), I played Dwarves because I like beards, I like Dwarves, and I still do. In 40k I started off with Blood Angels, probably because they were included in the box and because they had this mystique about them of being freakish space vampires.

When you are that age, things like that are cool.

At that age I picked up a single GW paint set and started painting, first on marines, then on the Dwarves, then on marines, etc etc. But never did I stick with one project for long enough to actually finish it. Sure I would finish whole units of Dwarves, one time I finished a unit of Spearmen with a total of 30 guys in it. But I never finished an army, I still have that Dwarf army, and it is still not fully painted. Those Blood Angels have long since vanished from my collection for the most part, either in trades, into the trash, or what have you, I honestly don't know anymore.

But right around 1996 or so, I started painting an Iron Warriors Chaos Marine army because, hey, siege warfare is cool. And that army I did nearly finish, only needing to finish the Berzerkers and some other random bits of stuff to be finished. Then I stopped playing 40k for about three years, came back, played my gray plastic Imperial Guard heavily, and then after my Iron Warriors walked away, I started rebuilding them, only this time, I had a plan.

Like so many others, I fell onto the Pre-Heresy bandwagon, and while some went with just painting a space marine army in the colors of the old Death Guard, I went a different route. I started converting each and every single one of the Iron Warriors in the army. Each figure had weapon swaps, hand swaps, back pack swaps, head swaps, removal of Imperial Eagles, and more. Each and every single one of the guys I was building had extra effort beyond what I would have ever imagined doing for a single rank and file trooper.

And this past Thursday, I finished it. I painted the last of the Iron Warriors I have done at this point. I finished them one and all.

Now, that doesn't mean I won't be building more, painting more, and expanding quite a lot, but the basic core of the army, the troops, the heavy support, the transports, the leaders, and the elites are all done.

So, allow me to proudly present the first army I have ever actually started, continued, and finished in my nearly 20 years of playing Games Workshop games. I give you...


The Iron Warriors of the 9th Grand Company.

Next up, doing two more Warsmith conversions from Techmarines, Two Razorbacks, and then 30 of the Forge World jump marines.

Yeah, it's been a bit. Not really sorry about that.

Sorry about not posting, been working feverishly trying to get ready for the Tournament season, which for me kicks off on Saturday with me going to Maul in the Mall.

My final to do list consists of the following for Maul in the Mall.

6 Rhino's. Painted, Dipped, Sealed. Done.
6 Squads. Fully done except for 1 which needs basing.
2 Rune Priests. Painted, Dipped. Waiting until tomorrow night and sealing then basing.
6 Wolf Standards. Painted, Dipped. 5 sealed, waiting on 1 to dry before sealing tomorrow night, followed by basing.
2 Choosers of the Slain. Painted, Dipped, Sealed. Needs basing.
3 Missile Launchers, Painted, Dipped. Will seal tomorrow night followed by basing.

Total to do tomorrow night. Seal the Rune Priests and everything in the above list. All painting is finished, just need to finish the seals/anti-shine on the stuff listed already and then I have to base 17 marines. Considering my basing is quick and dirty, I expect it will all be done in about 2 hours or so. After that is complete, the Maul in the Mall army is 100% done.

Adepticon to do list.
2 more Rune Priests, 2 more Choosers of the Slain, 2 Razorbacks, 1 Meltagun, 3 Dedicated Long Fang Sergeants, 6 new Sergeants with Powerfists and Combimelta.

Display Board. Needs to be completed.

Pictures... yeah, we know that'll happen eventually.

Looks like the Iron Warriors are nearly done for their current stage of readiness.

Iron Within, Iron Without

Finished painting those Marines

All but one of the marines I spoke about a few days ago are currently fully painted, dipped, and sitting in a nice ventilated area drying.

It rained like crazy here yesterday and most of today, which is why when the rain was done, and I got home, I scrambled to get them all dipped.

Looks like that's done.

Tomorrow, Rhino number 1.

Wish me luck.

Pictures will appear once they dry and have received their coat of anti-shine.

Iron Within, Iron Without.

This weeks painting commitment.

Tournament this coming weekend. I want to be able to actually field my army as a painted army, without having to just have some of it painted and some of it either base coated or gray plastic. So, that said, tonight 22 marines made it to the half way painted mark. The marines who are getting painted are the sword squad, all of the missile launchers, five of the Forge World assault marines, the Forge World boarding marine, and one Scibor commander.

What does this mean?

Well tonight with them being half way to the painted mark, tomorrow when I get off work they will push the rest of the way to the fully painted mark. Once that's done, as long as the weather stays nice and not bitterly cold and nasty with wind, they will all get the dip, that's slated for either tomorrow night, or Wednesday night. Hypothetically I dip them Wednesday night, Thursday night I'll be able to seal the dip and start work on the bases.

Hurrah, this will finish all, and I do mean all of my troops choices will be painted, as will all of my heavy support, one of my fast attack, and one of my HQ.

That ignores the Terminators, who are still done.

The thing it doesn't do, is touch the vehicles, which makes me a sad panda.

Meh, ah well, it's been a rough year so far with mom's health problems, personal issues with life and everything else, and... enough excuses. It's less than two months to Adepticon, I am well beyond fallen behind, it's past time to get cracking and get it all done.

Spent a bit over $200 on a bits order from Max Mini, I'm out of heads and backpacks. Which wouldn't be a huge deal if I weren't to the point where I need to start building guys beyond just the basic troops squads. Gonna stick with the helmet pattern of one for all the squad members and another for the leader, but still... more work ahead. Hopefully these 60 heads and backpacks will keep me going for a while.

Iron Within, Iron Without

2/16/12 update

So I got a chance finally to put miniatures together and get pictures taken. I also have a small rant to make about Forge World, but I'll save that for when we do our next Podcast. Allow me to present to you the Forge World Mk. II Assault Squad (with Meltagun, because everyone needs at least one.), the Forge World Boarding Marine, and my kitbashed hero guy.

And yes, all of them are obviously going to be Iron Warriors. The kitbash is made of a pair of legs I found in a bits box that I had to cut and repose as they were obviously intended to be used as riding something, the cloak from him was from the Chaos Lord on Manticore, the head is a Chaos Lord head from 40k with the horns shaved off his face, the backpack and shoulder pads are from Max Mini, and the hammer head is from Scibor.

Now, let me say this. I have done a LOT of conversion miniatures over the years. I have built stuff from several companies when it comes to miniatures, I have done GW bits orders, Forge World orders, Max Mini, Rakham, Scibor, and other companies now long out of business. I have dealt with flash, with poor molds, and with miscasts, especially with finecast. That all said, out of everything I have done, the GW miniatures in plastic have always been of the highest quality when it came to the figures. But these forge world ones I just put together? My god, I had more flash, more mold lines, and each and every single one of them has stuff I will have to cover up with green stuff because of a bad mold or poor cast. This is nuts. I've seen smaller companies with better quality control, and bigger ones with the same. If this is a representative of how Forge World runs their quality then I highly doubt I will purchase more from them after my Adepticon order.

Iron Within, Iron Without.

Scratch built my new commander over the weekend.

So over the weekend I took a large number of just random bits from across the various pieces and parts I have acquired over the years, and got more through trade and built myself a rather spiffy commander for the Iron Warriors.

Of course I've also had to deal with my mother being in the hospital again.

I'll get to those pictures, I promise. Hopefully this week once she's out of the hospital I can try.

Iron Within, Iron Without

It are my birthday

And for my birthday I got myself a gift. It's not much of a gift, and honestly, it's been rather painful so far, but my cutting out caffeine(soda, coffee, etc) has been successful. I haven't had a drop all day, and other than my head pounding like it doesn't ever want to stop, it's been successful. Maybe tomorrow will feel better and I can get a bit more work done on this special miniature I'm working on.

Then again, maybe it'll just be more painful.

Ow.

Iron Within, Iron Without.

Custom Shoulder Pads.

I took the plunge recently and ordered a batch of 40 custom designed shoulder pads for my Iron Warriors. I had a specific idea in mind for the helmeted skull that I wanted to go on the right shoulder of all my guys, even though it means cutting the old shoulder pads off the guys I already have done.

Well, they arrived today before I went to work, and tonight since I have the guys I put together with swords just waiting for their shoulder pads, I decided to see how they worked out.

My first thought when putting them on was that they weren't quite perfect since the arms and positioning wasn't coming out quite how I wanted it to, but that can easily be attributed to the fact that they aren't quite the same dimensions as GW shoulder pads. Other than that minor quibble, which can and has been resolved, I am in love with these shoulder pads. I ordered 40 as I said, now it looks like I need to get another 80 ordered, along with a few custom Rhino hatches with the same design on them.

Pictures maybe coming this week, depends on how work and life goes honestly.

Wish me luck.

Iron Within, Iron Without

The Road to Hell

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Be that as it may, it was a road that the Iron Warriors found themselves walking down and while I am certain that at first it was paved with the very best of intentions, when it came to Istvaan those intentions were long gone.

That said, I have my first batch of custom shoulder pads coming to me on January 23rd, which means that once I have those 40 shoulder pads coming, which will be enough to utterly redo the right arm shoulders of 4 of the squads. Once I see how these have come out and if I am satisfied with them I will go ahead and order enough to finish up the rest of the guys I have either finished or on the list of "to build".

That said, I have decided that the Iron Warriors that I'm painting up need a bit more than just "Generic blah", I'm going to make them utterly my own. With that said, I have decided that when I paint the chevrons onto the Iron Warriors left shoulder pads, it will be 3 striped of yellow, and either 3 stripes of black, or 4. The total number of chevrons will indicate that they either belong to the 6th or 7th Grand Company, which I'm not certain of yet honestly.

That said, we recorded another podcast tonight, Episode 5, go us!

And I completed two more missile launchers, which brings my total up to 7 complete, which means once everything is done together and painted/based I will only need to do another 8 missile launchers to fill up my heavy slots with two spare (if Chaos gets to take 5 heavy weapons in a squad akin to the Space Wolves).

If I am limited to just 4 per Havoc squad, it's not a huge loss as I will only have 3 extras, which won't be horrible, I'll still find a way to use them somehow I know.

That said, I've got another Tactical Squad box sitting here and I'm wondering what, exactly it is that I plan to do with them. I know I can always use more marines for the army, but what style I want to put them in I am not yet sure. I'll probably make this batch another group of swords men, that way I can have two of each squad, Pioneers, Engineers, and Guards. Each squad obviously armed and equipped identically to their similar squad, which in my mind is perfect.

Gonna try to get these guys together tomorrow if I can, and after that I'll get the Forge World stuff done hopefully.

Sadly I need to order more heads and backpacks from Max Mini, I'm nearly out of all the heads I use.

Then again, I also need to see if I can find a decent source for power armor lightning claws and pre heresy fists. I think I have a few character conversions to work on. Oh, and I need to get hold of 2 more terminators so I can bring myself to a full 10 man assault terminator squad.

So much to do, so little time and money.

Iron Within, Iron Without

Well I haven't exactly been posting as I said I wanted to.

Sucks to be me, I wish I had been keeping up with my posting schedule I wanted to. Sadly, life and work gets in the way occasionally.

Ah well, got another squad put together tonight, which pushes me to the full 6 troops choices assembled, 5 of them painted, 1 waiting on paint.

After this, it's going to be the rest of the Forge World guys, which means I'll have 10 jumpers together, and that's about all. Looks like I need to acquire more of the Forge World jumpers, a total of 20 more would be nice, think I'll snag me some of them at Adepticon (which I am going to), and use them to complete either my Vanguard, or something akin to it.

Iron Within, Iron Without.

Today I did utterly nothing.

As the title says, I did utterly nothing, mostly because I got home rather late, but that's neither here nor there.

Tomorrow I have plumbers coming to fix a blocked up pipe in the house, and once they are gone I will have plenty of free time to go back to sleep before work. After work however, I plan to come home, spray and basecoat the two meltagun armed members of the second hammer squad. Once they are finished that gives me exactly 50 BP+CCW squads, each with 10 members. Now, I know that I plan to make it 6 squads, and this means I need to get cracking on the Forge World guys.

I just need to figure out how to magnetize their jump packs so that I can use the same squad as both jump packers, and regular marines.

God I hope that the new Chaos Codex actually lets me keep using BP+CCW+Bolter on all the CSM. Otherwise I will be seriously seriously pissed as shit.

Once those two melta guns are done, I'll have also put my order in to Custom Mini's for their shoulder pads, and I'll go as a group and just pop off the right shoulder pad from everyone done so far and put the custom ones on, then repaint the pads. I may actually paint the pads and then put them on, I'm not sure yet.

Also, while I'm doing the melta guns I'll finish up the two other guys I have started and unfinished, one a Sarge with fist and BP, the other a guy with Axe and BP. And two missile launchers who are based and have a few bits and bobs done. So... 6 guys will finish every single one of the Iron Warriors I have put together at this time. Depending on snow and work this week, I just may have a fully painted army as of Saturday, we'll have to see. Other than that, I need to go about figuring out if I want to get a 6th squad of guys and just use the Forge World guys as dedicated jump packers, honestly, the idea is very tempting, but I'm just not quite certain yet. We'll get that figured out when the time comes.

Also, 5 Rhino's are base coated and need to be worked on. So... I better get started on those after this week where I focus on the last of the current infantry batch.

So, to do...

6 Marines. 2 melta, 1 axe, 1 sarge, 2 missiles.
5 Rhino's.
15 Forge World guys. (10 jumpers, 5 walkers).
Scibor Terminator.
Scibor Power Armor.
Figure out character options other than Kharn.

Looks like I may make the next week or two a bit busy. Gotta be ready for Adepticon.

Iron Within, Iron Without

Happy New Years!

Happy New Years all! Coming tomorrow are pictures of all five squads of power armor, the full missile launcher squad, and my beginning of the Rhinos. After that, one of my New Years resolutions is to have a minimum of 3 updates to the blog a week, either with army lists, reasoning behind the ideas for the army, fluff, or pictures/paint updates.

I can say that I hope everyone has a safe and happy new years!

Iron Within, Iron Without.